D K wrote: you are currently mentally ill
you need to check yourself
I'm sorry that you have been so convinced by the nihilistic forces that spawned out of the failed left that you don't realize just how cherished our civilization should be. I only hope that you realize your mistake one day, and that you come to the realization through introspection, rather than through the failure of our society to overcome the threats it faces due to ignorance like yours.
popslut wrote:How many times can you crowbar the words "moral" and "pragmatic" into a forum post?
Sounds to me like you've woken up one morning and thought "What the fuck am I doing in this shithole?" and now you're grasping at the only rationalisation within easy reach.
The fact that you constantly seek to justify yourself in these long-winded tracts suggests to me your that idealism is wearing thin and you're starting to realise just how much damage you've collectively done.
We sent our armies into Afghanistan and Iraq for "moral" reasons and in the process slaughtered a million innocents?
1. The words moral and pragmatic make up the theme of my post. They're the focus of the internal dialectic that I wrote. So, naturally I'll use them frequently. I use the words that fit, there's no reason to make readers break out a thesaurus just to show off my vocabulary
2. I write these 'long-winded' tracts as emails to friends at home. I cross post them here, since I have some friends on these boards as well (believe it or not). I'm trying not to convince myself, but convince the reader.
3. Afghanistan is not Iraq. We have had nowhere near a million deaths here - not even in the same order of magnitude.
sweetjesus wrote:why are sydney streets now flooded with afghan heroin? the first time in 100 years opium production has seen an increase.. 90% of the worlds heroin now comes from where you are and since the time you landed there it has been shown that afghanistan now makes 4 times the amount of heroin / opium that the entire planet consumes per year.
I'm surprised at the production = 4x consumption. Do you have a source on that? Anyways, the increase in Heroin production is an unintended negative consequence. That's what happened in the chaos that followed the fall of the Taliban. The blame there lies in not securing Afghanistan quickly enough; we deployed with too few troops. Certainly, US distraction in Iraq is to a great part to blame for that.
Machinesworking wrote:I can't resist this one..... So what he seems to be saying is that his position is either:
A- not moral
or
B- not pragmatic
because according to his own logic to have both a moral and pragmatic consideration on the same issue requires some sort of crazy whacky intellectual twisting of ones position.
You're missing my meaning. I'm saying that we need to address issues that are of pragmatic benefit only. But, when there are too many pragmatic courses of action (too many problems to solve), and we can't do them all, we choose amongst them by morally judging them; which of our pragmatic courses of action are morally justified? To what degree? On the other hand, for the vast majority of the Canadian anti-war crowd, they've started with one argument, abandoned it, and adopted another without even so much as a glance back. That implies desperate abandonment of lines of attack and yes, 'intellectual gymnastics'.
The Phat Conductor wrote:just don't kill anyone or you'll regret it later ok?
Depends on what you define 'kill'. The sniper who pulls a trigger certainly kills somebody. But does the artilleryman who enters coordinates kill somebody? What about the loader of a tank's cannon? Did the loadie who mounted the GBU-12 bomb on the aircraft kill somebody? What about the intelligence analyst who identifies a likely insurgent command node and passes that up the chain of command? Is he a killer once that location is targeted? What about the logistician who delivers the bullets to the infantry? Did he kill?
Ultimately, you could consider this 'aiding and abetting'. So, if you answer yest to the questions above, then I have killed a
lot of Taliban. I sleep great at night, thanks.
