So I asked my friends from Syria about my "I support intervention" stance.

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. The banality of evil.

"Arendt's first reaction to Eichmann, "the man in the glass booth," was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister." (4) She argues that "The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous." (5) Arendt's perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann's ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: "... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think." (6) (emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: "When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence."

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContAssy.html

*********************************************************

What makes your statements in regard to removing Assad from power so abhorrent to me is the thoughtlessness with which you deliver them. You have yet to offer any comments on the real people that will die or be horribly maimed by the actions you advocate. This is even more true in light of your repeated comments that you feel no obligation to offer any sacrifice other than the money you pay in taxes. To me that is evil and grotesque. I will not, as some will undoubtedly do, offer that your OP is conscientious or reflective. It is neither in my mind.