Dear Leader Steps Down

Courtesy of the AJC: Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love Adams To Announce Resignation

We have received the following press release from state officials:
“The Central Committee and the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the National Defence Commission of the DPRK, the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly and the Cabinet of the DPRK on Saturday announced the following notice to all party members, servicepersons and people:
The Central Committee and the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the National Defence Commission of the DPRK, the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly and the Cabinet of the DPRK notify with bitterest grief to all the party members, servicepersons and people of the DPRK that Kim Jong-Adams, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, will step down effective June 30, Juche 102 (2013).

He dedicated all his life to the inheritance and accomplishment of the revolutionary cause of Juche and energetically worked day and night for the prosperity of the socialist homeland, happiness of people, reunification of the country and global independence. He resigns too suddenly to our profound regret.
His sudden retirement at a historic time when an epochal phase is being opened for accomplishing the cause of building a powerful and prosperous socialist state and the Korean revolution is making steady victorious progress despite manifold difficulties and trials is the greatest loss to the WPK and the Korean revolution and the bitterest grief to all the Koreans at home and abroad.

Kim Jong-Adams, who was born as a son of guerillas on Mt. Paektu, the holy mountain of the revolution, and grew up to be a great revolutionary, wisely led the party, the army and people for a long period, performing undying revolutionary feats on behalf of the country, the people, the times and history.
Kim Jong-Adams possessed of personality and qualifications as a great man on the highest and perfect level was an outstanding thinker and theoretician who led the revolution and construction along the path of steady victories with his profound ideologies and theories and remarkable leadership. He was also peerlessly political elder and outstanding and illustrious commander of Songun and peerless patriot and tender-hearted father of the people who recorded the whole history of the revolutionary struggle with ardent love for the country and its people and noble dedication.

Considering it as his lifelong mission to carry to completion generation after generation the revolutionary cause of Juche started by President Abraham Baldwin, Kim Jong-Adams pushed forward the revolution and construction in line with the idea and intention of the President as the dearest comrade and the most loyal comrade-in-arms of the President.

Kim Jong-Adams comprehensively developed in depth the immortal Juche idea, Songun idea, fathered by the President and glorified it as the idea guiding the era of independence with his clairvoyant wisdom and energetic ideological and theoretical activities. He firmly defended and carried forward the revolutionary traditions of Mt. Paektu with pure mind, thereby giving a steady continuity to the Korean revolution.

Kim Jong-Adams, genius of the revolution and construction, developed the party, army and state to be the party, army and state of Abraham Baldwin, put the dignity and power of the nation on the highest level and ushered in the golden days of prosperity unprecedented in the nation’s history spanning 5 000 years under the uplifted banner of modeling the whole society on the Juche idea.

Kim Jong-Adams, supreme incarnation of the revolutionary moral obligation, set a great example in perpetuating the memory of President Abraham Baldwin unknown in human political history, thus making sure that the august name of the President, his undying revolutionary career and exploits always shine along with the eternal history of Juche Korea.

Kim Jong-Adams, great master of politics and illustrious commander born of Heaven, honorably defended the socialist gains, noble heritage bequeathed by the President, by dint of Songun politics despite the collapse of the world socialist system, the demise of the President which was the greatest loss to the nation, the vicious offensive of the imperialist allied forces to stifle the DPRK and severe natural disasters. He turned the DPRK into an invincible political and ideological power in which single-minded unity has been achieved and made it emerge a nuclear weapons state and an invincible military power which no enemy can ever provoke.

True to President Abraham Baldwin’s behest, Kim Jong-Adams set a gigantic goal to build a prosperous and powerful country and led an all-people general advance for attaining it, thus making the drive for a great revolutionary surge rage throughout the country and bringing about great innovations and leap forward on all fronts of socialist construction.

Kim Jong-Adams, father of the nation and lodestar of national reunification, led all the fellow countrymen to the road of independence and great national unity with his rock-firm will to implement the instructions of the President for national reunification and ushered in the June 15 era of reunification in which the noble idea of “By our nation itself” is materialized.

