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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (67362)	9/5/2004 11:38:01 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793914

We don't have to target children I'm afraid the discussion has gone hopelessly astray. My premise was not about children. I was exploring why you would regard the targeting of civilians in Dresden as OK and the targeting of civilians in Cleveland not OK. All the differences I can find between them lean toward the bus bombing in Cleveland as less unacceptable. I have no idea how you got off onto children. I can imagine no reason to think there would be children on busses in Cleveland but not in houses in Dresden. Children, IMO, are not a factor in the comparison. But if you want to bring it in, it would seem that you would find more children sleeping in houses in Dresden than riding busses in Cleveland, which would further tilt toward the Cleveland side. I'm having trouble finding factors that make Dresden more acceptable. While these hypothetical Jihadi's occupy Cleveland - why aren't we shooting at them, rather than their kids? The question on the table is whether or not terrorism is ever acceptable. If you're trying to get an answer to that question, then you must frame the hypothetical around terrorism, not some other aspect of warfare. Shooting combatants is not terrorism. Bombing busses is.

To: aladin who wrote (67362)	9/5/2004 11:48:36 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

Karen is trying to ascertain if people who claim that terrorism is an absolute moral nono, will continue to consider it unacceptable regardless of the circumstances, no matter what pressure is brought to bear. She built an extreme scenario (our own country occupied by others) to try to force people to look at it and decide whether their belief about the evil of terrorism is so absolute that nothing can justify using it. The point wasn't to argue how the scenario couldn't possibly exist, or to offer other alternatives, the point was to try to place yourself into an "if A, then would you do B" situation to test the absolute morality question. Instead of dealing with the given, everyone is trying to somehow to rewrite the scenario, or say that it's unlikely, or ascribe the constuct to Karen personally, and even criticize her. It's just a construct to try to get us to consider the possibility that our "absolute" may not be. In some book (Is Paris Burning? sticks in my head, but I really don't remember) a similar moral dilemma was posed where a priest is told by an occupying army that if he will shoot one person, his small town will be saved. His response was that no, murder was never morally right and the whole town would just have to die. Others, of course, said that yes, to save many, one should be sacrificed.