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Tim Daneliuk

wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:
wrote:
Leon wrote:
"Michael Daly" wrote in message
...

Torture is torture. Once you throw out the Geneva convention, you have
lost any moral authority and you are no better than the scum you're
combating. If you cease to remain civilized, the terrorists have won.
So shooting them is OK?
Depending on whom you mean by "them", in battle, sure. Shooting
them is OK, same as shooting uniformed soldiers. If they surrender
or are captured alive, they become protected persons. It's still OK
to shoot them, or to execute them in any other 'humane' way, so
long as they have been duly convicted of capital offenses.

We should do to others as others have done to us. We can crawl into the
cutter with them if that is what it takes to win the war. If the enemy does
not follow the rules and we do, we cannot win.
False. Not only can we win without abandoning our principles, we
cannot win if we do.

Abandonment of our principles is suicide.

So is clinging to them to the point where we are annihilated.

We have never even come close to being annihilated.

Fewer Americnas have killed and injured by all or our enemies
combined in the last 30 years than are inadvertently killed
by our medical establishment in a single year.

To even raise the issue of 'annihilation' is asinine.

It is not. In the early days of what would become WWII, the Left argued
as you have - "There's no serious threat to us. It's just asinine to
worry about it." Fast forward 15 years. Hitler and Stalin are
responsible for something on the order of 100 *million* deaths in total.
History is full of other such examples of what happens when you
ignore evil.

Today's threat isn't just an Islamist Terrorist threat per se.
Today's asymmetric warriors are testing the waters to see if they can
bring down a superpower. What ties them together far more than religion
is their tribalist mentality - of which there is plenty to go around on
the planet. The combination of a suicidal eschatology and a tribal
mentality, fertilized with global communications, transport, and
technology, will inevitably follow the same course as pre-war Hitler and
Stalin. The task today is to prevent the snowball from rolling down the
hill before it gets so big it cannot be stopped.

Your deeply held fantasies about how the world *ought* to operate are at
odds with considerable historical evidence to the contrary. You can
begin self-remediation by admitting out loud that "Evil" is a real thing,
and that, left to its own devices, it will grow.

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Tim Daneliuk
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