… or American soldiers, or ‘our’ boys (and girls) …
I pit everyone who uses those terms (particularly ‘our boys … and girls’; I am so sick of women being an afterthought).
Do you have any idea just how insulting it is to suggest American lives are so much more valuable than others? Do you have any idea how many of said insulted people have guns or explosive devices? Or how little anyone cares about the citizens of a country that routinely implies less respect for citizens of other countries?
I am a citizen of the United States. I have relatives in every branch of the armed forces except the Coast Guard. I cherish these relatives, and hope they all survive their deployments, in one piece.
Frankly, I value their lives because I love them, not because they are American.
slap
STOP IT!
JUST STOP IT!
Every time you refer to “American losses”, you imply American losses are more significant than others; those Others hold Americans in less respect in light of this bias.
People are more likely to kill other people whom they do not respect.
So, every time you refer to American losses as if American deaths are more tragic than other deaths, you piss people off, you leave them more open to acts of violence against Americans, and you further endanger the lives of my step-son, niece, and nephews.
That would be ‘our boys … oh, and girls! … in uniform’ you are claiming to be supporting. Yeah, the dead ones, because some people just aren’t moved by the call the respect American lives.
So, please, cut it right the fuck out.
I want my little chicks to come home in one piece.
American lives are worth more to me in the same way that American lives are worth more than deer or chicken lives. There is genocide going on around the world right now as there has always has been. Nobody, including you, cares much about that in any meaningful way. That is simply the human instinct and the human condition. I focus on my family and friends first and then people in my country who are similar to me which may include people in Canada and Australia and the rest of the Western world. Tsunamis in Asia make good news but who cares much about that outside of the magazine articles? Hurricane Katrina affected me 100,000x more because it happened in a place that I used to live in yet affected less than 100 people that I actually know today.
Not all human lives are equal to anyone and it is self-richeous and arrogant to think that they are to you. All 1.3 billion people in China could die tomorrow and it wouldn’t even register with me if a single, elderly family member of mine died at the same time. Everyone dies, some more tragically than others, and the human mind simply cannot stand the overload of every bad thing that happens in the world every day. No one really cares about it all if you really probe it.
Well, frankly, the whole reason why war is an oft-turned to and effective way to get one’s way is that most people value their friends/family/country more than they do your friends/family/country.
I’m firmly against the current war we’re in, but I most certainly am more concerned about, say, my classmates from high school who are in Iraq right now than I am for any particular Iraqi. I imagine that most of humanity feels the same way.
Shagnasty, I know I’ve seen you express similar sentiment before, and I get your point, but I don’t believe that outside family/friends/community/country the next level of compassion is ‘livestock.’ I’d rather loose 200,000 American chickens than, say, a family of Armenians, and I imagine the same goes for you, no?
Do you have any idea just how insulting it is to suggest American lives are so much more valuable than others? Do you have any idea how many of said insulted people have guns or explosive devices? Or how little anyone cares about the citizens of a country that routinely implies less respect for citizens of other countries?QUOTE]
That is an incredibly patronizing thing to say.
Not only are you assuming that people are actually listening to what Americans asy (because, after all, if Americans say it, it must be Important) You’re writing as if America was the only country in the world, and that everyone else beongs to a vast multinational “Other.”
Well, let me tell you something: all those “people with guns” out there - they all have countries, and they all care about their countrymen more than they they do about other people, including Americans (yes, to them you guys aren’t all that specila. Deal with it). Japanese care for other Japanese more than they do for other people; French people care for French people more than they do for other people; and so on. The only people who don’t care for their fellow countrymen then are citizens of failed states, like Iraq, and even they care more for members of their clan/sect than they do for outsiders, including Americans.
But no, if other people act like that it’s normal, but if Americans say it it’s racist. That’s because what you say is more important than what other people say. As if.
Look, I’m not agreeing with Shagnasty, here. I certainly don’t think of foreigners as livestock - I care for, and feel sadness for, all of humanity. I just feel more strongly for my own - non-American - countrypeople, and I’m not afraid to say it.
