Another one that hurts

Well of course they should, but what if they don't?You remember the parable of the Good Samaritan? At no point in that parable did Jesus say: "Well, since the priest and the Levite passed by on the other side, and they should have helped him, therefore the Samaritan would have been blameless if he'd also passed by on the other side."BTW, are you familiar with the Good Samaritan Experiment? Something to think about.

That does not correspond to anything in the analogy, since U.S. propaganda does not encourage people to join ISIS. But that doesn't stop them. People are certainly doing that sort of argument. Today I read a story about a thousand Muslim clerics who'd signed a fatwa against people who joined ISIS. Good. It will stop people from joining them. Hooray. But it will scarcely sway one in ten thousand people who are already involved in this ideology and who have already murdered a Christian or a homosexual in the name of Allah. They are raping and killing, they will go on doing so if unchecked. They will stop when we win. The people who are already doing this shit are already beyond polite argument and civil requests for them to stop. They will stop when we win. They will stop when we win. They will stop when we win.Let's win.

AND HOW DID HE KNOW THAT? The whole point of the parable was that the Jews and the Samaritans in principle hated one another. So the Samaritan might have rescued the Jew and the Jew might have stabbed him in the head for being a Samaritan. That's the point Jesus was making, that the two groups were involved in an ethno/religious conflict. But neither of us has proposed that you personally ought to be obliged to give your spare bedroom to a Christian Syrian woman escaping rape and murder for herself and her daughters. Or that I personally should do that. But that maybe our country could give them refuge without reference to our own spare bedrooms.And in fact ... I don't like to talk about myself ... but my wife just asked me if it's OK for us to take in a woman fleeing domestic violence into our house to live in our spare room, and I said YES without thinking about it for a second. But she might be a bad person. But that's barely a consideration. I should worry about the 0.0001% chance that this strange woman would murder me? Of course I said yes. Any good atheist would say yes, any good Christian would say yes, and apparently any conservative Christian would say: "But what if she's a Muslim with a bomb? Anyway, if she really needed help shouldn't someone else have helped her already?"

But of course it has.

They're the ones who are doing the beating down. Literally. As for people being poor, the people in this refugee camp have not undergone a sudden accession of wealth.

Oh, a metaphor. Well in that case it's a recruiting poster with the slogan "Be A Terrorist And We'll Kill You" superimposed on a picture of the corpse of Bin Laden. Is there some sort of fine print where we also offer them an excellent dental plan and four weeks paid leave?Sheesh, ringo, their desire to create a hell on Earth is not primarily motivated by the fact that some people are trying to stop them from doing so.

Well, in this instance, they don't. It's not like they're all muddled, and they look at pictures of that refugee camp and think "Well, we sure helped them out of poverty. Thanks to us they have the bountiful largess of a refugee camp, where they live in luxurious tents." Nor do they behead a homosexual and say "Well, he was 'beaten down' by, I dunno, the French Mandate in Syria which ended in 1943, but now he can walk tall." They are --- surely? --- not confused on this point. They don't "want to help poor Muslims", they want to carry out the will of God as they understand it.

And if the Nazis had thought they'd get 72 virgins if they died for Hitler, we should probably still have shot at them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

That is true. I said so myself. That was inadvertent propaganda for their side. On the other hand, if each bullet that hits one of them is a "recruiting poster", then let's carry on until they run out of people who can be recruited by the promise of being shot. There aren't all that many of them, and we have plenty of bullets.A man who runs amok with a gun in a mall expects that eventually the police will turn up and shoot him. It's a particularly florid form of "suicide by cop". But if on the basis of that consideration the police took a vow never to intervene in mass shootings, do you suppose the death rate would go down ... or up?

Also, no. Do please tell me about my "entire foreign policy". I was passionately and vocally against the Iraq war. I went around saying very loudly that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld should be tried as war criminals. It may be well and cogently argued that the behavior of those criminal shitlords got us into this mess. But ringo, that's not an argument that now, in the face of this evil, we should sit on our hands and wash them. The question is: what should we do now?

It turns out I've already answered you in my last post, we must have been posting at the same time. I am so angry at Bush (etc, 'cos he was too dumb to know what he was doing) that I want him to be tried as a war criminal. Fine. But what should we do now? Should we roll over before evil because Bush was a bad man?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Fuck it. Here it is. Sometimes it seems that the best thing you can do is kill someone. This is an appalling truth, but there it is. If I had a gun pointed at Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi then I'd pull the trigger. And if I found that difficult to live with afterwards, then given what he is going to do, I'd find it much harder to live with letting him live. This is, let me say it again, an appalling truth. Both options, if they stood before us, would haunt us in our dreams because we wish not to kill.Fortunately, I am never going to be in that situation. But when we consider American foreign policy, we are all kind of in that situation, 'cos, y'know, democracy.

I already know what made me angry. But ... Well, I have a solution. Let's bomb the crap out of them until we win.I hate this, AND IF YOU HAVE A BETTER SOLUTION ...No?

What vimesey said.

When you say hi to Hitler, explain to him how the unfair terms of the Versailles Agreement mean that we shouldn't have fought against him in WWII. He'll agree.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.