Genetic Variation (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, September 26, 2010, 01:41 (5152 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I am ex-military, have been to war, have had my friends killed, and seen many many innocent people die, including women and children. The one great fortune I can claim is that I never had to put a bullet in another human. Threat of violence was enough. I admit that I have a very strong aversion to violence of any sort. That tends to happen when you are nose to nose with the aftermath of it. Ever seen what happens to a man ran over by a tank?
> -No, but I worked in an ER for four years and can tell you what happens when you don't wear a motorcycle helmet! The worse part of the tank issue is that at some point some poor fool will have to clean it... -> I was arguing the point about the Manhattan project from a species standpoint, not political. How do we justify the slaughter? "We got them before they got us?" "They killed a few thousand of our soldiers and some civilians, so we wiped out two civilian cities?" "We split the atom because we could, built the bomb because we were told to, but have no responsibility for the damage caused by it?" We spend as much, if not more, money and time learning how to obliterate ourselves more efficiently than we do learning how to cure our illnesses.-Our policymakers took responsibility for our actions. I am not arguing that we don't have a responsibility to our fellow man, but that pacifism (like communism) can ONLY function if every last person on earth adheres to it. We know this is not an option. -Oppenheimer especially felt awful after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, enough that he eventually committed suicide. However, the slaughter is justified because as pearly as we like to make ourselves out to be, humans are killers just as much as we are "civilized." Denying that slaughter is in our nature denies us the right to do something about it. -At the same time, consquentialist ethics also plays a part here; but you're also mistaking a time of war as a time when men behave rationally. You never had to kill (thankfully) but because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many less people had to bear that burden as well. Less people died. And as a result, by the 1990's we feared that the Japanese were going to take us over commercially.-You also think that Japan had a similar propensity for "civilized warfare" (always thought that term stupid) that we had. They did not. If you're dealing with an enemy that is impossible to demoralize, and thinks is invincible, the only way to deal with them is to utterly shatter that illusion. An invasion wouldn't have done that job. If you beg to differ, I'm willing to entertain that scenario.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"