About 5yr. log retention

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Tue Dec 19 09:48:59 PST 2000


     --
Tom Vogt:
 > > > > > Weird, a couple thousand years of history disagree with you.
 > > > > > until the very recent past, pretty much everyone was sure
 > > > > > that killing enemies, unbelievers or other people isn't
 > > > > > "evil". probably isn't even "murder".

James A. Donald:
 > > > > If you are  confused about the difference between war and
 > > > > peace, you must be seriously confused about a lot of things.

Tom Vogt:
 > > > the above holds true for both, peace and wartimes.

James A. Donald:
 > > Baloney.  That is the "everyone else is doing it" excuse.

Tom Vogt:
 > not at all. it's the "who are you to believe you can pass judgement
 > on all of human history?" argument.

The nearest equivalent in European history to the crimes of the the nazis 
and commies was the spanish inquisition,and that was a small scale 
operation: Handcrafted murder rather than mass produced murder.  Each 
victim was individually identified and processed, rather dumped by the 
truckload.  They murdered about 12000, and the world was horrified by their 
crimes.

Tom Vogt:
 > > > 1.) those you call "evil" will often see things the other way
 > > > around. how do you resolve this issue without circular
 > > > reasoning? (i.e. without saying that their judgement doesn't
 > > > count because they're "evil")

James A. Donald:
 > > Evil people are likely to do hurtful things (bad things) to me
 > > unless I get them first.  Normal people will not do hurtful things
 > > to me unless I do bad things to them first.  Hence my use of
 > > nazis, commies, and murder as illustrations and examples of evil.
 > > As I would point to the a particular piece of iron to define all
 > > iron, to define the category iron, in the same way I point to
 > > murder, nazis, and commies to define all evil, to define the
 > > category evil.

Tom Vogt:
 > you forgot intend. otherwise, innocent bystanders who get hit will
 > always call the "good" guys who missed the target "evil" (according
 > to your definition), and rightly so.

No they do not.

Laws of war are universally accepted by except by those who break 
them.  Those who claim to find it terribly shocking that innocents get 
killed when legitimate military targets are attacked, never seemed to 
notice when their favorite terror regimes murdered hundreds of thousands of 
peasants in peacetime.

 > what about the israel/rest-of-the-near-east problem? both sides call
themselves good and the other side evil.

This is the classic problem of pointing out the mote in the other's eye 
while ignoring the beam in one's own eye.  Both sides use the murder of 
children as a deliberate tactic to get their way.  The middle eastern Jews 
are likely to murder any non Jew, as their christian allies in Lebanon so 
painfully discovered, and perhaps the crew of the USS Liberty discovered 
also, and the arabs are similarly likely to murder friends and allies.  On 
both sides, murdering scum are in charge with overwhelming popular 
support.  When Clinton was organizing peace talks, he had one arm around a 
murdering terrorist, and his other arm around another murdering 
terrorist.  This was the basic cause of the lack of success in the peace talks.

 >  both sides have done and received their fair share of killing. both
 >  sides are convinced that the other will do hurtful things to them
 >  unless they get 'em first. is one or both of them evil?

Both.  As is confirmed by the propensity of both to deliberately murder 
innocents and allies.

     --digsig
          James A. Donald
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