That much was obvious from the get-go. Truth does not appear through repetition. And as we all know, there are two moral states in the world: 100% moral and 100% immoral. And as we all know, there is pure selflessness and there is pure self-interest and nothing in between. And as we all know, the victim of a murder has been just as injured as the victim of a shoplifting. My distaste for Tom Brady is 100% equivalent to my distaste for Rodrigo Duterte. Yes. It is a well-proven fact that those who smoke marijuana immediately begin freebasing cocaine. Because when the CIA propped up the despotic Diem regime, our goal was to contain the deprivations and societal injustices of the Communist sphere of influence and forbid their spread throughout the countries we traded with, exchanged tourists with, and shared ideas with. WE WERE WRONG and we did a lot of bad shit but the general idea was "the world will be a better place if this dangerous way of life is discouraged from flourishing." When Mee Lai happened, there were congressional hearings. When Vladimir Putin blew up a half-dozen apartment buildings, his goal was to panic Russians into accepting authoritarian rule and a drummed-up war against a pesky (muslim) separatist movement. The general idea was "the KGB wants to run the country." When Litvenenko fled Russia to tell journalists, he was poisoned in London. One might argue that both sides are fighting for their ideals. However, one would then be forced (by me) to go through the thought exercise of James Comey not suggesting that mmmaybe they wanna take a look at Clinton's emails again, but of James Comey and a willing crony FBI carrying out the equivalent of eight Boston Bombings against the citizens they're sworn to protect in order to rule the country through terror... and then poisoning Robert Baer when he flees to Switzerland to write a book about it. This is the problem of refusing shades of gray. This is the issue with taking the moral position that "all bad is bad." Yes. All bad is bad. How pedantic of you. But we are a species of big brains and pointy teeth and there is such a thing as "more bad" and "less bad" and when you decide that blowing up Anwar Al Awlaki's kids by accident is the same as drumming up a war with Chechnya on purpose... well, this is how we end up with Trump as President. Know who leaders are? They're the people who make the least bad choices. Not the ones who make good ones. Let's pretend it's 1942. You're Churchill. You know that Hitler is murdering Jews by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. You've got intercepts of daily kill counts at Auschwitz. What do you do? Do you bomb it? It's deep behind enemy lines, it isn't militarily significant and you aren't in any position to win. Besides, if you bomb it, it'll probably start right back up again somewhere you don't know about. Plus, the Nazis will realize that one of their secret channels has been compromised. So you do the evil thing: you keep it quiet. You keep monitoring it. And you preserve that channel until you can do something about it. And you know that millions of Jews are dying because you lack the strength to act and win. I'm not going to defend PRISM. I'm not going to defend extra-judicial killings. I'm not going to defend puppet governments or propaganda. But I'm not the guy who said we're as bad as Putin as an offhanded aside. You wanna see where, in your word salad, you lost the script? You say this the same way we say "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" when in fact it's one of the most heavily debated concepts in geopolitics. More than that, you're attempting to boil the entire nuance of geopolitics down to "the same road", much the way you're saying "all bad is bad." But worse than that, you present it as an accepted maxim and then run with it, stating that the fundamental mechanism of evil is the natural tendency of people to do whatever the fuck they can get away with. You are arguing, in no uncertain terms, that evil is a function of "The people who often attempt these kinds of behaviors." In other words, if it weren't for the psychopaths we'd be fine. And that's beyond childish. It's beyond simplistic. And it's a ridiculously insulting framework to put someone else in, which is exactly what you're doing when you say Putin is evil, we're evil, and evil is a function of psychopaths therefore if you're defending evil...? ...I'm defending psychopaths? No. I'm saying the world is a fuckin' messy place, global conflict is rarely a positive-sum game and I will ALWAYS pick a ruler doing evil for me and my 300 million fellow citizens over a ruler doing evil for himself. Because good people often do evil in the name of good. Virginia Woolf committed suicide because she couldn't stand to live in a world where the Armistice had fallen. My grandfather, on the other hand, built bomb casings to drop on Nazis. And they were fuckin' nasty bombs, too - they had these acetyl disks and weak acid in series that was set in air so that once you dropped the things they'd sit there unexploded in the dirt for hours, days or weeks. The point was to keep the Nazis from using their railroads and factories. The Nazis used Jews to clear them out. So. There's my grandfather. Not just making bombs, but making bombs to drop on civilian targets that largely blew up Jews. The moral choice was to be Virginia Woolf. The righteous choice was to be my grandfather. Then you should at least be okay with the fact that your country causes less suffering than Vladimir Fucking Putin.You know, I've been sitting and thinking here, and I really can't help but think you're very much in the wrong.
Putin has a history of doing fucked up shit to consolidate and maintain power for him. America has a history of doing fucked up shit to consolidate and maintain power for America. They're different, but the same.
Both are immoral.
Both are selfish.
Both create victims and enemies.
Both of them create road maps for other people/organizations to try the same.
Tell me how they're different.
The problem is, we easily have the potential to go down that same road and that’s a huge reason why I say “the ends don’t justify the means.”
I'm a complacent citizen in a first world country and my comfort and safety comes at the cost of the suffering of others and I am not okay with that.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing here. Iny original statement I acknowledge that our government often had to make hard decisions. However, I'm not talking about hard decisions involving war, conflict zones, or people who are open enemies with our country. I am talking about our history of interfering in world affairs and undermining sovereign nations and the rights of their citizens that we aren't at war with. Which is bullshit. Period. I am talking about domestic programs and trends that put our rights as American citizens at risk. Which is also bullshit. Period. I am also saying that when we create programs and precedents that can easily be abused, we're taking nasty risks that sooner or later, someone is gonna try and abuse them. Everyone's afraid of a madman getting their hands on nukes. People should be equally afraid of them getting their hands in other cookie jars. These are the arguments you aren't addressing, merely handwaving away saying "Oh, rd95, you simple fool. If only you knew how the world really is." You're the one being disingenuous here, not me. So now you're pissed, I'm pissed, neither one of us is listening to each other, and this conversation is getting nowhere. So for now, we're done. Maybe next time this subject comes up, it'll go smoother. We will see then.
This has been an interesting thread to read, as both of you stand side by side, shouting down the hallway, and not getting anywhere. You, rd95 made the casual assertion that "America is as bad a Putin", essentially, because we have done some nasty underhanded shit, and so has he. kleinbl00 countered with the basic premise that a leader, acting on his own behalf and not in the best interests of his country, is a bad man doing bad things for bad reasons. While a country, doing unsavory things to stop bigger, badder things from happening, is not the same, and drawing an equivalency between the two is not just lazy, it is dangerous. Using KB's example of Auschwitz: Putin would not have even asked the question as to whether he should stop the atrocities there now, or wait until he could win the battle. He wouldn't have cared one way or the other, because intervening in Auschwitz would not forward his personal agenda. Churchill, on the other hand, was faced with the moral dilemma of what to do, simply because he is a moral man that wanted the best for everyone. So he had to wrestle with the idea, and make a hard decision. THIS is where you two keep missing each other. RD keeps trying to abstract the issues above the practical, and KB says you can't do that because that is exactly where the problem rests. One is a philosophical thought experiment about how the world could be different; the other is a practical examination of human nature in history, and trying to predict future actions based on past behaviors. It's been a fascinating conversation to watch, actually.