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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (84191)	7/27/2000 3:56:43 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

War is hell! War has been waged against civilians from the very beginning. Any military leadership that dares disregard the possibility of mass murder of its people in retaliation lives in a fool's paradise. If the world could ban retaliation against civilians (or that necessarily involves), there would be nothing to prevent Saddam or Hitler from attacking Kuwait or anyone else. Douhet was quite correct -- as was Marshal Harris -- that if Britain had been able to demolish Essen in 1939, Hitler would never have dared attack Poland. Who knows what restraint was imposed by American nuclear weapons targeted as second strike weapons on Russian cities? My guess is that US atom bombs sufficed to convince the Japanese leadership to quit, even though there was not much left to kill except Japanese civilians. The world is a rotten place. Those who will not fight will be conquered.

To: epicure who wrote (84191)	7/27/2000 2:14:31 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 108807

War is like the grocery business. If people really thought about where their Chicken McNuggets came from, they'd be more reticent to indulge in them. Talk about propaganda : I love the Foster Farms chicken commercials. You have these out-of-shape, unfit chickens trying to make their way to the slaughterhouse. Yes, at the end of their happy journey they will be beheaded, scalded, disemboweled and then cut to pieces. Yeah, there sure are a lot of those kind of chickens around. When I was a kid I had a pet chicken. Her favorite food was ... chicken. Kind of disgusting really. She'd greedily pick it right out of your sandwich. The revulsion we see in cannibalism lies in our sentience and humanity. War is like the business of eating and acquiring food. Even carrots have feelings and with the right instrumentation you can measure their distress to being eaten. So, what do you do? Always approach these matters (war and eating) with grave concern, respect, consideration and humility. Jingoism is antithetical to these positive behaviors. Sentient creatures should generally not be eating and killing other sentient creatures. The amount of revulsion should be related to their level of awareness. That's why we shouldn't (and generally don't) eat people, apes, monkeys, elephants and what not. If we do it should always be with some remorse and respect. Hence, the "custom of the sea". If there is nothing left to eat but the dead, then chow down. No one should blame you but they might if you had a barbeque party with Oroville on the spit being roasted alive. Big difference. So to close the loop, we should view war as the ultimate failure of our ability to use reason. I don't mean "talking the bully out of beating you up" but rather a failure to prevent the creation of said bullies in the first place. Once you have the situation where you may have no other choice and there was probably a whole series of missed opportunities to avoid it. We couldn't wait to arm Iraq when we had problems with Iran. The Ayatollah was directly due to our pandering to the perceived decadence of the Shah and his death squads. We couldn't wait to sell arms to Afghani's when they were a problem for the Russians. These weapons have come back and shot down aircraft we didn't want shot down. And where is the closest example of old-style Soviet totalitarianism in the world: 90 miles from the only opposing nuclear super power - US!!! We created Castro just like we created Norieaga. It is tens of years of mistakes that give rise to these powers.