I pit you guys...

The BBQ Pit
221

We evidently have differing definitions of the words “proven” and “lies”. I go with the dictionary definitions, which I kinda like, so I’ll stick with them. Maybe you’d like them, too. Check them out sometime.

Man, you’re dumb. May I suggest you drill some holes in your head and stick a few flowers into the wet mush, because you’re not using it they way it was intended. But out of curiosity, which specific law did Bush break? And if he did break it, I’m sure that He That Is Mighty AND Good And Clean And Articulate And Can Do No Wrong As He Rules As The Wisest And Bestest Ruler EVER will have him tried in a court of law. Right?

And here’s a little tidbit you might find interesting. The President of The United States is imbued with powers that allow him to do certain things that an ordinary citizen is unable to do. And individual country is free to act in it’s own self defense. Which is what Bush was doing, as badly botched or wrongheaded as it might have been.

I’ve not disputed that. I think that to be the case. Though there has been an upside: no more attacks on the U.S. But God forbid you deign give him credit for anything.:rolleyes:

Not quite. I’ve defended my position just fine. You just can’t see that due to the pictures of a Obama in a toga etched into your glasses. You are a Poster Boy for the worst of this board’s synapses-shut-off knee jerk partisans. Here’s a tip for the future son: before you start attacking someone’s position, have an idea what the fuck that position actually is. Oh, and here’s another tip: even if you feel strongly about a particular position, even super-duper-with-Olberman-jizz-on-top strongly, that does not mean you’re allowed to use words in ways they weren’t meant to be used without looking like the ball-licker that you are.

And one more: if that drunk imbecile Red comes to argue your side, it’s time for some deep, deep reflection.

Hope that helps.

222

I guess the question is: to what degree does the good that might done through an evil act make it a good act? Or, is it possible for an evil act to be responsible for such a large degree of goo that it can be, or should be, characterized as a good act?

But maybe there’s no reason to have it fall into one category or another. As long as an act having a component of evil doesn’t take it off the table.

223

This is the problem I was trying to get at in the first place - there shouldn’t be any “merging” of moral quality. An evil act to a good end means you’ve done both evil and good. An evil act to a fantastically good end increases the amount of good done, but it doesn’t decrease the amount of evil. The evilness of the act isn’t reduced by the greater goodness. So really like you say it’s a matter of an act being both things, not simply that which it is mostly. An act which is both good and evil should be characterized as a good and evil act.

224

Wait. If an act has both good an evil components, but the good far outweigh the evil (Nagasaki and Hiroshima for instance), shouldn’t we want to encourage the action a tiny bit. Possibly by allowing it to be characterized as “good”?

I think so, but I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m comfortable with either answer. But I’m definitely less comfortable with an estimation the discourages the behavior that we think is a net benefit to us.

225

In the spirit of reciprocity, I am willing to help you as well.

There. Problem solved.

Don’t mention it. Pleasure’s all mine.

226

That does help, thanks. You really are a dumb drunk. You try to insult me by posting a picture of yourself. :smack: Tell me do you have to lube that dumb-ass goatee, or have you loosened up after so many years of this, that you can now just pop that empty head of yours in at will? At least now I know that you can do exactly what I’ve said you’re doing all along: posting with your head up your ass.

::Golf clap::

227

No, because that would dilute the meaning of “good”, and we certainly wouldn’t want that.

228

:wink:

229

Must. Try. Harder. As it is, I actually find it amusing toying with you – kind of like when I whip my Doberman into a lather and then call “sit” and she does with a forlorn look in her eyes. You’re not just there is yet so there’s a bit more training to be done. As when I actually received a moronic death threat from a Keyboard Warrior such as yourself on this very topic when it was actually topical – and should you bother to read the thread that it happened in, you might even notice how I was right in just about every point I made in it.

…Quite frankly, if he had said that to my face I would have killed him on the spot.

Now that’s some real frothing and not your cumstained, run of the mill Internet tough guy replies.

Now run along little man, Master will let you know when he needs you again.

230

It’s not really a question of pluses and minuses, where if the pluses (good) add up to more than the minuses (bad) we can ignore the bad entirely. It’s more (to me) like filling a container with freshwater (good) and saktwater (bad). If you fill the glass with fresh water and add only a squirt of salt water, it’s drinkable, but you can taste the contamination. The more salt water you add, the less palatable the mix becomes.

That’s not to say an evil action can never be used toward a good end. In some cases it’s necessary. But the good end does not absolve the actor of the evil it did. We dropped the bombs on Japan and in doing so stopped the war, true. Stopping the war was unquestionably a good thing. Had I been President at the time, and let’s even say I was granted the ability to know the future and what consequences my action would result in, I would probably make the same decision as Truman.

However, I would have to live with being known as the president who used atomic bombs. The United States has to live with being the only country thus far to be willing to use the bomb. If a country chooses to factor that in to the way they conduct business with us, that’s at least as rational as our justifications in using the bomb in the first place.

There are suggestions I’ve seen, both in fiction and non, for local-level laws/constitutions that allow a leader power to do something, such as summarily execute a man without trial or forcing a board to vote a certain way. However, it comes with a price. No matter the outcome, even if in the end that evil action leads to a greater good, the leader who exercises such a power must step down. Either simply hand the position over to someone else or go into exile or be jailed, something like that.

Just because the end is good doesn’t mean the act doesn’t have to be accounted for, that the actor doesn’t bear responsibility. That path leads to thinking like “We got information from torture, therefore torture is good!” or “You can’t arrest me for mugging all those people, I gave the money to charity!”