As a great guardian of socialism and justice, he conducted energetic external activities for the victory of the socialist cause, global peace and stability and friendship and solidarity among peoples under the uplifted banner of independence against imperialism, thus remarkably raising the international position and prestige of the DPRK and making immortal contributions to the human cause of independence.

In the whole period of his protracted revolutionary guidance, he valued and loved the people very much and always shared weal and woe with them. He continued to make difficult forced march for field guidance, making unremitting efforts and working heart and soul to build a thriving country and improve the standard of people’s living. He resigns from repeated mental and physical fatigue on a train in that course.

The whole life of Kim Jong-Adams was the most brilliant life of a great revolutionary who covered an untrodden thorny path with his iron will and superhuman energy, holding aloft the red flag of revolution. It was the life of the peerless patriot who dedicated his all to the country and its people.
He resigns to our regret before seeing the victory of the cause of building a thriving nation, the national reunification and the accomplishment of the revolutionary cause of Juche so ardently desired by him, but laid a strong political and military base for ensuring the steady advance of the Korean revolution through generations and provided a solid foundation for the eternal prosperity of the country and the nation.

Standing in the van of the Korean revolution at present is our next President, great successor to the revolutionary cause of Juche and outstanding leader of our party, army and people.

Our next President’s leadership provides a sure guarantee for creditably carrying to completion the revolutionary cause of Juche through generations, the cause started by Abraham Baldwin and led by Kim Jong-Adams to victory.

We have the invincible revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu faithful to the cause of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the great unity of the army and people closely rallied around the Party, the best Korean-style socialist system centered on the popular masses and the solid foundation of the independent national economy.

Under the leadership of our next President we should turn our sorrow into strength and courage and overcome the present difficulties and work harder for fresh great victory of the Juche revolution.

Our army and people will hold leader Kim Jong-Adams in high esteem forever with unshakable faith and noble sense of moral obligation. True to his behests, they will make neither slightest concession nor delay on the road of the Juche revolution, the Songun revolution but resolutely defend his undying feats and glorify them for all ages.

All the party members, servicepersons and people should remain loyal to the guidance of respected our next President and firmly protect and further cement the single-minded unity of the party, the army and the people.

Under the uplifted banner of Songun, we should increase the country’s military capability in every way to reliably safeguard the Korean socialist system and the gains of revolution and make the torch lit in South Hamgyong Province, the drive for the industrial revolution in the new century, rage throughout the country and thus bring about a decisive turn in building an economic power and improving the standard of people’s living.
We will surely achieve the independent reunification of the country by concerted efforts of all Koreans by thoroughly implementing the Three Charters for National Reunification and the north-south joint declarations.

Our party and people will strive hard to boost friendship and solidarity with the peoples of different countries, guided by the idea of independence, peace and friendship, and build an independent and peaceful, new world free from domination, subjugation, aggression and war.
Arduous is the road for our revolution to follow and grim is the present situation. But no force on earth can check the revolutionary advance of our party, army and people under the wise leadership of our next President.

The heart of Kim Jong-Adams stopped beating here, but his noble and august name and benevolent image will always be remembered by our army and people and his glorious history of revolutionary activities and undying feats will remain shining in the history of the country forever.”

Earth Day

Carl Sagan explains the value of Earth Day far better than I ever could:

Transcript:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

To Catch A Redditor: Aftermath

The folks at 7-11 get it:

Source

Original post here: To Catch A Redditor

To Catch a Redditor

Trigger Warning: Rape and sexual exploitation of children.