Used to be “American” meant something good. I fear most of the world isn’t as scared or impressed as they used to be. We pretty much flush the lives of our brethren down the tubes over lies uncovered for all to see. We can’t even stop hating each other from a few feet much less a few thousand miles. It burns my heart to the ground that we can’t just let each other live in peace.
Way back in the 90s, an Australian TV comedy outfit called “The D Generation” stairised tabloid/sensationalist TV news broadcasts. Behind the newsreader’s head was a thing called the DEATH-O-METER.
“Good evening. Three people were killed today in a head on collision in Sydney’s south…”
DEATH-O-METER: Ka-CHING! 3
“…two people died today in Melbourne when their light aircraft hit powerlines…”
DEATH-O-METER: Ka-CHING! 5
“To overseas news now, and a flood has killed eight thousand people in Bangladesh.”
DEATH-O-METER: Ka-CHING! 11
“…*ahem Of course, those are the racially-adjusted figures.”
How then are we to gauge the success or failure of a conflict if we aren’t there?
When you hear “Coalition troops engaged the Taliban in a fierce firefight today, killing hundreds”, wouldn’t that make you wonder which side suffered more casualties as opposed to addending that sentence with “an estimated 256 Taliban fighters were killed, with only 6 American casualties reported”?
Do you have any idea just how insulting it is to suggest American lives are so much more valuable than others? Do you have any idea how many of said insulted people have guns or explosive devices? Or how little anyone cares about the citizens of a country that routinely implies less respect for citizens of other countries?
Iry time you refer to “American losses”, you imply American losses are more significant than others; those Others hold Americans in less respect in light of this bias.
People are more likely to kill other people whom they do not respect.
So, every time you refer to American losses as if American deaths are more tragic than other deaths, you piss people off, you leave them more open to acts of violence against Americans, and you further endanger the lives of my step-son, niece, and nephews.
T.
So, please, cut it right the fuck out.
I want my little chicks to come home in one piece.
Just … stop.[/QUOTE]
American lives are more precious then other nationals lives to Americans just as Outer Mongolian lives are more precious to outer Mongolians.
Your ideas about other nationalities getting pissed off because Americans worry about American lives is completely and utterly wrong.
I suspect that you have never actually met a genuine foreigner in your life let alone an Arab,and I DONT mean … fill this space Americans.
Virtually all middle easterners couldn’t give a flying fuck about American or Brit or Canadian etc.lives but they would hold the members of any nation that DIDNT care about their own countrymens lives before all others in the deepest of contempt.
The biggest threat to your "Little Chicks "RE. people at home, are people like you, as your relatives are probably worrying about YOU and your emotional baggage ,taking their minds off of the job and giving them unhappiness that they could well do without at this time .
And I would bet anything you like that they disagree with your attitude.
Just remember that THEY are the ones in danger not you.
It is a contest of control.
I hate the contest, but that doesn’t mean that I hate any of the players on my side or the other.
In war control is often measured in terms of preservation of life.
If one side loses lives they lose some control.
So loss of life, other than its effect on immediate family, is an update to the score. It’s not a simple measurement of numerical comparison, but it is an indicator none the less.
Whether or not you agree with the reasons behind the war, American lives represent a measurement of whether or not “your side” is " gaining. You may hate the ideas behind the war, but these people still represent you if you are an American.
So American losses do mean something important to me. They mean that people on “my side” are suffering the loss of family. They mean "that “my side” has lost some control.
Not completely and utterly, no. Here’s one foreigner who does get pissed off at the behaviour outlined by j666. And yes, I get equally pissed off when my countrymen do it.
The arguement could go:
American lives are more important in war because we need our soldiers alive to win. We need to win so as not to become oppressed by the other side.
I do not agree with this war. I think it is deplorable that innocent Iraqis are dying. But, to me, American lives are more important than the lives of the insurgents.
… then there’s the bit about all the resident aliens who fight alongside your boys (… and girls) You know, the “Green Card Warriors”, as they’re called. Many of them on their second or third deployment by now. Quite a few honored with purple hearts, told by everyone how they are brave Americans (ha!). Speaking of – wasn’t the first “American” killed in Iraq actually not even a citizen but one of these Green Card Warrior boys?
