Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (244595)	10/10/2007 3:07:49 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Of course harsh mistreatment and killing of Japanese POWs was an evil act! Not only that, it was also a blatantly racist act. We weren't arguing whether refusing to take Japanese prisoners was a good act or a bad act. We were arguing whether it made America an immoral country or not. I merely pointed out to Wharf Rat that by his own logic, it did. Refusal to take Japanese prisoners, as I also pointed out, was not race-based but behavior-based. It was based on the way the Japanese treated American prisoners and the danger involved in trying to take Japanese prisoners. Therefore the racist angle may have been there, but wasn't blatant. As evidence, there were also instances of Americans shooting Germans who tried to surrender, after word came in of Germans shooting American prisoners. Now I understand that the conservatives have a genetic defect that prevents them from seeing the complexities in the world and to them, saying that one side did something evil means that side has to be evil to the core for all times and all things Which leads me back to my original point, that any attempt to implement wars of war will be influenced by conditions in the field, and attempts to ignore this fact of life will only lead to the laws of war being ignored. When the laws of war are ignored, more civilians die and fewer prisoners are taken. Not only is paying attention to the behavior of the other side a fact of life, it is a necessary fact of life, as game theory proves. If you always cooperate and never go tit for tat even when the other side screws you, you lose the game. Going tit for tat provides real world incentive for the other side to obey the law. You say conservatives don't see complexities? I say that of liberals, for two longstanding causes. First, liberals are invested in Utopia, and more concerned about how systems should be made perfect than how they can be made to work. The Perfect is the enemy of the Good. Second, they have bought into the multi-culti system of moral relevance, whose axiom is that every society is as good as every other society, and nobody can judge anybody in an "other" society. The unintended corollary is you can only judge somebody in an "us" society, and that harshly; cf. Rule 1. The result is anybody in an "other" society gets a free pass, no matter how they behave, thus recreating in liberal form the very racism their tolerance was supposed to obliterate. This accounts for the liberal difficulties in condemning obvious barbarities on the side of AQI, which they'd rather not cover at all. A thousand front pages have been dedicated to (possibly non-existant) crimes of the Marines at Haditha, but when Michael Yon took pictures of AQI wiping out an entire Iraqi village, men, women, children and livestock, no media outlet was even interested.