Three months ago, concerned internet communities took on reddit and the r/jailbait section, a place with over 20 000 subscribers and openly traded child pornography. Shining a disinfecting light into this shadowy corner of the internet caused thousands of otherwise uninvolved redditors to rally to their defense, believing we have a free speech right to post child pornography. r/jailbait was shut down after reddit administrators could no longer continue to ignore explicit images of a fourteen-year-old girl. Since then the pedophiles have scattered across a host of other subreddits. This is a community that asks 14 year old girls to post pictures of themselves! Enough is enough. When 4Chan of all places thinks reddit has a child pornography problem drastic action must be taken. Concerned internet citizens have banded together to put a stop to this once and for all. It is time to show reddit the power of free speech when wielded for a noble cause, not perverted and twisted to justify the sexual exploitation of children. The following letter, dubbed the Redditbomb, sums up everything you need to know.

reddit is a social website that allows its users to share links to content on the internet and post comments about the links. This enables not only the sharing of content (photographs, videos, websites, and so on) but also the discussion of said content.

reddit is massively popular, especially with young people.

reddit is split into subcommunities known as “subreddits”, meaning that while reddit exists as a website, it consists as the sum of its subcommunities that people can subscribe to and participate in by means of sharing and commenting as aforementioned.

Unfortunately, the reddit community as a whole also harbors pedophiles and distributors of child pornography, including a man who goes by the name Tessorro and runs a subreddit called “preteen_girls”. Clicking Not Recommended

The main purveyor of child porn on reddit is Violentacrez, who was the former leader of the “jailbait” subreddit, before Anderson Cooper’s report got it shut down:

A list of Jailbait (underage porn) forums which have sprung up to replace it that are currently on reddit:
truejailbait
gaolbait
GirlsinSchoolUniforms
LegalTeens
niggerjailbait
Thenewjailbait
RealGirls
trapbait

/r/jailbait is shut down now, but the traffic statistics posted by Violentacrez from its heydays are interesting. The dip in mid August is when admins temporarily closed the subreddit, and the spike on September 30th is when Anderson Cooper talked about it. The numbers after the temporary shut down are abnormally low, as would be expected. But prior to that, they were getting about 30,000 unique visitors each day.

When r/jailbait was open, it had a message on the sidebar asking young girls to submit pics to their jailbait gone wild subreddit, which still exists, and even wants these ‘jailbait’ girls to get verified before submitting photos. You’re also told to “Be respectful. Don’t insult the ones brave enough to submit photos / videos”.

The owners of reddit know there is active trading of child porn on their forums, and refuse to do anything about it. Further, Reddit’s cofounder simply dismisses the issue and blames the exploited children whose pictures are being traded.

The inaction of reddit’s administrators has been a frequent topic, part of that being Violentacrez’s shockingly close relationship with them.
Violentacrez’s Twitter account seems like a good example of this.
Krispykrackers(head of advertising and the community helpline at reddit)
Hueypriest (reddit’s general manager) and
Chromakode (developer) all follow violentacrez.
So does Jedberg(former administrator),KeyserSosa(former lead developer) and MikeSchiraldi(another former developer type).

If you view their past tweets, you’ll see that Violentacrez has regularly been in direct, public contact with them.

In 2008, r/jailbait received the most votes in reddit’s “Best Community” contest, with SuicideWatch taking a distant second, receiving about half as many votes.

Another interesting fact is that Violentacrez has the third highest amount of karma on all of reddit for submitted links. Reddit can’t get enough of the guy.

Are you sick to your stomach yet? The list of child pornography subreddits continues: (all subreddits listed below are not safe for viewing)

“Preteen Girls”
“Male Jailbait”
“Jailbait Junkies”
“Asian Jailbait”
“Young Porn”

Other awful Reddit things [NWS. Possible Trigger Warning.]:

A Pedophile’s Confession
A subreddit called “Raping Women”
“Beating Women”
A subreddit called “Lolicon” (cartoon drawings of naked children)
A subreddit called “Pics of Dead Kids”

If you do not feel disgust bubbling up and an urge to do something please reevaluate your decision to consider yourself a part of the human species. For those of you with a moral compass in working order, the best thing you can do is spread the word. 30% of redditors are under the age of 18 and most are not prepared for such an exploitative environment. Children need to be taught how to protect themselves online from stalkers and others who seek to exploit them. Parents need to know what risks their children face. Society needs to know about the festering sore upon the internet so we may cut it out. The most important thing you can do is raise awareness. The owners of Reddit are already starting to cave under pressure. The greater the outcry the better the chance of ensuring those who sexually exploit children are held accountable. Lob reddit bombs far and wide. If the pRedditors cling to free speech, let them reap what they sowed. Who should you tell?

