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I think I've fallen into the rabbit hole and I'm in Alice's wonderland.
Soldiers to carry cash to compensate for casualties
Cynthia Banham
July 2, 2009SOLDIERS in Afghanistan will carry cash to pay off civilians whose family members are killed or injured as a result of Australian Defence Force operations.
The "tactical payments scheme" came into effect yesterday. It means Defence will no longer have to go through the Department of Finance in Canberra - which can take days - before making reparations to civilians who get caught up in ADF battles overseas.
Senior officers of the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher will carry the cash, which will be most likely in US dollars, and they will be able to make payments on the spot. Defence would not say how much money officers would carry because of "safety issues". But individual payments can be for amounts up to $250,000.
Defence believes allowing tactical commanders the discretion to make on-the-spot payments will help it win the "hearts and minds battle".
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12 comments:
Maybe if the populace didn't put harbor and let taliban militants roam free we wouldn't be having these problems to begin with.
I can see this compensation scheme becoming a ripe target for scammers.
Sounds like a reasonable policy to me.
I agree with Hammer.
FJ, am I missing something here?
Like 90% of that money won't get "diverted" into the pockets of the boys who are fighting.
This will not end well.
It has long been Islamic custom to compensate the families of those wrongly killed. Think of it as the equivalent of a judgement in a civil suit (the O.J. Simpson civil suit foloowing the failed criminal murder case)
I'm surprised that you would find any Islamic customs reasonable.
I find all of them reasonable, I'm simply not a huge fan of reason. I'm a lover of wisdom... see the "tension" in that expression?
I am less "reasonable" than "rational". I know it's hard to see a distinction, but one implies arriving at a conclusion via "logical purity" whilst the other one is reached by a methodology that accounts for a degree of proportioned "compromise" (either dialectically or as described in Plato's Philebus"). As Plato always said, our is a "mixed" existence, not a pure black & white one that sees no shades of grey.
FJ, since you are less reasonable than rational it makes your statement even more curious. Rational or pragmatic?, is the question here. As for wisdom, I make no claims to it.
Rational. I'd like to think I trust my "in-stincts" and "in-tuitions" more than my "reasons" when dealing with people.
I'm more Heraclitian than Aristotelian (Nietzsche, "On Greek Philosophy")
Heraclitus has as his royal property the highest power of intuitive conception, whereas towards the other mode of conception which is consummated by ideas and logical combinations, that is towards reason, he shows himself cool, apathetic, even hostile, and he seems to derive a pleasure when he is able to contradict reason by means of a truth gained intuitively, and this he does in such propositions as: "Everything has always its opposite within itself," so fearlessly that Aristotle before the tribunal of reason accuses him of the highest crime, of having sinned against the law of opposition. Intuitive representation however embraces two things: firstly, the present, motley, changing world, pressing on us in all experiences, secondly, the conditions by means of which alone any experience of this world becomes possible: time and space. For these are able to be intuitively apprehended, purely in themselves and independent of any experience; i.e., they can be perceived, although they are without definite contents. If now Heraclitus considered time in this fashion, dissociated from all experiences, he had in it the most instructive monogram of all that which falls within the realm of intuitive conception. Just as he conceived of time, so also for instance did Schopenhauer, who repeatedly says of it: that in it every instant exists only in so far as it has annihilated the preceding one, its father, in order to be itself effaced equally quickly; that past and future are as unreal as any dream; that the present is only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two; that however, like time, so space, and again like the latter, so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time, has only a relative existence, only through and for the sake of a something else, of the same kind as itself, i.e., existing only under the same limitations. This truth is in the highest degree self-evident, accessible to everyone, and just for that very reason, abstractly and rationally, it is only attained with great difficulty. All who have this truth before their eyes must however also proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has likewise expounded (The World As Will And Idea, Vol. I., Bk. I, Sec. 4): "Only as active does it fill space and time: its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in which alone it exists: the effect of the action of any material object upon any other, is known only in so far as the latter acts upon the immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before; it consists in this alone. Cause and effect [Wirkung] thus constitute the whole nature of matter; its true being is its action. The totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German Wirklichkeit [actuality], a word which is far more expressive than Realität [reality]. That upon which actuality acts is always matter; actuality's whole 'being' and essence therefore consist only in the orderly change, which one part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly relative, according to a relation which is valid only within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of time and space."
FJ, I'll forever be ambiguously grateful for that explanation.
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