Karzai Twists the Knife - Would Support Pakistan over US

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Things that Hamid Karzai would support over the US:

• Pakistan
• The Taliban
• A guy called Hajirullah whose chief qualification is 'possesses a scimitar'
• Wales
• A needle of horse.

Old news.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

welcome to the Muslim mind

Now, jmfcst, dear, what have we told you about generalising 1.6 billion people?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

welcome to the Muslim mind

Now, jmfcst, dear, what have we told you about generalising 1.6 billion people?

I would like to see those 1.6B polled on the following question:  "Who would you support in a war between the US and Pakistan?"

I'd guess at least 80% would choose Pakistan

Many of them have reasons for feeling that way other than the fact that they're Muslim, though.

If one polled the 2.3 billion Christians and 80% said that they would support the US in that situation, which I would not be surprised by at all, would you say that this tells you something deep and important about 'the Christian mind'?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

welcome to the Muslim mind

Now, jmfcst, dear, what have we told you about generalising 1.6 billion people?

I would like to see those 1.6B polled on the following question:  "Who would you support in a war between the US and Pakistan?"

I'd guess at least 80% would choose Pakistan

Many of them have reasons for feeling that way other than the fact that they're Muslim, though.

Such as…the US’s harsh treatment of women and intolerance of religious diversity, as compared to rest of the world?

Such as the US's harsh treatment of that part of the world, as compared to the rest of the world. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates do in fact produce religious fanatics who hate us for fairly crappy reasons, but people in places like North or East Africa--or, for that matter, Pakistan--have somewhat more dialectically standard fish to fry.

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Yeah:  Many Christians understand Islam is the enemy of individual freedom and that the US is the champion of individual freedom.

[/quote]

How is it 'championing individual freedom' to judge and at times wage war on people on the basis of their religion. Related question: Have you ever actually met a practising Muslim?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Such as the US's harsh treatment of that part of the world, as compared to the rest of the world. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates do in fact produce religious fanatics who hate us for fairly crappy reasons, but people in places like North or East Africa--or, for that matter, Pakistan--have somewhat more dialectically standard fish to fry.

I thought the Allies freed North Africa during WWII, no?  

And subsequently propped up brutal dictators for decades until continuing became excessively painful for our image, yes. We overthrew the first, last, and only sort-of democratic government in the history of Iran, among other things. In the case of North Africa, we sold arms to Qaddafi towards the end and were buddy-buddy with Mubarak and Ben Ali for decades. Now those countries are turning into religiously-flavored flawed democracies, which is in most cases closer to what the people who live there want, as opposed to what we want them to want. I know, life sucks. Deal with it.

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Whose actions, precisely, are we talking about again. Is this still the generalized agglomeration of 1.6 billion people or is this a smaller subset now? For the sake of your soul I sincerely hope it's the latter.

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Good for you.

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No, the vast majority of people in the Third World stick with other people of their real or perceived in-group no matter what the facts are, because that's the mindset of shared poverty and more often than not shared oppression. Christians in the First World stick with other people on the basis of class or ethnicity or sex or other perceived community more often than not, as much as somebody with an ideological stake in individualism might yearn to deny this.

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Both you and your colleagues have my condolences.

One last thing: I'm NOT trying to defend Karzai here. Karzai doesn't have any of the excuses that people in this part of the world so often end up with. We've been propping the man up for a decade to little or no perceivable benefit to the United States. Karzai is a tool. He's basically a drug-addled Muslim version of you. All I'm asking is that you stop demonizing one fifth of the world's population.

Stop demonizing one fifth of the world's population, jmfcst.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

jmfcst, has it ever occurred to you that it's intrinsically wrong to kill people, not just incidentally wrong to kill people from cultures and under governments of which you approve?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Asshole.

This, I hope everybody can agree on.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's better than your attitude, which, at least on foreign policy, is more aggressively ignorant, myopic, and compassionless than I would have liked to think possible.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

And my attitude is far better then the current US administration’s handling of the Arab Spring, which is only guaranteeing the creation of several more Iran’s, this time of the Sunni flavor.  I mean, how ignorant do you have to be not to have known Egypt would turn into a radical Sunni state?

jmfcst, you think any Sunni state is radical. Besides, the Middle East exists for people who live there, not for the benefit of the West. The Middle East doesn't dislike the West just because we're here; they dislike us in part because we're there. If we had pursued your policy towards Iran and Syria the entire Third World would have turned much more radically against us than it has anyway.

And whether or not killing people is effective or leads to desired results has no bearing on whether or not it's wrong. It's wrong to kill enemy combatants. It may be excusable given circumstances, but it's still wrong; and it's not excusable to kill civilians--any civilians--because of the actions of their governments.