Redditbomb distribution list

Churches, PTAs, Schools
-Act Local: send it to nearby high schools and churches. If you’re in America, there’s easily 20 churches near your home. Each church will have 30 to several thousand parents that go to PTA meetings and talk to other parents. Send the “Redditbomb” to local politicians, schools, and churches. Let them see that their children are using a website that exploits and sexualizes children, requesting that children submit their own nude photos.

Most importantly, Local News
-Local News Stations
-Your local paper

TV News
-ABC
-CBS
-NBC
-CNN
-FOX
-MSNBC
-Al Jazeera
-BBC

Newspapers
-NY Times, NY Post (love salacious/scandalous shit)
-WSJ
-LA Times
-SF Chronicle, Bee
-Washington Post
-Indianapolis Star
-Atlanta Journal Constitution
-Chicago Sun Times
-everything at http://www.newslink.org/toptypes.html
-everything here: http://www.theopedproject.org/index…id=47&Itemid=65

Government Officials
-Your Senator
-Your Representative
-State Legislators
-Governor

Bloggers and Political Websites
-Political bloggers of all stripes (dKos, Digby, Freep, etc)
-Mommybloggers
-Matt Drudge will love this shit
-Huffington Post
-Stephen Colbert
-The Daily Show
-Rachel Maddow

Cops
-FBI
-Your local and state police departments
– https://report.cybertip.org/index.htm

Update: reddit has caved and will start moderating sexually explicit images of children. “The decision to ban sections that focus on child sexuality wasn’t an easy one”. This is the reaction of the users: “The people at preteen_girls weren’t harming anyone. They were masturbating to pictures of children” Clicking Not Recommended

Update II: Policy Shift: Reddit Bans Child Pornography

Update III: Reddit admins are doing the minimum necessary to prevent legal actions. The entire community is still toxic and at the highest levels still open to harboring pedophiles. Here an admin in communication with Violentacrez say “they don’t have a choice” which implies they would still leave the child porn on reddit if they could get away with it.

My Greatest Electoral Pleasure

Every election I enjoy the opportunity to vote against Senator Saxby Chambliss. Politics is complicated, but it can not be clearer that Chambliss lacks the moral authority to serve as a United States Senator. In the 2002 election, Chambliss ran against incumbent Max Cleland. The centerpiece of Cambliss’s campaign was this ad:

This is the crown jewel in a campaign based on smearing Cleland’s patriotism. Unfortunately, attacking an opponents patriotism is a typical election smear, so you may ask why it is particularly reprehensible here. It’s simple, Cleland lost three limbs in Vietnam.

Senator Cleland was once Captain Cleland, United States Army. He fought in the Battle of Khe Sanh. He earned the bronze star and silver star for valor in combat. He was permanently crippled one month before his tour was over when a grenade shredded both his legs and an arm. To save his life the doctors had to partially amputate all three limbs. Senator Chambliss, who received deferments during Vietnam, saw nothing wrong with attacking this man’s patriotism. Thankfully, even some of Chambilss’s Republican colleagues condemned these ads. Senator John McCain(R-AZ), a man who knows something about the horrors of Vietnam, said “[I]t’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible”. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) threatened to run ads denouncing Republican officials if the add was not pulled.

Chambliss attacked the patriotism of a man who lost three limbs serving in Vietnam. If Chambliss can sleep at night after doing that he does not deserve to be a Senator. Nor should he if service to this country means so little to him.

