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To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (85354)	11/10/2004 12:15:20 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 793919

For this, too, I blame the militarists who have transformed Jefferson's republic into an American Empire. And you don't think that the thugs who commit crimes on innocents have anything to do with it? Are you so enamored of the current penchant for victimology that you don't assign even a smidgen of fault to perpetrators of crimes? What is to keep these thugs from engaging in rational discourse with innocent travelers rather than, say, behead them? After all, an adventurous youth with a yen for dangerous travel may very well agree with your position and likely agrees with much of the thugs' complaints. Why kill such a person? Your comment is interesting because it suggests that you are really not a pacifist, as I originally thought, but something else altogether. A pacifist would decry the crime, regardless of who commits it. You, on the other hand, think American "militarists" are to blame though obviously violence on American innocents, like Nick Berg, is committed by someone whom a true pacifist would also find blameworthy, if not completely responsible.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (85354)	11/11/2004 12:49:44 PM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 793919

Jacob, I don't "assign zero value to the lives of foreigners," not even those of my enemies. But the lives of my enemies who are implacable simply don't have as much value as mine and those of other people, be they Christian, Muslim or atheist, they want to kill or enslave. There isn't a justifiable reason to remain passive in the face of totalitarian ideologies and those who support and act on them. Violence is not "redemptive" - it's horrible - but sometimes it's necessary. Because of technology the world has become too small to house us and totalitarian movements. It appears you wish to avoid this circumstance as you accuse us of "demonizing" the followers in your desperate attempt at pacifist moral relativism. Now, about those "at least 100,000 "deaths"" as presented, you say, by "the most prestigious medical journal on earth." I read the Lancet article you refer to. They didn't count those deaths they claim, they projected them from a very small sample. Figure 2 on page 5 gives the game away. Also their 95% confidence interval gives the number of estimated deaths as between 8000 and 194,000! This about the same as saying, "We don't know." But it didn't stop the authors from claiming 98,000 deaths. The article was an exercise in pre-election headline grabbing, not an effort at finding the truth. Fred Kaplan has an article discussing it here in Slate slate.com and if anyone's interested the Lancet article may be read here (registration is free): thelancet.com