You, on the other hand, do think that it's okay to kill civilians because you don't like their government, which is also al-Qaeda's justification for 9/11. Literally that was their exact excuse, that American civilians are culpable for US government action because the US government is elected.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yeah, those rapidly depleted Christian minorities in the ME are sure loved by the citizens of their own countries, aren’t they?  They're simply loved to death by the Muslims.

They were 'rapidly depleted' before, too, and also that has nothing to do with what I was saying. You do know that what happened with those Copts in Egypt got a lot of people really angry at the army and the SCAF had to go into damage control mode by banning religious discrimination, right?

I'm also not buying your sudden concern for Christian minorities in the Middle East, considering your views on the subject of Israel.

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It's called pacifism. You may have heard of it.
I would certainly think it was wrong for the SWAT team to do that, but I would understand why they did it and not judge them for it. Just because it's wrong doesn't mean it's not sometimes called for. Because we live in a Fallen world, which you apparently don't want to understand the full import of.

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He also said that His Kingdom isn't in fact of this world, if you'll recall.

Agreed, there is such a thing as 'proportionate force' and the early Christians needed to defend themselves. But killing when there is any other option to solve the situation is always, always, always wrong, for the precise reason that only God has rights over our lives.

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I'm referring to your apologism for dropping atomic bombs on factories full of conscripted children at the end of World War II. And you may not be 'targeting' civilians here but the fact of collateral damage certainly isn't enough to diminish your sabre-rattling.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

but it has everything to do with what I am saying - Islam is a religion intended to be a politically imposed religion that is not tolerant of anything other than Islam…simple and accurate.

Absurdly bigoted and historically myopic. There are certainly types of Islam that are like that, and we have the ill luck to be living in an era in which Islam is in one of its sh**ttier phases, but the same is true of any other religion.

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Relative to how they were before? Actually, depending on how enforcement goes, yes, it's entirely possible that they will be. They're certainly better off now than under Mubarak, even if a lot of sh**t is bubbling to the surface by the nature of what revolution entails.

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It's contradictory with opposing religious discrimination, though. But you obviously don't actually care about religious discrimination unless it's Muslims doing it.

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I have in fact been in situations in which my family was endangered. Remarkably, I managed to defuse them without killing anybody. Had I not been able to I would have tried to atone for it.

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It's not the righteous thing to do. It's the tragic thing to do, because life is tragic. There's actually a book called Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida which I highly recommend you read. Like a lot of the author's work, it's partially about how to reconcile the inherent wrongness or tragedy of a lot of contingently necessary things. I'd also recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on pacifism, which can be found online, since it's a concept that you're grossly and willfully oversimplifying.

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Agreed as far as the exegesis of the Seventh Commandment goes, but forgive me I don't think God intended man to be violent, jingoistic hypocrites.

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See part in bold italics.

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Which is why religious dictatorships are often more forgivable than secular ones.

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1. Sharia
2. They desire it because it's the traditional legal system of their culture. They desire it for much the same reason that we would desire a return to the Common Law if it were taken from us. Whether this is right or wrong isn't affected by that, but that's why they desire it.

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Killing people because they make you pay relatively small taxes is such a childish, short-sighted, and morally reprehensible disproportionate response that I don't even know where to begin. Also, you know that there have been many non-Muslim theocracies throughout history, right?

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Some types of Christianity also seek to unify the whole world under a Christian political state; it's just that the Christian political state is eschatological. Also, some types of Islam seek that. Are you familiar with the concept of fiqh and different schools thereof? How about 'denominations', in general?

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It's far from clear what was actually going on in Japanese high command at the time and whether or not the United States jumped the gun, but this really isn't the point. Also, the huge seaport and factories were being run by conscripted children. I'm going to keep using the phrase 'conscripted children' until it sinks into your venal, tribal little skull.

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It's not a question of 'scale'. It's a question of it being wrong to preemptively kill civilians.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Can you give me a count on the number of nations where the Christian population has increased after an Islamic government was put into place?  I think the answer will be 0 +/- 0

Persia and India, among others. As I said, Islam right now is indeed comparatively sh**tty, historically speaking.

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Okay, so it's racial discrimination. Gotcha.

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If I killed someone, it wouldn't be because I was trying to; it would be because that was an unintended result of trying to stop them to do something else (other than 'being alive'), and I would rightly feel horrible about it. As it happens, I've never done that, so I'm not pitying myself at all. Also, I misspoke. I meant 'repent', not 'atone'. Sorry about that.

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The basis of intent. Faith is a better intent than greed, even if it's really messed-up faith.

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One who doesn't feel that it's right to kill people. Again, read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, in particular the section headed 'Transformational Pacifism'.

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You shouldn't put a bullet between the eyes of either if there were any other options available, but good to know, I guess.

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What actions? They were consumed with infighting as to what to do next and when they tried to communicate with Truman somebody mangled the translation.

