About 5yr. log retention

[James A. Donald]

     --
James A. Donald
 > > If morality is merely relative, then what is wrong with murdering
 > > a few million jews, kulaks, or people as irritating as James A.
 > > Donald?  All a matter of perspective, isn't it?

At 11:43 AM 12/13/2000 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
 > example: killing 1 million. jews is evil, because - because of what?
 > there's a lot of "becauses",

I notice you imply that the Nazi liquidation of the Jews has been wildly 
exaggerated.

Killing several million Jews is murderous because killing Jews merely for 
being Jewish is like killing me, therefore someone who liquidates the Jews 
is likely to kill me, someone who favors rendering society Jew free is 
likely to kill me if he had the power.

Similarly anyone who thinks that Stalin was too soft on the kulaks (read 
the various commie criticisms of Stalin) would certainly kill me if he had 
the power, for the same reasons as he would kill the kulaks.

 > but none of them works without a subjective set of ethics.

Bullshit.

 >  you won't find a "because" that has the structure of, say, a
 >  mathematical proof.

You cannot prove that iron is iron with the structure of a mathematical 
proof, because it is a fact about the world, and empirical fact, ultimately 
resting on the evidence of the senses.  To deduce the necessary "because", 
one must start from the nature of man, and the nature of the world.

James A. Donald:
 > > The reason we define certain killings as murder is not because
 > > "the bible tells us so",  but because we want to know if a killing
 > > indicates that the killer is apt to kill murderously.
 > >
 > > Similarly we observe that one deed, and one man, is like another,
 > > and another unlike, and we call one such group of men and deeds
 > > "evil", "evil"
 > being our word for that commonality that makes them alike.

Tom Vogt:
 > you are changing the meaning of "we" without noticing it. in the 2nd
 > paragraph, "we" means pretty much everyone. in the third, "we" is
 > much smaller. for example, the nazis would certainly have agreed to
 > calling iron "eisen" (the german word for "iron"). however, they
 > didn't call the mass murdering of jews that.

Then they were wrong, just as they would have been wrong had they called 
iron copper.

And evidence that they were wrong is that a great many of them died of that 
error, for nazis killed more nazis than they did commies, just as the 
commies killed more commies than they did nazis, something that anyone 
could have foreseen had he recognized that killing Jews was murder, that 
killing capitalists for being capitalists was murder.

The Nazi claim was that the killing of Jews was not indicative of a 
propensity to murder Aryans.  The commie claim was that killing of 
capitalists was not indicative of a propensity to murder proletarians.

These claims, of course, were false, because killing Jews capriciously, or 
because they were Jews, or killing capitalists
capriciously or because they were capitalists, is in fact morally similar 
to killing anyone whimsically and capriciously, is in fact murder.

Not "deemed to be murder".

Not "socially constructed as murder".

It really is murder, really is capricious and unreasonable killing, and 
hence it really is indicative of propensity to kill people capriciously, 
which is why we feel about murder as we do, feel that it is wrong.

If the nature of man and the world was what you imagine it to be, if it was 
true that killing Jews was not indicative of propensity to kill Aryans, 
then Trotsky's "their morals and ours" would be right and I would be 
wrong;  Hobbes in "Leviathan" would be right and I would be wrong.

The evidence however is that I am right and you are wrong, that I am right 
and Trotsky is wrong, that I am right and Hobbes is wrong, that I am right 
and Hitler was wrong

The evidence is that killing Jews is like killing me, that killing witches 
is like killing me, that killing capitalists is like killing
me.  Not "socially constructed as like killing me".  Really like killing me.

James A. Donald:
 > > They crossed the "is ought gap" without the slightest difficulty,
 > > and so does everyone else except for monsters and philosophers.  I
 > > find it striking that many of the philosophers who have such great
 > > difficulty with this alleged gap have some connection to monstrous
 > > regimes.  Not all of them by any means, but most of them.

Tom Vogt
 > that's because they are so readily abused by them. almost everyone
 > is prone to not listening to what someone else really has to say,
 > but to draw conclusions quickly. go into any anti-nazi newsgroup and
 > argue a careful position, ask for evidence and draw conclusions only
 > from facts. want to make a bet on how long it takes until you're
 > called a nazi?

I observe the contrary -- that people who go into anti Nazi newsgroups and 
purport to argue a careful position that the Jews were not murdered, or at 
least no very many of them, and anyway they had it coming, are generally 
not called nazis by most people, even though they quite obviously are 
nazis.  Same goes, even more strongly, for commies, even those who loudly 
announce that they reject Lenin and Stalin, and then proceed to argue that 
Lenin and Stalin were softies, that they failed to suppress capitalism with 
sufficient vigor.

 > they spoken not to their own people, but to the people of serbia,
 > they could not have "crossed the gap [between is and ought" with
 > such ease.

The people of Serbia were wrong to vote fascists into power, though US 
intervention saved them from themselves, so they did not discover for 
themselves the consequences.

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          James A. Donald
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