Mossad terrorists keep killing civilians.

[Hauldren Collider]

My argument is that half measures rarely work. We can turn into total pacifists ourselves, withdraw from international politics, and send trucks full of food to the rest of the world; or we can annihilate our enemies and brainwash them into being our friends. But our current foreign policy of doing terrible things in secret while claiming the moral high ground in public is a stupid half measure doomed to failure.

Do you have any reason to believe this? I understand your point about half-measures, but in my mind, half-measures are things like international sanctions. Covert activity has done plenty of things in the past to cause dramatic change.

[MRT144]

What other lens should I look at them through? I see a country here that is a brutal dictatorship, with obscene human rights abuses and megalomaniacal aims, trying to build nukes after having stated that Israel should be wiped off the map. They fundamentally oppose modern countries with social and political freedom for the simple reason that they have such freedoms--they consider women's rights an abomination and have demanded the death of foreign authors that they disagree with (such as Salman Rushdie). There's no subtlety here about good guys and bad guys. Iran getting nukes would simply be a very bad thing, and if the price of preventing something that bad is an Iranian scientist has to die, so be it.

If having nuclear weapons prevents the death of one Iranian at the hands of Israel they'd be totally justified. Why does your morality trump their morality?

[Hauldren Collider]

If having nuclear weapons prevents the death of one Iranian at the hands of Israel they'd be totally justified. Why does your morality trump their morality?

Congratulations, you have now become what is known as a "moral relativist". It's okay for them to do what they do, because they have different standards of right and wrong.

I could make my standards of right and wrong whatever I want, and then whatever I do is totally justified.

See, I'm making what Kuci would call a "utilitarian calculation" here when I surmise that Iranian nukes would harm more people in more ways than assassinating a lone Iranian scientist. I think this is a reasonable conclusion. Now, to decide that we care more about the scientist than Iran's many potential victims seems like a pretty simple decision, and it sure as hell trumps Iran's pathetic excuse for "morals".

[Hauldren Collider]

Continuing from my previous post...

In particular, the question we are deciding here is whether the right of Iran's autocrats to rule Iran (which the UN would refer to as "Iranian sovereignty") is more important than the rights of anyone Iran would potentially extort or attack with nuclear weapons. I don't care much about the fairly questionable "rights" of dictators to squash their own people, but I care quite a bit about normal everyday folks who would be harmed by said dictator's attempts to squash even more people, facilitated by nuclear weapons.

[dannubis]

Hey, I almost forgot to mention: we never murdered 10 million people in the Congo.

Hey, if you weren't one of those daft USians I would explain to you the history of early colonization of the Congo.

Now I just say : we never freaked out over a backwater nation trying to get the a-bomb after we unnecessarily dropped 2 of them on civilian targets.

[dannubis]

I suppose it's easier to understand why Europeans would have this "blame the good guys first" thing when they have such a rotten history of genocide and enslavement of other cultures. We stopped that nonsense by the 1870s.

Was that before or after the south got kicked in the mouth for slavery ?

[Hauldren Collider]

Was that before or after the south got kicked in the mouth for slavery ?

If you weren't one of those daft Belgians I would explain to you the history of the American Civil War and antebellum period.

Now, I just say: We've never had a king, and if we did, we probably wouldn't have let him use an entire country as a massive personal slave camp.

[Lorizael]

Do you have any reason to believe this? I understand your point about half-measures, but in my mind, half-measures are things like international sanctions. Covert activity has done plenty of things in the past to cause dramatic change.

I cannot conceive of a scenario in which covert action against Iran leads to what our ultimate goal should be: having peaceful relations with the nations of the world. Our foreign policy as it stands in the past fifty years involves doing little things here and there that piss off other countries and eventually lead to all out war. This cycle will only be broken if we drastically change our behavior.

[regexcellent]

Hey, if you weren't one of those daft USians I would explain to you the history of early colonization of the Congo.

Are you talking about the point at which the Belgian parliament confiscated the place from the personal ownership of your King, because millions of native Congolese had died or been brutally maimed in the rapacious extraction of the country's mineral wealth? Yes I'm familiar with the fact that things got better after that point. Soldiers even stopped cutting off people's hands and mailing them to the authorities as proof that they had killed insurrectionists. Belgium also stopped pretending that the project was a grand mission to bring civilization and Christianity to the poor and uneducated Africans.

[dannubis]

What is the case you are trying to make? Show that you can read wikipedia? Or basically saying that your initial remark didn't make much sense.

[regexcellent]

I hold in my hand a copy of King Leopold's Ghost.

[dannubis]

If you weren't one of those daft Belgians I would explain to you the history of the American Civil War and antebellum period.

Now, I just say: We've never had a king, and if we did, we probably wouldn't have let him use an entire country as a massive personal slave camp.

If you weren't such a drooling idiot I might explain you why the Kingdom of Belgium was formed in the first place. However, since this does not include jerking off to images of dead palestinians I just say: no, you had a couple of presidents kill of your native population.

[dannubis]

I hold in my hand a copy of King Leopold's Ghost.

Good for you. Second option then ey ?

[regexcellent]

Basically I'm saying that lots of countries have bad stuff in their history, even yours, despite the fact that it ceased to be significant nearly 52 years ago. Germany had the holocaust (though fewer people probably died in that than in the violence in the Congo Free State), but today we don't think of Germany as the country of those evil Nazis. Lots of bad **** happened long ago and pulling out the OMG you had slavery etc thing doesn't hold water.

[dannubis]

Maybe you should go back and read what your first rely was to. Slavery I just put on the plate of Kuci's drooling sibbling.