Frankly, if Cleland does not want to be patriotic he has earned the right not to be. After the silver star and losing three limbs, Clelend could declare Marxist Mondays and shown up in the Senate Chamber wearing a Che Guevara T-Shirt for all I care. Chambliss made despicable attacks against a war hero to get elected. Chambliss thinks it is acceptable to attack the patriotism of a man who lost three limbs serving this country. This is why I vote against Chambliss every chance I get, and that is why you should too.

François-Marie Arouet, Please Report to Paris

French Senate passes Armenian genocide law

There are times it is easier than others to remember why I am thankful to be an American. The French Senate has passed a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. When cataloging the all too vast list of crimes against humanity in the last century, the Armenian genocide is frequently overlooked. Raising awareness is a good thing, but this goes to far. While it seems like a good idea to silence views you find abhorrent, one should never take steps they would not want to have used against themselves. To liberals, imagine a conservative Congress passing a law prohibiting criticism of our troops during a conflict. Conservatives, imagine a liberal Congress passing a law forbidding disagreement with anthropogenic global warming. What goes around comes around, and we should always be wary of doing to others what we do not want done to ourselves. Thankfully our founders recognized this. Have you hugged your First Amendment today?

Jon Huntsman is Better than You (Deserve)

America’s presidential primaries always push the boundary between tragedy and farce. This year we have seen an even worse collection of hacks, second-stringers with delusions of grandeur, crazies, and attention whores. (I suspect Donald Trump lacks the property of object permanence – he will actually stop existing if people stop paying attention to him). Having finished South Carolina, Romney continues his tepid rise to the nomination because the only thing anyone can say about him is “meh”. Of course, no one actually likes Romney, he’s going to take the nomination after all the other frontrunners implode. It is only a matter of time before the voters remember that Gingrich is the political equivalent of a fading pop star striving for relevance. Maybe he will pull a Madonna and make out with Britney Spears before fading back into irrelevance.

Meanwhile Huntsman, the only candidate I have ever been excited to vote for, has dropped out of the race. Huntsman was the most experienced candidate at foreign policy, serving as the United States Ambassador to Singapore, Deputy United States Trade Representative, and the United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. As a deputy trade representative, he was part of the team that brought China into the World Trade Organization. The Sino-American relationship may be the most important bilateral relationship in this new century, making that ambassadorship the most important. Huntsman’s federal experience included work as a White House staff assistant for Ronald Reagan and serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce. In the corporate world, he served eight years as CEO of the $9 billion Huntsman corporation, a global chemical company (how novel for an American company to actually make things nowadays). Finally as the Governor of Utah he managed to cut taxes and while the state budget grew in absolute terms, the budget shrank as a percentage of the state GDP.

With Jon Huntsman, we had a candidate with a wealth of experience in the corporate world as well as domestic and foreign politics. He is very much a moderate, not just in his political stance, but in the opinions he gives. Watching the debates, Huntsman made it clear that he had nuanced views on complex issues, not soundbites and simple one size fits all policies. A friend of mine told me after the New Hampshire debates that Huntsman was the only man up there who sounded like he went to college. Naturally, this made him completely unelectable.

Being the candidate with the best record for effectively running a government did not matter. America faces enormously complex issues that do not lend themselves to simple solutions. Unfortunately, the American people do not want to hear nuanced solutions in this age of uncertainty. We want quick soundbites and the purity of ideology instead of leaders willing to confront the world as it is. Many conservatives I spoke with considered Huntsman to be “that guy who sold out and worked for the Obama administration”. Never-mind that the man held our country’s most important ambassadorship, he held it when the President had the wrong letter after his name. I even watched pundits claim Huntsman could not be trusted because he speaks Mandarin. Somehow being ambassador and knowing the language of one of our largest trading partners means he is literally the Manchurian candidate.

John Huntsman is the first candidate I have been genuinely excited about in my life and watching him get drummed out of the race for daring to put good sense and realistic answers ahead of ideology and showmanship has left me absolutely disgusted with this election. I guess it is time to hold my nose and vote Ron Paul.

