I believe the point is supposed to be that New Zealand police officers are jackbooted thugs seeking to speak to people, unlike the nice US cops who only seek to shoot them. The problem with New Zealand is that they’re danged libruls who enacted stronger gun control, and furthermore, who seem to have such a responsive legislative system that they enacted in a couple of weeks what the US has been unable to do in a century. They’re a quiet peace-loving country who have taken steps to make sure they stay that way. No wonder Ditka hates them with a passion!
However, to your question about why his “courage” matters, HD has taken the position that a civil war between conneds and libs would not be the worst thing, that the conneds would win because they have more guns… and yet a “man” advocating for the outright slaughter of his fellow citizens is too scared to come here and be yelled at.
HurricaneDitka is probably from Hurricane, Utah (note the pronunciation, /ˈhɜːrɪkən/) a town which became a suburb of St. George as the latter expanded. My father was from the same sort of small Mormon town in central Utah. We would visit relatives and you get the same sort of asshole conservatives who are racists.
It does matter. The reason is that there is a certain kind of person who almost makes a fetish about “hard choices” as a sign of manly leadership. They dismiss anyone who raises humanitarian concerns as weak-willed, deluded, feminine, unwilling to face hard facts. But while they are all about hard choices, they never seem to end up being the person whose going to pay the price: they are always all about how someone else is just going to have to take a hit for the team, but not themselves. Somehow, the logic never works out that way. So pointing out that they are willing to pay in other people’s lives but not their own is showing that they don’t think the cause is worth a life, when the life is “real”; they are just wiling to trade away the lives of others because it isn’t real to them.
Exactly. And words like “coward” and “gutless” are aimed straight at this hypocrisy, using the same sort of language they use to advocate for violence. It’s meant to be harsh – and sometimes being harsh is appropriate.
First, you were arguing with him in the Iran war thread, not just in this pit thread.
But more importantly, it’s just a bizarre argument. I’m generally anti-war (Though I thought Desert Storm was at least reasonable) but there is one thing I unequivocally support: Fighting fires. I think fire fighting is necessary and I support the brave people who fight them. But I am not a fire fighter and have never been. Somehow I don’t think that makes me a coward. Nor do I think it makes the tens of millions of Americans who are not fire fighters cowards either.
Again, we have a professional military. We should use it judiciously and rarely, but if it comes to it that we need to fight, it doesn’t make me a coward to say so, even if I’m not serving.
I don’t either. This doesn’t contradict anything I’ve said. I’ve only been criticizing those who advocate for dumb wars. Not firefighting or anything else aside from wars.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. And my criticism is not about any “need to fight” – it’s really about those who advocate for the kind of dumb and unnecessary military actions that we’ve gotten into the last couple of decades (and before). We didn’t need to fight in Iraq in 2003, for certain. Nor many of the little operations before and since.
But if you really want to discuss this in detail, I recommend you take it to the GD thread I started.
I did (respond to him) and my apologies to all for my temporary weakness. I guess I do it for basically the same reason it’s sometimes interesting to respond logically to a fairly dumb computer program that was built as a half-assed experiment to engage in the Turing test. There is some minor level of curiosity, during a boring moment, about how the dumb thing will respond. Of course it’s invariably disappointing because neither primitive implementations of simplistic AI nor lunatic ideologues respond to logic.
