I loled.

This is an entry that should probably go into my equivalent of Lisa's "Looks Like Rain," if I had one. So avert your eyes if you don't want to be exposed to my hidden (some would offer that they're really not all that hidden) character flaws.

This passage made me lol: "Rachael Corrie, an American, was killed when an Israeli soldier bulldozed her." LOL!

How stupid would you have to be to get bulldozed? Probably about as stupid as you'd have to be to pay money for an Evergreen State College (another lol) degree. (The real question is how narcissistic and sanctimonious you'd have to be to think the world at large would hold you as some kind of legitimate martyr for getting crushed in an effort to save a bit of real estate, 'marginalized' occupants or not.)

But Corrie's ineffectual and, admittedly, more substantive than average activism isn't what I find most worth thinking about. Her demise harkens back to some situations my family has experienced, namely, environmental activists who sought to block our family logging company's efforts to log redwoods in the mid-nineties. They employed similarly narcissistic tactics, that is, they chained themselves to trees that were to be felled and lay beneath fallen logs that were to be bucked, so that any action on the loggers' part would lead to the activists' deaths. I term them narcissistic because their actions imply that we, the loggers, value their lives more than we do our profession and more importantly, our obligation to the mill to fulfill our contract. It's a wrong assumption.

At risk of sounding ponderous, the tactics of Corrie/Greenpeace et al are poisonous to society. I reject wholeheartedly Ayn Rand's philosophy (would even go so far as to affirm Whittaker Chambers' assessment of Atlas Shrugged's undertone as "to the gas chambers go"), but I think she got it right when she pointed out the greatest and most repugnant piece of moral bankruptcy is the exploitation of someone else's moral code against the adherent by one who does not keep it. Corrie's like-minded ilk live outside of societal norms, trampling over property and self-determination rights alike, yet they employ a societal norm, that of not killing crunchy Northwestern bitches, against the adherents.

Obtuse and imperfect hypothetical arguments are trotted out against any deviation from living under the hegemony of the decided deviants ("oink oink oink is stopping a logging site's work punishable by the death penalty oink oink oink"), but I should like to live in a world where more Telegraph Avenue blackguards have to be scraped out from under felled Douglas firs. Hats off to the Israeli bulldozer engineer for keeping Corrie, erm, intellectually honest.