They may have access to fast track citizenship, but even that takes its merry time. Lucky for them, they can get it granted posthumously. I’m sure that makes us all feel better.
No, nothing new here. In previous wars, you’d take 'em off the boats - “Welcome to the U.S.! Here’s your selective service form… here’s your gun, here’s the next ship out! Have a nice day!” Truth is, young men who immigrate to the US now, still, must register for “the draft” (Selective Service). If they don’t, they will never be granted citizenship. Ever. Or a whack of other social services, later in life.
There are American lives.
There are gooks,slants.sand niggers,krauts,insurgents, etc.
How different would the sense of the war be if we announced that we killed 65 Iraqis in a raid today. ? Call them insurgents or AlQueda and you are not doing something so bad.
I wouldn’t take offense if Japanese considered other Japanese more important to him than my own countrymen. If Prime Minister Mori stood up and said the reason he doesn’t want to send his army into Iraq to help us is because it would endanger Japanese lives, and thus showed that he valued Japanese lives more than American lives, I wouldn’t be insulted at all. He’s Japanese, he’s the Prime Minister of Japan, he bloody well should put more value on his countrymen than on mine. That’s what the people of Japan elected him to do. If he did equate the value of Japanese lives to American lives, he’d owe the Japanese people an explanation.
Most people value the lives of their countrymen more than those of other countries. I see no reason why Americans should be any different.
I’m curious why you sem to think that your motive would be less inflammatory to foreigners than the first motive.
You suggest that for Americans to value the lives of Americans more than those of other people not only annoys non-Americans, but actually insults them so badly that it inflames them into a murderous rage that makes them more likely to kill Americans than they would otherwise.
I don’t think that’s true. But if it is true, why wouldn’t you get the same result by valuing people you love more than people you don’t? Why don’t the people whom you “insult” by not valuing their lives as much as your loved ones’ take bloody, brutal revenge against your loved ones?
OK, so for us to say that our losses are more significant to us makes the whole world outside our borders hold us in less respect, and thus be more likely to kill us.
Then why isn’t the whole non-American world trying to kill us? Why, in fact, are a considerable number of non-Americans - British, Poles, the immigrants that Elenfair rightly pointed out are fighting for us - fighting on our side?
Those who are trying to kill Americans do not seem at all to be a cross-section of the world we have “insulted” by valuing our own losses more than others’. They seem to consist mostly of 1) Iraqi nationalists, who with some justification feel that our soldiers have no business being in their country, and 2) fundamentalist Muslim fanatics, who regard us as the strongest of the “infidels,” and who have been trying to kill us nonstop for decades, long before America was in any shooting war in which we could overvalue American losses.
That’s why people are trying to kill us. We’re in a country where we arguably don’t belong, and we refuse to adhere to this or that fanatic’s religious views. Not because we, like everybody else, value our own countrymen’s losses more than others.
Here’s hoping they do. Sorry if I can’t agree that your method is going to help their chances of doing that.
I understand the desire to believe that, if we were only nice enough, everybody would like us too much to hurt us. But it’s just as naive as the desire to believe that, if we were only mean enough, everybody would fear us too much to hurt us. They’re two sides of the same coin: the belief that we can control other people’s behavior just by modifying our own. We can’t.
Your little rant is nothing more than ignorant anti-nationalistic pablum. I wish our boys all the luck in their missions and gross failure for all those working against them.
And by “boys” I of course mean all those fighting in American uniform. Girls are included, idiot. Just like with the term “guys”, as in “C’mon guys, let’s get this done so we can all go home” is used in an office that might be predominantly women.
Why don’t we extend this even further? Let’s have our reports read like “An estimated 246 civilians were killed today, including 80 women and 115 children, as well as 10 Taliban fighters. Only 6 American casualties were reported.”
See, that sort of reporting I could get behind. Are you on board?
When we catch someone who MAY be an insurgent, we deny them a trial. That is another example how we deny they basic human rights. They are lesser people and do not deserve a fair and speedy trial. They are simply guilty.