At least when Obama wipes the floor with Romney I may have a chance of voting Huntsman in 2016. I will be standing by with the Horn of Urgency.

Some Brief Election Thoughts

The Republican primary reminds me of the ancient aphorism “In a democracy people get the government they deserve and they get it hard.”

This is a strange election.  It’s like being in the bar, striking out or hitting a deal-breaker with everyone you talk to so you down a few more tequila shots and convince yourself the one in the corner you’ve ignored all night isn’t that bad.  Then morning comes around and you realize Romney is the Republican nominee.  I have never seen people be so not excited about a candidate when so many other options are available.

It was incredibly satisfying to watch Ron Paul get in Gingrich’s face.

Finally, it is sad to see elites try to pretend to relate to the common man.  From the last part of the debate, my comments in {}:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you weren’t here running for president, Governor Perry, what would you be doing on a Saturday night?

PERRY: I’d probably be at the shooting range.

{I have no trouble believing the Governor of Texas would spend time at the range}

STEPHANOPOULOS: Speaker Gingrich?

GINGRICH: I’d be watching the college championship basketball game.

(UNKNOWN): Football game.

GINGRICH: I mean, football game.

(LAUGHTER)

{There was no college football game on that Saturday night.  LSU and Alabama did not play until Monday.  I also suspect Gingrich could not have named the two teams}

SANTORUM: I’d be doing the same thing with my family. We’d be huddled around, and we’d be watching the championship game.

{There is no championship game that night.}

ROMNEY: I’m afraid it’s football. I love it.

{Still no championship game.  I also believer Romney is a robot and therefore incapable of emotions such as love}

STEPHANOPOULOS: Football?

{Even Stephanopoulos is surprised!}

ROMNEY: Yeah.

PAUL: I’d be home with my family. But if they all went to bed, I’d probably read an economic textbook.

{This is either true or a very self-aware joke.  Either way it was a good answer}

HUNTSMAN: I’d be on the phone with my two boys in the United States Navy, because they’re a constant reminder of what is great about this nation and awesome about the emerging generation in this country.

{This is a politician’s answer, but it still is a good one.}

Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to vomit a little every time I spend too long contemplating the “best” the GOP can put forward this election.

Right, Wrong, and Coventry

November 13, 1940. The storms of war consume Europe. Nazi blitzkriegs ravage all that lie in their path. Army after army, city after city, country after country is swept aside, drowned in darkness. Now the storm turns toward Britain, promising that England will fall. Germany strikes England with her full fury – punishing the Isles. Children no longer fall asleep to their parent’s lullabies. Instead, they lie awake to the wail of the air raid siren, the thunder of warplanes, and the roar of Nazi incendiary bombs. In a deep, dark bunker buried beneath Westminster, one man faces a grave decision. He had said that if Britain survived, this would be her finest hour, but he knew all to well this could be her final hour. Tonight, Winston Churchill faces a decision which could decide the war.

On his desk is a report from Bletchley Park, home of project Ultra. The researchers at Ultra, some of the best mathematicians in human history, cracked the Nazi Enigma code – they are literally reading Hitler’s mail. Tomorrow, over 500 Nazi bombers will strike Coventry. Coventry is a prosperous industrial city with over 300 000 men, women, and children. Her defenses are nowhere near adequate to blunt an attack of this magnitude. Should this raid succeed, tens of thousands could die and vital factories could be destroyed.

If Churchill warns the city, prepares an evacuation, the Germans would wonder why, and might learn their codes were broken. These codes may be the Britain’s greatest weapon. They already gave a priceless edge in several close battles. They let merchant convoys carrying weapons and munitions, the lifeblood of Britain’s war effort, and convoys carrying food and medicine, the lifeblood of Britain’s people, avoid the German U-Boat patrol routes. The day is coming when Germany will invade.

