So… how would you have stopped the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany?
I’ve come to realize one of my co-workers is quite the evangelical fundamentalist christian.
I finally had enough of his spouting and outbursts, whereby he bemoans how everyone is against christians and seemingly want to put the kibosh on them.
Trying not to be unfriendly/hostile I say “I dunno man, I just don’t see where christians are being persecuted”.
He asks me, “Lemme ask you: Is there a place for christianity in this country?” Answer: “Of course. You’re free to practice it here, aren’t you?”
“No no no” he corrects and asks “As a guiding principle of this country?”
“Well…no” ( my version of well…yeah ) I really wanted to say “F*$# no”, but decorum dictated otherwise.
“Are you saying you want drug users to be able to buy meth, coke, crack, heroin at any corner store?”
Well, yeah.
Are you joking?
I think he takes your “government can’t kill people for any reason” principle to apply to warfare and not just capital punishment.
The NHS is vastly overfunded. If we make drastic cuts some people will die.
Well…yeah
Are you?
(To be honest, that’s about as much of a defense of the position of absolute pacifism as I expected.)
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
People like that are used to the idea that being white, male, christian, native born, etc. gave them certain privileges and that people like them were the only ‘true’ citizens, and everyone else was 2nd class. They feel society should be structured so that people who hit those checkboxes are the de facto rulers politically, economically, socially, spiritually, etc.
Now that all those 2nd class citizens are growing in both number and power, they feel persecuted since they’re losing their grip on privilege.
Hence why so many religious people support Trump, despite Trump being the exact opposite of the morals they pretend to believe in. The only moral those people truly believe in is white identity politics and christian dominionism. They’re desperately holding onto an idea of America where they are the best and only ‘true’ citizens, and people like them are entitled to run everything.
Overfunded? I’d heard it was underfunded.
The US health system is overfunded. Some studies have found 30-50% of all medical spending in the US does nothing to make people healthier.
I’d hardly call anti-capital punishment “pacifism.” I’m not sure what Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer have to do with warfare.
Clearly. Perhaps I should have been more specific. However, I also do not subscribe to the idea that it’s ethical for governments to bomb non-combatant men, women, and children during warfare either. Not that that has anything to do with the injustices of capital punishment in America.
Not quite political, but:
“If you allow students to retest/turn things in late, they might get away with being lazy or not doing their best work the first time!”
Well, yeah. . . .
“But being for the death penalty means you’re just falling for the “Eye for an Eye” revenge idea!”
Well, yeah.
Well…yeah. That is a weird argument.
Well, yeah, borders should be open and people free to live wherever they can find a good life, regardless of where they were born, or at least we should be working our way to that.
Well, yeah, I would confiscate all the guns.
Well, yeah, I think we should only legalize marijuana slowly while we watch for any consequences in traffic safety and the like.
Well, yeah, I think animals deserve their own legal rights.
Well, yeah, I think most of us white guys have privilege and don’t do enough to fix it.
Well, yeah, I think there’s no gods or miracles anywhere, any time, any how.
Well, yeah, I think dill tastes just awful.
OK, we had a miscommunication.
I’m also against the death penalty, but on practical grounds: It’s impossible to conclude that there’s any legal system currently equal to the task of getting false conviction rates down low enough to support the idea that executions should be done on the basis of those convictions.
But I want to respond to the quoted portion of your post: In a system of total war, where all or almost all of a country’s economic output is directed towards fighting the war, is any adult active in that society truly a non-combatant? Destroying a country’s ability to wage war is the most effective way to get them to stop fighting, and destroying their logistics is the most effective way to do that. However, when nearly all industrial output is being done to benefit the country’s war machine, that logic inexorably leads to factories of civilians being bombed, which is precisely what was done to both Japan and Germany late in WWII, and a big reason both of them stopped fighting. (Japan is kind of a special case, in that the sheer terror of the nuclear weapons played a role in their decision, but objectively those weapons did less damage than the firebombing campaigns which actually destroyed industrial capacity.) Germany and Japan were both utterly determined to wage aggressive wars, and had to be stopped through sheer force. How much longer would WWII have lasted had factories not been bombed?
That is the primary reason why I’m against the death penalty, but even if we could ensure that only the guilty were convicted, I think the the death penalty undermines our societal ethics. Do we respect life and bodily autonomy or not? Don’t get me wrong, I think some people should spend the rest of their lives restricted and kept separate from society, though not in the barbaric way we do it in the U.S. People, even horrible people who commit horrible crimes, should be treated humanely because to do otherwise compromises our own humanity which makes absolutely no sense if we want to have a peaceful, productive, compassionate society.
This also correlates to the way governments wage war. Not everyone in a country subscribes to the goals and ideas of the authority in power. Surely, there were Japanese and Germans who did not support the war or the atrocities committed by their governments. They were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and, at least in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians, are victims of government-sponsored terrorism. I can’t argue that those bombings didn’t shorten the war, but I do dispute the morality of using nuclear weapons on civilians. They didn’t just “bomb factories.” They annihilated over 100,000 people in 1945 and established decades upon decades of lifetime suffering for tens of thousands more people, some of whom hadn’t even been born at the time of the war. If this doesn’t fit the definition of atrocity, I don’t know that anything does. In my opinion, the enormous extent of suffering caused to civilians cannot be justified by the ends of that action. We didn’t just destroy Japan’s ability to wage war. We destroyed the future of those people and their families.
We bombed factories which were built near and in cities because those factories were making materiel, such as ball bearings, which were essential to making weapons. As far as people being in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, every military of the era used conscription, and the losing side eventually conscripted people who were young, old, and sick, simply to throw more soldiers against the inevitable. And as far as using nuclear weapons against civilians goes, I can only say this: For decades, the Purple Hearts we used were new-old stock originally manufactured against the planned invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, which was projected to require… well, enough Purple Hearts to see us through Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War combined. And we don’t give medals to the enemy.
Ultimately, war is horrible, and demanding good solutions once war is inevitable is insane. Cleaning the world of the regimes which created Korean “comfort women”, hellships, death marches, the Rape of Nanking, death camps, crematoria, “medical experimentation”, and everything else the Axis did was the priority, and demanding that be done “cleanly” is equivalent to demanding it not be done at all.
Not anymore. It’s been almost 50 years since a new amendment has been added from scratch (I’m not counting the 27th, since it was an unusual case that won’t happen again).
It’s just not practicable to amend any more.
Not anymore. It’s been almost 50 years since a new amendment has been added from scratch (I’m not counting the 27th, since it was an unusual case that won’t happen again).
It’s just not practicable to amend any more without a major political change like the Civil War.