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Author | Topic: Another one that hurts | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined:
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Faith writes: ringo writes:
Opportunity for what? Our new government is looking at incoming refugees as an opportunity, not a problem. How about an opportunity to help some people who really need it. Or a chance to save thousands from a life of misery. An opportunity to treat others as we would be treated. An opportunity to treat people as innocent until proven guilty. A chance to be brave and accept the cost of those actions. As well as a chance to spit in the eye of those who would cause these people to flee. An opportunity to act like a decent human being instead of dropping bombs from the sky.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined:
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But, those who are coming to the west for refuge have an obligation too. Sure they do and most of them will meet that obligation given half a chance. In so doing they will enrich us all. I say let them come both good and bad. The good will be good for us and the bad will show themselves. To paraphrase, 'let them do their worst and we shall do our best.'
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined:
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Really? The killing of Jews in WW2 has the same moral equivalence as those that killed to liberate them? I would disagree with ringo's claim that all killing is morally equivalent but what is the difference between intentionally killing innocent people and accidentally killing innocent people? How can it be acceptable for a guy like Col Steve Warren to say things like: "We are reasonably certain that we killed the target that we intended to kill". He was referring to 'jihadi john'. How Jihadi John was tracked down in Syria - BBC News I fully support getting a stick in the spokes of these guys but we can't abandon our principles of justice while seeking that justice. We in the West are responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the last decade. Hundreds of thousands. The only high ground that we look down from is through the lens of a predator drone. Our morality is for shit if we tolerate the killing of innocents as a legitimate cost of our own security.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
PT writes: Intent. but what is the difference between intentionally killing innocent people and accidentally killing innocent people? Well yes that is the difference but is it enough for self-absolution? Intent doesn't offer much of a defense to the drunk who accidentally kills someone even if he tries really hard not to. The intent of the shooter doesn't make any difference to the shot at.
... but it would be wrong to say that the West has a policy of killing innocents in the way that our enemies do and therefore equate the two.
I agree that the two are not equal but I would say that they are equally bad. I am not opposed to snuffing out some of these guys in the face of impending attacks if we can but we are way to ready to forgive ourselves for all of the collateral damage that we do. I can't see why it should be ok for our govt's to do things that no decent human would do.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined:
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If you believe it's always wrong to kill a non-combatant, you would oppose all war. OK then I am good with that. My point is simply that I don't know why we should be able to do things as a collective that we find to be immoral at the level of the individual. Or why we don't see the hypocrisy of suspending our principles of justice when we try to extract that justice from foreigners. Or the hypocrisy of accepting the killing of innocent people as a reasonable cost of retaliation for the killing of innocent people. I guess if you support drone strikes in Syria then you would support them in your own neighbourhood should there be a suspected killer on the loose? No? Edited by ProtoTypical, : No reason given.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined:
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Fine, pacifism is an honourable, if naive, position. The thing that I like about pacifism is that the more people who practice it the better it works as contrasted with violence where the more people who practice it the worse it gets.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
PT writes: My point is simply that I don't know why we should be able to do things as a collective that we find to be immoral at the level of the individual. To take another example, if I were to decide you'd done something bad and needed to be punished, so I locked you up, that would be kidnapping. But when a society does it, it's called "justice" ... Certainly we need our govt's to do things that individuals cannot do. Those things are all things that we find to be acceptable and necessary like justice and taxes. Our govt is the instrument of our morality. When it comes to killing foreigners, however, there is this big deviation from what any average person would find acceptable on a personal level. So most of us might shoot some terrorist in the face if we had the chance but the number would drop fast if we might shoot his child as well. Somehow this just blows over when it is govt that is doing the killing from a long way off. Omnivorous said it well somewhere, 'I care more about sparing the innocent than hammering the guilty'. This is a fundamental principle of our justice system when we use it over here. We can't claim the high ground of our morality if we don't use it over there.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
Jihadist propaganda stands as evidence against your statement that 'they hold life cheap.' It might be evidence if it were not propaganda. Given that it is propaganda I would say that it is evidence that they are full of shit.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
Why would people unconcerned by loss of life be so motivated by people losing their lives? They are not motivated by the loss of life. They are motivated by the lack of acceptance of their religious views and submission to their authority.
