The fact that the military represents a demographic microcosm of the public at large is lost on no one except those that find it a convenient excuse to push stereotypes in support of political agendas. What you don’t realize is that your “study” will find higher rates of this so-called “psychopathy” in other walks of American life, especially if the the demographic is narrowed by locality or regions.
As far as your personal experience of the sand nigger killers and other marines goes, it simply illustrates the common human tendency to believe the world ends at the horizon of their consciousness, oblivious to objective reality or more information they simply ignore for lack of it’s existing right under their nose. This basically leads to the common fallacies affirming the consequent or least plausible hypothesis type arguments.
That’s basically my argument – with the caveat that the final act was Hasan’s choice, and his choice alone. I don’t believe the U.S. Army or any other agency expected Hasan to “go postal” in such an extreme manner – but the available evidence makes it obvious that his immediate supervisors weren’t paying close enough attention, or didn’t care, or were outright prejudiced (yes, prejudiced) against his Palestinian heritage and/or his status as a mentally ill individual.
They did fail to understand his problems, I agree. I don’t know of any reason to believe they ignored him because of prejudice. I am not sure how that means ‘the crazy was forced upon him.’
Hey fuzzy, since you are so good at reading stranger’s minds thousands of miles away and being intimately familiar with organizational dynamics in the military you’ve never even seen - got any hot stock tips for us?
Yeah – when you restock, make sure the product label faces out. And don’t stock the Lean Pockets next to the Totino’s Pizza Rolls – that’s just being stupid. :rolleyes:
Whereas you’re essentially arguing that the kind of person who really enjoys the idea of killing $ENEMY_OF_THE_WEEK will NOT disproportionately join the military in order to do so in a socially sanctioned manner?
I might not have been clear: 100% of the active duty military that I know A) know personally at least one person who asserts they joined up specifically to legally kill Arabs, and B) wish there was a good method for dumping that trash out of their military. When I hear that enough times, I want to see some hard evidence that the military is “a microcosm of the public at large” – as opposed to “attracting people who like the idea of killing”.
Even within a purely fictional scenario, mass murder of innocent civilians for the greater good would be an extremely tough sell. (Except for Commando – but in that film, Arnold was trying to locate his kidnapped daughter, so that makes it okay.)
On the other hand, there’s the scenario portrayed in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone – Johnny Smith can see the future, and he knows about Greg Stillson’s evil motive to destroy the world with nuclear war. Therefore, he commits himself to a course of action which changes the future, at the cost of his own life – sacrifice. Not everyone around him would see it that way, of course…but the audience sees the truth. Some may even ask themselves if they would do the same thing, within that fictional scenario.
But remember, it’s only a movie. It never actually happened.
The real-life counterpart to this would be if you had first-hand inside information of an upcoming event. There would still be the moral question of course, but you don’t have to invoke magic to posit a scenario that asks the exact same moral question. After all, his premonitions could be as false just as easily as one’s inside information could be false.
Anyone who thinks there is “no significant moral difference” between Quakerism and Shia Islam, Unitarianism and Orthodox Judaism, or Reform Judaism and Roman Catholicism doesn’t know what they are talking about.
There is a massive moral difference between pacifism and the idea that husbands have the right to beat their wives if they are disobedient or between the idea that gays have the right to get married versus the idea that they are sinners damned to hell.
The idea that all religions are “equally moral” “equally stupid” or “equally evil” is one of the US’ most commonly held fallacies.
I have premonitions from time to time, and they’re rarely false.
That being said, I’ve never once had any vision similar to that of Johnny Smith (or Jared Lee, for that matter!!) – and if I ever do, I’ll re-connect with my therapist and beg for medication, only because I’d rather not think about it. :eek:
They are not “equally moral” or “equally evil”, but they are “equally stupid”. There is no substantive difference between believing in thetans, that the garden of Eden was in Missouri, that the earth was created in 6 days, or that someone died to save us from our sins.
But no, the theists will say, they don’t believe that nonsense, they just think that there is ‘something’ even though they can’t describe it, see it, or say what it does, did, or will do, or tell us what difference it makes if it did exist.
