That sums up what I think is the (main) flaw in UG's position.

Ridding the world of tyranny, totalitarianism, injustice, etc is indeed an excellent aim. Military force is simply not a viable way to achieve this.

To invade, defeat, occupy, rebuild, democratize, and return to local control tyrannous nations by military force is an enormous and difficult task. Ten years per country is a bare minimum. Look how badly strained our resources are trying to do it just in Iraq (task underway, outcome uncertain) and Afghanistan (task underway, outcome very dubious).

And when we move on to the next one, the ones we have just left may well go wobbly and need help again.

To do this for the whole world? Russia? China? All the democratic nations together do not have the resources to achieve it.

It just can't be done with guns. Now, schools, THAT is in with a chance. Why do parents send their sons to extremist madrassas? Because that is the only education available. A few thousand reasonably funded secular schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan would do more to defeat AQ than the equivalent resources of military force.
Mind you, those schools will need guarding. AQ aren't stupid, and they would understand the threat it would pose.

When the only tool you understand is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
--Maslow (Paraphrased)

Now really, just why do you think I wouldn't be onboard with the education angle? Where have I poormouthed that? I think I've mentioned before that education, particularly of girls and women, shrinks the Non-Integrating Gap.

Still, you're going to want to keep the slavemakers intimidated, and there's nothing like the smell of corpses for that. Those who will not negotiate and show reasonableness must be removed, and without let or hindrance. Or for that matter, complaint. Kindly stop bitching about bad people dying! I'm taking a more holistic approach than it appears I'm credited for.

The 'education angle'? All the emphasis you place on the slaughter of those who stand in the way of your democratic utopia and yet education is merely an angle?

We are the slavemakers; our markets and our protectionist subsidies, our violent history and the maps we redrew, our shameless self-interests played on a global scale.

DanaC, your snit is wholly unjustified and it doesn't become you. And it doesn't exactly accord with recent and not so recent history either.

Those who stand in the way of increased democracy value something higher than human liberty, don't they? Like their own excesses of power -- the same old oppressions of too much government, with the same old stultifying disadvantages. No human being should oppose their removal, yet I get far too much inhuman opposition on this very point from people smart enough to know better. And they don't. That's antidemocratic and it is simply disgusting. I do not suffer from such moral blindness, and you could take a good lesson from me. Nothing wrong, you know, with taking a lesson from the enlightened, the pro-human.

It's all angles -- strategies and tactics and stratagems -- including fighting and killing the shitheads like the lot in Bombay (yes, I'm using the old spelling -- try and make something of it). We liberate and have done liberation for a century. We the English-speaking world are in the van in this. You however are living under the malign influence of a bad religion, socialism with leftism, and your religion's articles of faith suck too much.

Because of this eviscerating, emasculating suckage that you think I ought to accept and believe in, you yourself don't want our enemies afraid to kill us. You call that impressive? Do you even call that adequate? Does it even reach "below standard?" Really, DanaC, your leftist mode of thinking is too easy to savage and to dismiss.

Try applying it to the period 1939-1945 and consider what would have been the likely result.

Do you want to kill her, or educate her?

And how do you make that choice?

One notices that it seems to take a ridiculously large government to do what you want to do.

How does that go?

And He said to them, "No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me, 'Physician, heal yourself! Whatever we heard was done at Berlin, do here in your hometown as well.'"

Russia to the rescue!

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldN...36735220081127

A small measure of justice served.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-10-years.html

Leftist stupidity is nothing if not annoying. It seems to spring from the limited mentality needed to stay leftist.

I do not accept those limits upon my thinking -- and I'm not hogging all that ambition to myself. I think therefore that I'm walking a better road than Dana's. I'll get around to composing a little essay on whether I'm walking a better road than you are soon.

How do I make that choice? Fuck, UT, how do I not make that choice? I am not afraid to be a moral being, and all the less so for anyone telling me I should be. That's not out of pointless contrariness, but ultimately out of understanding that moral relativism is altogether hopeless at telling good from bad. So I dropped moral relativism many years ago and will not take it up again. It's the last refuge of the pseudosophisticate.

As for government size, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. What was it you think I wanted done that would take gigantism?

Do you want to kill her, or educate her? How do you decide?

From the BBC:

The headline made me think WTFFF?, but the story makes me a little more ambivalent about it.



ETA: Maybe his defense in court was "But your honour, she just said she didn't want to see me anymore..." :devil:

Damm, those humane Iranians! We should welcome their way of life with open arms.

www.thethirdjihad.com

Hey, at least they acknowledged that what he did was wrong and deserving of punishment. I honestly would have expected them to give him a slap on the wrist--or hell, maybe even follow Somalia's example and kill the girl for daring to show her face in the presence of acid.

An eye for an eye and all that...