More likely is that, with the exception of a few genuine psychopaths, most ISIS members consider themselves to hold human life very dearly indeed and for that to be one of the core reasons for their actions. It takes more than a few psychopaths to man all the road blocks and to execute people by the score because they are wearing the wrong clothes or belong to the wrong tribe. You cant execute doctors and aid workers under the banner of respect for life. It is not a respect for life but rather a fanatical devotion to religious belief.
Are ISIS members motivated to do the things they do by the loss of lives they care about? It certainly seems so. In which case it is not that they hold life cheap so much as they have split the world into the human lives that matter and the dehumanised ones that don't. A very typical human psychological response. I say we try not to follow that same path. We don't need propaganda to dehumanize people who would execute a woman doctor who refuses to cover her face. Or who would put someone in a cage and then set them on fire or who would kill someone because of their sense of humour. It is not a distortion to say that these people are inhumane. No doubt that there are many who have been pressed into service and many more who are held captive in their territories with no rights of movement. No doubt that there are scores of children who have been indoctrinated and really can't be held accountable. I agree that we need to be specific about our condemnation and retribution.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
We can examine propaganda as evidence for how our enemies are radicalizing others. That is how I was using it. Do you disagree? I agree that there are leaders and followers.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
Do you think every member of ISIS is psychopathic? Psychopathic is a personal diagnosis based on the behaviour of the individual and is, I think, a hereditary genetic condition. So I would have to say no they are not all psychopaths. A sociopath is someone who willingly harms others who do not threaten them and is caused more by upbringing. I would say that the willing members of ISIS are good candidates for the label of sociopath. Most important is the understanding that guilt can only be established on an individual basis. So the child executioner in the video is not as guilty as the guy holding the camera.
If you were a Muslim young man in Raqqa - What do you think your position would be on the relative merits of Western bombing of Syria, ISIS, Assad etc? That is difficult for me to imagine but I can't see how my position would include support for killing Western civilians. If the US started to bomb Canada I wouldn't go to Detroit and start shooting people on the street.
I ask a genuine question to guage the level of empathy we are capable of achieving here...... I have overwhelming empathy for those who are caught up in the tide and I have little more than contempt for those who are willing participants.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
I agree, you cannot respect life by murdering doctors. https://www.washingtonpost.com/...unduz-hospital-a-war-crime Yeah it is pretty grim. Bombs are a repugnantly blunt instrument but not the same as shooting a female doctor who refuses to wear a niqab.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
I was just arguing against turning our image of our enemies into the above,... The problem isn't with the vilification of the head choppers and puritans. We should despise and destroy those people. The problem is being able to single them out.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
So yes - how we think of our enemies is important as it drives our policy decisions. Sure and how we should think of them is as head choppers and puritans. This is not a fabrication or propaganda. They really are killing non combatants deliberately. They really are throwing people from high buildings and executing women for their fashion choices. We should be motivated by these atrocities. We should be angry and dangerous in response. There are lots of problems and we should not mischaracterize the truth nor should we ignore our culpability. There are also such things as monsters and this idea about loving your enemy should be held in moderation. Holy should.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 348 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
You are right, to call this propaganda would be a disservice, perhaps you would prefer 'war mongering masterpiece'? Naturally we should continue killing and bombing blindly because of how effective this has proven over the last century. quote: Pointing out the atrocities that have really occurred is not exactly war mongering is it? I have specifically spoken against 'blindly bombing' anybody. The problem is not so much with the use of force as it is with the inaccurate use of force.
War mongers and those infected with propaganda often seem to confuse 'know thy enemy' with 'love thy enemy'. What else do we need to know about them in order to conclude that we should resist them? How does one go about loving their enemies anyway? The best that I can do is to treat them as I would expect to be treated. This includes cutting them all kinds of slack before resorting to the use of violence but it doesn't exclude the use of violence entirely.
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