About 5yr. log retention

[Tom Vogt]

"James A. Donald" wrote:
> 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.

I don't deny that the nazi (and communist) MURDERS were without equal.
but again, we're not talking about murder, we're talking about evil,
with murder being one (possibly the best?) example of murder. there's
other evils beside murder. (rape, for an example that's widely
considered to be of roughly the same degree).



> 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.

you are too fixated on war. I wasn't talking about war. and besides,
even in war it's a little sarcastic to tell the family who just lost its
mother that "shit happens" and that the "laws of war" which say that
shit happens are universally excepted, so rejoice and be happy, it's all
for the greater good.

innocent bystanders get hit in ALL circumstances. there's a lot of death
every year when police forces shoot innocents. there's a lot of "small
scale" military action that's not yet quite war (such as most of the
recent US activity which is better described with the words "world
police" than "war").

if you leave out intend, then you running over the neighbor's kid by
100% accident makes you evil, because you did hurtful things to them
without them doing any to you first.



>  > 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.  

yepp, we agree completely that they're all insane. the difference is:

>  >  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.

...that I don't label them "evil", and by doing so - according to your
definition - declare a right for myself to take 'em out.

your problem is still circular reasoning. the arabs who say that the US
is evil are wrong because they are evil, and they are evil because you
say so (or because your definition says so, which is pretty much the
same). your problem is that it works perfectly well the other way
around: james who says that the nazis are evil is wrong because he is
himself evil, and he is evil because the nazis say so (because if he
says bad things about the nazis, he must be part of the jew world
conspiracy). on a pure logical level, these two statements have
identical truth values. since they collide, the only possible conclusion
is that they're both wrong.