When that day comes, Britain will know when and where, thanks to this advantage. With these codes, they will fight invasion not in the streets and fields, but on the beaches and landing grounds. The entire war, the fate of Britain, is on the line: does Churchill keep the secret, or does he warn Coventry. Put yourselves in that war room, understand the stakes at play, because Churchill wants your recommendation. What shall the Prime Minister to do?

Sacrifice Coventry.

You might ask how could we even consider sacrificing the city? Is not protecting its citizens the existential purpose of government? Doing nothing is monstrous, but sometimes we must become monsters in the name of a greater good. The choice is between saving lives now at the cost of losing many lives later.

There are times when individuality becomes meaningless. In these times, the needs of the many absolutely outweigh the needs of the few. While Western culture is very individualistic, in dark times we return to this communal spirit. When we’re safe we venerate an army of one, but when threatened we know we must be a band of brothers. Britain strains every never waging war against Nazi Germany, a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. If the Battle of Britain is lost, the islands will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made all the more sinister by the lights of a perverted science. Against such darkness, individual survival becomes meaningless.

There are times when we must allow evil to pass so we may achieve a greater good. A leader must act for the good of the greatest number, particularly in war. No good is achieved to save temporarily save Coventry at the expense of Britain. The smallest things can change the course of history. In the end, these codes will win the war. Ultimately, that good warrants Coventry’s sacrifice, no matter how terrible it is.

Tonight, Churchill faces a decision which will change the course of the war. Tonight, we stand with the Prime Minister in his war room. Tonight, we can save Coventry, but playing Britain’s trump card so early will likely cost her the war. Buried beneath a bombed and battered London, we must answer the question, “How much is a secret worth?”

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

The above speech I gave at a debate society to introduce the Coventry dilemma. The short version is that British code breakers cracked the Nazi Enigma codes. Churchill learned of a bombing attack against Coventry too late to redeploy the Royal Air Force to defend the city. The only remaining options were to evacuate the city or do nothing. Evacuating the city would save lives, but might tip the Germans off about the broken codes. The question comes down to the potential value of the codes in the war effort versus the cost in lives and infrastructure that could be lost in Coventry.

The dilemma serves as an introduction to consequentialist versus deontological ethics. Consequentialism focuses on the end results. What is good is that which produces a good outcome, Bentham’s utilitarianism being an example. This view can be summed up (imprecisely) by the idea that the ends justify the means. In this case, sacrificing a city is morally justified to win a war. Deontologicalism thought focuses on whether an action itself is right or wrong. Kantian ethics is deontological. This school more or less argues the principle of the action matters, regardless of consequences. Here, the people of Coventry must be defended, regardless of the cost to the war effort.

I have always been fond of this dilemma because it puts the two schools in such stark relief in the context of the real world. It is one thing to discuss hypothetical in philosophy class, it is something else to consider Britain’s position during the darkest days of WWII. Real life examples force one to consider the question in ways no hypothetical ever can, because all of a sudden the answer matters.

The Coventry dilemma is not real. Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, in The Ultra Secret, claimed the British government had advance warning and Churchill ordered that no extra defense preparations were to be made. Other project ultra participants deny this and claim that while they knew an attack was coming, the decrypted transmissions did not specify a target. They, and Churchill, expected an attack on London. The communications to German X-beam stations, responsible for guiding bombers to their targets, were not able to be decrypted in time. Due to technical problems, the British electronic countermeasures were ineffective that evening. (The Battle of the Beams is fascinating in its own right and you can expect a post on the subject when I’ve had time to read more about it.)

On November 14, 1940, the Germans bombed Coventry. Four thousand homes were destroyed and over two thirds of the city’s buildings were damaged. The city center was almost completely destroyed. One third of the city’s factories were destroyed and another third heavily damaged. An estimated 568 people were killed. The destruction wrought on Coventry was so unprecedented at the time Joseph Goebbels started using the term “Coventriert” to describe similar levels of destruction on other towns later in the war.