231

I think this is an excellent examination of the issue. And I really think you, Rev, and I are just a degree or two out of alignment. But here’s where I get hung up:

I think it does. Take two rulers. Both drop bombs and kill 600,000 people. Ruler A does it while under no threat or involved in any conflict. He does it just because he doesn’t like some people. Ruler B is Truman. To say that the good stemming from Truman’s action does not absolve him of the evil he did, equates the actions, and the “guilt” of the two rulers. If he is not absolved of the evil, what separates them.

Truman made what was no doubt an unbelievably difficult decision. Rather than insisting that the evil of the act always be attached to him—in a final analysis kind of way—seems like the wrong thing to do. The fact that he gave the order very reluctantly, and in spite of the evil, is a calculation that we should be thankful for. I fear that not allowing the good to shadow the bad is both unfair to him and might prevent a future Truman to do the same thing. And I don’t think that would be a good thing.

232

So, this is what a drunk imbecile does:

  • continually refers back to old posts of his that he feels are just so amazing
  • mutters something about death threats from the past, from a different poster, when nothing like that was offered in the real here and now
  • forgets all the times when he went running away with his tail between his legs, and in particular, the time when I simply shared with him his ex-wife’s behavior with his mates

Good to know. Perhaps the best gauge—and proof—of your utter, incalculable stupidity, Red is that you are so enamored with yourself. You post on these boards with the loud back-slapping bravado of a punk kid that has left his hometown and is hungry to leave his lonely, friendless existence behind and have friends, just like the normal kids back home. But you overplay your hand. You simply advertise your pathetic desperation for acceptance. Maybe your wife leaving you to suck any cock other than yours sent you over the edge. I don’t know. But don’t blame her for coming to her senses and upgrading to someone who is more of a man. Women are attracted to the real thing. They see through bullshit and can see when one is trying to compensate for their lack of a backbone with bluster.

You and your mirror have a nice day.

233

They are? They can? Oh, shit.

234

I believe an excellent example of ‘chutzpah’ is the Jewish man who admitted to murdering his parents, but asked for mercy on the grounds that … he was an orphan. :smack:

235

That was funny.

I’ve marked the calendar.

:wink:

236

There’s certainly a difference between Truman and a mass murderer, just as there’s a difference between a glass that’s 90% fresh water and 10% salt water and a glass that’s 100% salt water. But that first glass is still never going to taste as good as a glass that’s 100% fresh.

When you operate from a straight end-justifies-the-means perspective, the morality of the act never comes into play. Did we get the results we wanted? Yes? Then what we did doesn’t matter. This approach logically implies that the easiest way to achieve the end, the path of least resistance, is the best way. If we can crack a prisoner with torture in two weeks to get the same information as we could get with a month of engendering trust and good will, why would we ever choose the second path? Here’s an old Calvin & Hobbes strip that’s always stuck with me despite being too young to really understand it when I first read it. Calvin prattles on about the ends justifying the means, and Hobbes ends up pushing him into a mud puddle. When Calvin shouts at him, he calmly states, “You were in my way. Now you’re not. The end justifies the means.”

Now, that’s somewhat extreme. When we talk about Truman, or killing someone in self-defense, we’re talking about situations in which there were no other acceptable options left in the time frame given. Truman could have continued fighting a conventional war, but the final body count was very likely to be more than what the bombs produced. But when we encounter a situation like torture, it becomes less clear that it’s the only option available. We can come up with hypothetical situations in which Jack Bauer needs a disarming code in the next 5 minutes, and there I think nobody would fault him for using the threat of pain and death to get what he needed. But looking at reality, we waterboarded a guy, what was it, 187 times in one month? I find it hard to accept that that was the only option left to us.

Even when we could do nothing else but take a life or cause pain, for the alternatives would be worse, we have to remember that the action we had to take was an evil one. And I do believe there should be consequences that come from that, even if the only consequence that occurs is internal guilt. In the case of torture, one strong consequence is that people are less likely to trust us, and some may come to hate us for hurting their countrymen or just for the principle of hurting another person. Now, torture may have been the only option left to us, and we may have gotten the information we needed that we had to have and couldn’t get any other way. But we can’t just say that because it worked, everything’s okay and you shouldn’t blame us for using it. That torture still happened. We can’t just make it or its consequences go away, and we shouldn’t, because without consequences, the act becomes easier and easier to contemplate using until it’s no longer the last ditch option but instead one of the first to be considered.

That was a much longer post than I meant to compose at work, but it’s an interesting argument and one I tried to give a lot of thought to.

237

And you got it? I’ll mark mine.

238

Members of Al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993.

On September 10, 2001, I wonder how many Republicans/others would have praised former President Clinton for keeping us safe because there had been no more attacks on the U.S.

Al-Qaeda is nothing if not patient. Look how long they waited. There WILL be another attack, we just don’t know when or where or how, but they’re planning something, and they can wait. They have all the time in the world. They also have a whole shitload of new and willing recruits thanks to Bush.

We can only hope that President Obama and his staff don’t blow off any warnings the way Bush and his people did (especially Rice). I don’t think they will, just as I don’t think a President Gore would have.

239

No more attacks? What were the anthrax letters, chopped liver?

240

No, and that’s precisely what i’m worried about happening.

The flipside of that is of course that by encouraging an estimation that has more of a net benefit than is actual, we’re more likely to be willing to do that evil act for not enough good.

To go with torture as an example; if we go too far in our focus on the evil aspect, it may well be that people will not elect to torture, with the worst case effect being that it could have provided information towards a very good result (this presumes torture works, of course). If we go too far the other way, we risk people being willing to torture too much, when the good results aren’t as valuable. Either way presents a risk. I really couldn’t say which way worries me more, but I tend to see more people who would agree with you in your larger concern for that particular direction of estimation, hence my concern.