Top 10 schools with most stressful academics?

redcrimblue
Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:27:03 +0000

to LFWB dad

Perhaps they taught you at your service academy to misquote and selectively quote, and perhaps deliberately to mislead, but I hope not.

John Stuart Mill said, without your excisions:

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice,—is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”

By leaving out the key parts of this writing, you are misleading people. I hope you are not merely parroting a paraphrase that is promulgated without criticism within the military academies. Although I was educated at three Ivies, I have great respect for the military academies and their roles. At my alma maters, however, I know I could never get away with the academic solipsism reflected in your cut and paste citation.

You might also do well to note another of Mill’s writings:

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”