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It was wrong to conscript them on the part of the Japanese government. The United States had considerably more control over its own actions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in fog-of-war situations prevalent in actual combat. Had the United States had some sort of divining rod to separate conscripts from volunteers, however, then yes, it would have been absolutely wrong to intentionally kill the conscripts.

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You never mentioned civilians at all, except to say that they follow a demonic religion and can be justifiably treated as a homogeneous mass. Forgive me if I used that fact as a starting point for deduction about how much you care about them.

we need a new representative for pacifism...I just can't reconcile "it is 'wrong' for a SWAT team to kill someone in the defense of others, but it is called for...though they will need to atone for their actions"

what is the SWAT team to do for atonement - adopt 10 miles of a local highway and clean it for 2 Saturdays per person they 'wrongly' but 'necessarily' killed? 

How about cleaning poop droppings of homeless kittens in the local animal shelter?  My wife does that.  I'll have to go home and ask here what she is attempting to atone for.

I'm not claiming to be a representative for pacifism, just one for myself, which is why I keep trying to get you to read the damn article.

You can't reconcile it because you have a risibly simplistic worldview and are also misunderstanding what I am saying, possibly deliberately. Here:

1. It is wrong to intentionally kill somebody.
2. If the SWAT team ends up with somebody dead from trying to do another task, that's not a good outcome and it's something for which they should repent.
3. If the SWAT team intentionally killed somebody, that's a completely unjustifiable outcome.

You also seem to think (or not to care if it comes across that way) that if one believes in repenting and atoning through works, one can't believe in doing good works for their own sake. I don't know what this says about you but whatever it is I don't like it.

Your suggestions would be perfectly good things for SWAT police to do with their time, yes.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I am willing to entertain arguments to wait out Iran…but I am not going to sit here and listen to a bunch of contradictory nonsense that attempts to define deadly force used in the act of self-defense as a “sin” and then attempts to claim “sin” is sometimes justified.  Your attempt to muck up the English language has one aim and one aim only – to cloak the lie that you are pedaling.

Sin is sin, period.  The bible NEVER portrays it as justifiable.

Again, I am fine with people arguing that my plan will cause more bloodshed in the near and long term.  That is a viable argument.  But it is NOT a viable argument to openly claim sin is justifiable in some cases for it is never presented that way in scripture.

You are willfully misinterpreting what I am saying or else you are so incredibly ignorant that you genuinely do not understand that there is any kind of Christian moral thought other than your own. I am not attempting to cast sin as 'justified', only 'understandable'. If it is justified in the sense of being forgivable, which is a word that I have used while you have been the only one insisting on the use of 'justified', it is because the result is unintentional. I have never claimed anything else and if you genuinely think that I have then I am afraid that you are well beyond the help of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Maybe if you spent the rest of your life doing nothing but reading Unamuno and Endo over and over again you might eventually break even. MAYBE. But I'm not going to sweat it until that happens. Welcome to ignore.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You are willfully misinterpreting what I am saying or else you are so incredibly ignorant that you genuinely do not understand that there is any kind of Christian moral thought other than your own.

actually, I prefer biblical moral thought, rather than creating my own.

No, it's still your own moral thought, you just describe it as Biblical because you're engaging in a particularly hubristic type of value attribution.

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Then where in the bible is sin “understandable”…give me a single example out of the entire bible. [/quote]

There are enough examples of points where Jesus understands people's sin that I don't feel the need to list any specifically if you can't read it yourself. Understanding sin isn't the same thing as excusing it. You and the Pharisees are the only ones who think that. Jesus certainly didn't.

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I'll concede this semantic point (and I completely agree with your last sentence), but what I'm referring to is the distinction between venial and mortal sin, which is one of degree, not of kind. Again, somebody reasonably familiar with the history of Christian moral thought would have understood this. A venial sin ('forgivable' in this context, which was probably a stupid word for me to have used) is simply one that doesn't in some way at least point to or pave the way for blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, in that it either does not concern a 'grave matter', is not committed with full knowledge, or is not committed with both deliberate and complete consent (the last of which is the relevant one here).

I don't agree with the classical interpretation of what 'mortal sin' entails precisely, because I agree with you that that particular part of the analysis doesn't have any basis in the teachings of Jesus, but denying that there is at least some sort of distinction here strikes me as faintly absurd at best.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nathan, I've created a thread on the Religion Board where you can continue attempting to explain the logic of your "pacifism + the need for sinning SWAT teams"

I'm not interested in discussing the particular example of the SWAT teams any more, since I'm analyzing it as a result of a fallen and violent world whereas you're more interested in the applied morality of it as itself (which there's nothing wrong with, aside from the fact that it seems to be hampering your ability to understand what I actually believe; which I admit I haven't been doing the best job of explaining, because you won't read the Stanford article). Here, I'm going to create an 'Opinion of transformational pacifism' thread and we'll see if that gets us anywhere.