WW2 was a fiction? That’s good to know. Glad my grandparent’s generation didn’t have to fight anything, glad England wasn’t at risk, glad that German aggression, Japanese imperialism, and Italian fascism was just a spot of local bother and not something that needed to be fought over.
Also glad that we didn’t need to fight to do anything to prevent the ‘fiction’ of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, or the fiction of Iraq invading it’s neighbors in 1991. I guess we just needed to talk real nice to them and they would have knocked that stuff off.
Other than being a complete fallacy, and willfully untrue, what exactly are you trying to say?
We killed lots of people ‘who would rather not be dead’ in WW2. Are you saying that this defence of the Western Liberal Democracies from assault by fascist / imperialist / totalitarian states was immoral? That anyone who partook in that war was immoral, no matter what? I’d think a whole lot of veterans of that conflict, as well as draftees from other conflicts, would have a lot of not very nice things to say about that.
Uh, yeah, it is. You said killing people was immoral no matter what, and anything else was a ‘fiction’. So killing Serbs, who wanted to remain alive to continue killing, enslaving, raping, and forcing their enemies to leave their homes to make room for Serbian leibensraum, was immoral and anything else is a fiction. Killing Iraqis, who wanted to continue to occupy, rape, and pillage their weaker neighboring state, was immoral and anything else is ‘fiction’.
You said it - defend it. Otherwise what you say has no meaning whatsoever.
I can defend it to you only to the extent that you bother to sound out the words you’re reading and think about them making yourself look like a horse’s ass. I said that war is irreconcilable with morality. Do you know what each of those words means?
If I said that playing frisbee was an activity irreconcilable with morality, would you assume that I perceived frisbee and all acts associated therewith to be fundamentally immoral? That I was anti-frisbee? Or is it possible that I simply don’t see frisbee as having moral implications at all, one way or the other, neither moral nor immoral? That for my part, I see frisbee as having the same moral implications as eating a grapefruit. Is that possible? Conceivable to you?
Idea: All things that are not moral are not necessarily immoral. In point of fact, the majority of what you will do today, from breathing to eating to shitting, have no moral context at all, whatsoever. Wow. Gather your jaw off the floor, precious, and let’s review.
mswas observed that he found warring in Iraq to be morally objectionable. I responded that I found moral objections to war to be fundamentally meaningless. mswas apparently does not agree and simply reiterates an unwillingness to get on the plane. All is well in the agree-to-disagree land, until your attempt to turn that particular exchange into your own personal Custerian defense of the The Greatest Generation ™, which was totally beside the point and completely goddamned retarded.
There’s my defense, so I hope you like it. Have a nice day.
I had this whole response all written up and you got it in one sentence. Screw it, I’ll do it anyways.
You didn’t say it had no moral context. You said war was irreconcilable with morality, which means immoral. If you’d like to change your answer, that’s fine - all that’s required is you to say ‘sorry, slight mistake - I meant to say…’
Personal insults again. Weren’t you just warned for that?
So sorry to interrupt your private conversation. Oh, wait, it was a public message board? Dedicated to fighting ignorance? And you said something provably incorrect?
You said all war was ‘irreconcilable with morality’, which to me (and apparently others, means ‘immoral’. In the attempt to eradicate ignorance, I tried to confirm if you included, in your bold statement of ‘all’ wars being immoral, WW2 and other conflicts where a wrong (genocide, war of aggression) was attempted to be corrected. I disagreed with your comment. I said so. I didn’t happen to disagree with mswas’s comment, because his was emotive (‘I wouldn’t get on the plan’) and personal, and therefore not a subject for debate I cared about. You stated an incorrect fact. I attempted to confirm it. You’ve now stated further incorrect facts. Sorry, but I’ve been here long enough to learn that that’s kinda what this place exists to stop - people being wrong about facts.
Sarcasm has it’s place. Usually it works best when one has won an argument. As this is clearly not the case, I will go forth and have a good day in spite of your sarcastic hope for the opposite.
With slow response time, I had not had a chance to review the post you were making while I was submitting my last post, however, I will emphasize, in case you mised it, that personal insults are not permitted in this Forum.
You will refrain from such actions in the future.
Junior modding on statements posted before a Mod has actually addressed an issue do not win any points among the staff, either.
grossbottom, you need to keep your insults in the Pit.
Everyone needs to ratchet back on the personal hostility (particularly when one has chosen the excluded middle of treating a claim for amorality as a claim for immorality rather than seeking clarification).
Then you lack a more perfect understanding of the English language. Irreconcilable, as used by me, was a predicate adjective, the meaning of which would be ‘not reconcilable.’
Main Entry: rec·on·cile
Pronunciation: 're-k&n-"sI(-&)l
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -ciled; -cil·ing
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French reconciler, from Latin reconciliare, from re- + conciliare to conciliate
transitive verb
1 a : to restore to friendship or harmony <reconciled the factions> b : SETTLE, RESOLVE <reconcile differences>
2 : to make consistent or congruous <reconcile an ideal with reality>
Ergo, I have stated that war cannot be made harmonious or congruous with what is moral. But this does not mean or imply that all war is immoral; merely that it is irreconcilable with a state that is moral. The exclusion of a thing does not necessitate the inclusion of its opposite. This is logical, and to some, obvious.
Your ignorance is now fought. You may admit to the mistake or by all means, continue.
