ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Undertoad
I don't want to kill people just because they think differently, I want to kill them when they proclaim loudly that they want to kill me and then prepare to do so...

Well...I certainly didn't mean to suggest that either you or I believed your hypothetical was something that *should* be done.

The point of it as I saw it was that by turning the situation around as you did, you were highlighting why the *original* violence was, to use the delicate term, "inappropriate"--a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>. This is why I pointed out that the Predator Hellfire attack wasn't idiological, it was self-defense.

I guess the point is that I'm not really all that concerned with WHY they want to kill me. If they want to kill me, that is enough.

That was my point exactly, before. But when I said I "didn't give a rat's fuzzy behind" about this idiology, I simply got a lecture on my lack of sensitivity to all the "interesting social observations" these people have made, and how unlikely it was that I personally might be a direct victim anytime soon. Apologists who say "Oh, there's no need for such an overreaction, a big country like ours should calmly take a few hits so these poor oppressed people can buy some press" are way off-base.

Again...advancing an idiology by sponsoring attacks on prominent high-value targets is *not* a legitimate method, and it's wrong-headed to cast a defensive response to such an attack as idiological.