I think the guy needs some serious therapy.
That’s some odd, let’s call it, reasoning. One of the things I enjoy about the US’s legal system is that it often takes the breaking of a law to get that very law examined by the courts and then declared wrong (unconstitutional).
Since breaking the law can’t ever be right, I guess we should call this whole ‘independence’ thing off and just hand ourselves back over to the UK. Fair’s fair.
A reminder that while the CIA’s using a vaccination program to get information about bin Laden was stupid and harmed vaccination efforts, there’s a tradition of targeting vaccination workers in the Third World based on conspiracy fears that long predate the CIA’s involvement:
*“(in 2003), immunization in Nigeria was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.”
*
After the CIA program in Pakistan was exposed in 2011, the Taliban refused to allow vaccination efforts until the U.S. ended drone strikes, cynically hiding behind vulnerable people to get their way.
It doesn’t get the CIA off the hook, but neither does it make the agency solely responsible for local resistance to immunization drives.
But does he like dogs? :dubious:
(sigh) This is what I get for letting myself speak up at 5 in the morning.
At the risk of re-igniting this dogpile - for the record, I probably would’ve been a Royalist had I been alive in the Colonies in the 1770s, and IMO, America and the rest of the world would be in a better place today if the Colonies had sought and received equal representation in Parliament.
How about the fact that in the military, soldiers are REQUIRED to disobey unlawful orders? What then? If you were a member of the military, would you risk being court martialed, because you feel it would be wrong to disobey an order, even though it would be against the law to obey it?
But soldiers (at least in the United States) are specifically forbidden from following unlawful orders.
I would request clarification of the order in writing and refer any objections I had to the next-most superior person in the chain of command.
Exactly my point.
You think you would have time to do that in combat?
“Lieutenant Smapti, kill every last man, woman, and kid in this Village right now! Shove them all into one hut and set the thing on fire.”
“Sir, I request clarification of your order in writing. I would like copies of it for myself and for you, and we should get them notarized and sign them. I also wish to speak to the next most Superior person in the chain of command.”
" Lieutenant, we are in the middle of fucking nowhere and there is no way to reach anybody like that and there is no fucking copier or printer around here either!"
“Oh, I see. Very well, sir. I’ll burn those motherfuckers first and then we can do all of this paperwork later.”
Smapti’s sense of morality is fundamentally broken, likely due to childhood trauma that he’s alluded to (but not described in detail, IIRC, which is obviously his prerogative). In addition to his most recent insanity, Smapti believes it is wrong to help free slaves at little/no risk to himself, he believes MLK Jr.'s civil disobedience was wrong, he believes that the only fucking morally correct actions for a slave in the pre-1860s US was to obey their master, and he believes that Harriet Tubman’s actions to help free slaves were morally wrong.
I should heed my own advice from past threads – there’s no point in engaging with Smapti on any issue relating to morality and the law, since his ability to distinguish the two is fundamentally, and apparently irrepairably, broken. I’ve never, ever met anyone with the same particular moral derangement that he appears to have.
Good gawd… I hadn’t seen those posts before. Sickening-- makes me throw up a little in my mouth and in my soul. Advice taken.
Smapti doing his insanity in a death penalty thread: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=872399
In that situation, if I believed the order was unlawful and my superior refused to restate or clarify it in a lawful manner, I would be obligated to either attempt to relieve my superior of his command, or, failing that, surrender myself for detainment pending court-martial for violation of Article 90 and/or 92.
And in the situation where you could help smuggle escaped slaves to safety, along the Underground Railroad? Or one where you could help persecuted Jews get the heck out of Nazi Germany? Just so I have your position right: what would you do?
I would have taken no action, because I would prefer not to endanger myself in the process.
In the previously posited scenario, I, a soldier on a battlefield, am being compelled to commit a questionably unlawful act. In yours, I, an ordinary citizen, have no legal compulsion to actively seek out and turn in escaped slaves or fleeing Jews, and if I have no personal knowledge of such persons, then I cannot be accused of failing to report them.
I’ve never noticed this individual’s posts before. Of course where I’m nowhere near full agreement, he seems like a good guy. Reminds me of my parents a bit, they’ve always followed the law no matter what and it works for them. They would only disobey if the state commanded them to bow down to an idol or take someone to get an abortion. Thanks andy.
Not a big fan of MLK Jr. and Harriet Tubman, huh? I’ll note that my criticism of him has nothing to do with a preference for following the law – I follow the law too. It’s about his moral philosophy.
You contradict yourself. “no matter what” excludes the latter exceptions. Your parents’ philosophy boils down to “I will follow the law unless the law contradicts moral principles I personally hold dear” - which really means they believe their own justifications trump law in some cases. The overwhelming majority of people think that way, the only thing that varies is where the justifications begin and in which cases. As PTerry Pratchett wrote, “Rules are here to make you think good and hard before you happily break them”.
Our **Smapti **here is broken and abnormal because he’s willing to let laws override his own morality, or indeed equates laws with a moral system. No matter what laws.