You continue to misstate my position. Cite to where I said all wars are immoral.
I was insulting the argument, not the poster, which I took to be permitted. Apologies.
You argue that your use of the phrase “irreconcilable with” was in keeping with the dictionary definition given above, and you argue that on that use, to say that something is “irreconcilable with morality” does not imply that it is immoral. You are incorrect on both accounts.
You are also incorrect to think that looking something up in a dictionary settles its meaning. For one thing, a word can often be part of a phrase, the entire phrase having a definition of its own, which definition is not dependent on the meanings of the phrase’s constituent words. For another thing, dictionaries can err in their record of the usage of words.
So, for example, googling “irreconcilable with” turns up a list of results–actual use of the term by competent English speakers, in various contexts–every single one of which illustrates the fact that, in the English language, “irreconcilable with” means “not compatible with, contradictory towards,” or words to such an effect. This may be in accordance with the dictionary definition, or it may not be, but my point is, the dictionary definition is not relevant when we can get a good look at how actual English speakers actually regularly use the word.
Based on that usage, as illustrated through the google search, we see that to say something is irreconcilable with morality is to say it is not compatible with morality. For something to be incompatible with morality is for it to be immoral. Were it neither moral nor immoral (as you suggest it could be while remaining “irreconcilable with morality”) it would be compatible hence reconcilable with morality. A rock, in and of itself, is neither moral nor immoral. Hence, the existence of a rock is compatible–reconcilable–with morality.
Now to your other arguments, mentioned in my first paragraph above.
The dictionary definition given says that to reconcile is to make consistent or congruous. Hence to be irreconcilable is to be incapable of being made consistent or congruous. But a morally neutral item, as I’ve just illustrated, is capable of being made consistent or congruous with morality. The only thing that can’t be made consistent or congruous with morality is that which is morally negative, i.e., immoral. So we see both that your claim that your understanding of “irreconcilable” is in keeping with the dictionary definition is incorrect, (yours allows “irreconcliable with morality” to apply to the morally neutral, while the dictionary definition does not), and by the same token, we also see that the dictionary definition you gave does indeed imply that that which is irreconcilable with morality would be immoral.
So your arguments have been based on a bad premise that dictionary lookups are relevant to this discussion, and furthermore, even granting that premise, your arguments’ conclusions did not validly follow.
I appreciate your attempt to substitute a Google search for a respectable dictionary definition. I also appreciate that you feel that citing to dictionaries in order to discover what words acutally mean isn’t useful. Unfortunately for your argument, I can assure you that a) dictionaries do in fact tend to be dispositive in determining what words mean, that being their function in the universe, and b) they are certainly authoritative when compared to random Google searching, with the possible exception of slang or technical terms, neither of which is the case here. Furthermore, as the discussion was centered on my use of a term, and as my use of that term was wholly congruous with the English dictionary definition thereof, and as my meaning was at issue and that meaning has been clarified beyond any doubt, I really question the point of your post. Are you just bored and looking to make a semantic, off-topic argument? Or are you just trying to cover up your woeful misunderstanding of the word “irreconcilable” by relying on search engines instead of a dictionary to justify that misunderstanding?
In any event, it’s really just not very interesting.
Irrelevant, as I reject your offer to substitute search engine results for a proper reference. Even if I accepted Google as a substitute for a college education, or as an explanation of why you and anyone else should misapprehend what is otherwise the plain meaning of an ordinary English word, you haven’t offered a refutation, only an alternate explanation. You were wrong once and I said nothing, but now its twice. Cut your losses.
No, you didn’t actually. But you tried real hard. Please cite to a moral rock, I would enjoy that.
Hopefully more than they’re buying your argument that dictionary definitions aren’t relevant where the definition of “irreconcilable” is concerned. I admit I’m sad that you won’t actually be demonstrating the moral value of inanimate objects.
Well, I’ve got my fingers crossed. I’ll be here whenever you feel you have enough encouragement to prove either 1) a congruity between zero and non-zero, or 2) the non-zero moral value of the inanimate.
If I were to fight, it wouldn’t be for moral reasons it would be for pragmatic ones. If I abstained from fighting altogether it would be for moral reasons. The thing is, I like liberty. The war in Iraq is not about liberty it’s about creating a friendly vassal state in an unfriendly neighborhood. If they achieve any of the goals pertaining to liberty then that’s a bonus. If we go to war with Iran, it will just be furthering the naked aggression that wants to reshape the Middle-East in our own image, like when we funded the Mullahs in Afghanistan and Pakistan in order that they could fight the Russians who were liberalizing the country by allowing women to study at University. Defeating Russia was more important to us. Our competing Utopian vision was so important that we sided with people who were even farther afield ideologically than our enemy. So Russia invaded Afghanistan, and we helped create the Taleban.
If the United States were to institute a draft and force people to fight in this neo-colonialist debacle, then they would have to remove rights at home to put us on a total war footing. Unlike World War II, this war has no definable goals, it’s open-ended, terrorism will never be defeated as long as there are people who consider themselves oppressed minorities and are willing to fight. So, in essence, that would mean that they have dissolved the Republic in the name of creating the Empire, I would fight for the Republic, not because it is the moral thing to do, but because I do not want to live under a Fascist Imperial Junta.
Gomiboy This is sort of painful to read so may I offer you:
