re death penalty gulf war long in article x rusnews w w mantis co uk mathew mathew mantis co uk writes jbrown batman bmd trw com writes in article f rusnews w w mantis co uk mathew mathew mantis co uk writes which liberal news media are we talking about western news in general but in particular the american mass media cbs nbc abc etc the general tone of the news during the whole war was one of those poor poor iraqis along with look how precisely this cruise missile blew this building to bits most odd over here there was very little about the suffering of the iraqi civilians until towards the end of the war and then it was confined to the few remaining quality newspapers true at first the news media seemed entranced by all the new gizmos the military was using not to mention the taped video transmissions from the missiles as they zeroed in on their targets but later and especially after the bunker full of civilians was hit they changed their tone it seemed to me that they didn t have the stomach for the reality of war that innocent people really do die and are maimed in warfare it s like they were only pro gulf war as long as it was nice and clean smart missiles dropping in on military hqs but not when pictures of dead dying and maimed civilians started cropping up what naive hypocrites how about all the innocent people who died in blanket bombing in ww i don t hear you bemoaning them discussion about blanket bombing and a bombs deleted all things considered the fire bombings and the atomic bomb were essential and therefore justified in bringing the war to a quick end to avoid even greater allied losses i should have said here militarily justified it seems from your comments below that you understood this as meaning morally justified i apologize what about the evidence that america knew japan was about to surrender after hiroshima but before nagasaki is that another lie peddled by the liberal media conspiracy i have often wondered about this i ve always thought that the first bomb should have been dropped on japan s island fortress of truk a good inpenatrable military target the second bomb could ve been held back for use on an industrial center if need be but i digress yes i have heard that we found evidence after the war btw that japan was seriously considering surrender after the first bomb unfortunately the military junta won out over the moderates and rejected the us s ulimatum therefore the second bomb was dropped most unfortunate imo i for one don t regret it nuke a jap for jesus i don t regret the fact that sometimes military decisions have to be made which affect the lives of innocent people but i do regret the circumstances which make those decisions necessary and i regret the suffering caused by those decisions why all the fuss about kuwait and not east timor bosnia or even tibet if iraq is so bad why were we still selling them stuff a couple of weeks before we started bombing i make no claim or effort to justify the misguided foreign policy of the west before the war it is evident that the west especially america misjudged hussein drastically but once hussein invaded kuwait and threatened to militarily corner a significant portion of the world s oil supply he had to be stopped oh i see so we can overlook his using chemical weapons on thousands of people but if he threatens your right to drive a huge gas guzzling car well the man s gotta go actually it was the fact that both situations existed that prompted us and allied action if some back water country took over some other back water country we probably wouldn t intervene not that we don t care but we can t be the world s policman or if a coup had occured in kuwait instead of an invasion then we still wouldn t have acted because there would not have been the imminent danger perceived to saudi arabia but the combination of the two an unprovoked invasion by a genocidal tyrant and the potential danger to the west s oil interests caused us to take action i ve moved a paragraph from here to later on if we hadn t intervened allowing hussein to keep kuwait then it would have been appeasement right but did you ever hear anyone advocate such a course of action or are you just setting up a strawman i m not setting up a strawman at all if you want to argue against the war then the only logical alternative was to allow hussein to keep kuwait diplomatic alternatives including sanctions were ineffective i guess we shouldn t have fought ww either just think of all those innocent german civilians killed in dresden and hamburg yes do germans are human too you know sure what was truly unfortunate was that they followed hitler in his grandiose quest for a thousand year reich the consequences stemmed from that translation they were asking for it well in a sense yes they probably had no idea of what end hitler would lead their nation to but what about those who didn t support hitler s dreams of conquest it s not as if they democratically voted for all his policies the nsdap got in the elections of and that was the last chance the german people got to vote on the matter they suffered along with the rest why does this bother you so much the world is full of evil and circumstances are not perfect many innocents suffer due to the wrongful actions of others it it regretable but that s the way it is there are no perfect solutions i look forward to hearing your incisive comments about east timor and tibet what should i say about them anything in particular the people of east timor are still being killed by a dictatorship that invaded their country hell even western journalists have been killed all this was happening before the gulf war why didn t we send in the bombers to east timor why aren t we sending in the bombers now probably because we re not the saviors of the world we can t police each and every country that decides to self destruct or invade another nor are we in a strategic position to get relief to tibet east timor or some other places here s that paragraph i moved what s your intent to sound like a loving christian well you aren t doing a very good job of it well it s not very loving to allow a hussein or a hitler to gobble up nearby countries and keep them or to allow them to continue with mass slaughter of certain peoples under their dominion so i d have to say yes stopping hussein was the most loving thing to do for the most people involved once he set his mind on military conquest the chinese government has a policy of mandatory abortion and sterilization of tibetans tibetan people are rounded up tortured and executed amnesty international recently reported that torture is still widespread in china why aren t we stopping them in fact why are we actively sucking up to them by trading freely with them tell me how we could stop them and i ll support it i for one do not agree with the present us policy of sucking up to them as you put it i agree that it is deplorable and as for poor poor rodney king did you ever stop and think why the jury in the first trial brought back a verdict of not guilty yes amongst the things i thought were hmm there s an awful lot of white people in that jury so it was the policemen on trial not rodney king erm surely it s irrelevant who s on trial juries are supposed to represent a cross section of the population are they or are they supposed to reflect the population of the locale where the trial is held normally this is where the crime is committed unless one party or the other can convince the judge a change of venue is in order i m not an expert on california law or even us law but it seems that this is the way the system is set up you can criticize the system but let s not have unfounded allegations of racial prejudice thrown around and under american law they deserved a jury of their peers you are saying that black people are not the peers of white people no not at all the point is that the fact that there were no blacks on the first jury and that rodney king is black is totally irrelevant this point of allegedly racial motivations is really shallow this idea of people only being tried before a jury of people just like them is really stupid should the nuremburg trials have had a jury entirely made up of nazis germans perhaps peers doesn t mean those who do the same thing like having murderers judge murderers it means having people from the same station in life presumably because they are in a better position to understand the defendent s motivation s those who have been foaming at the mouth for the blood of those policemen certainly have looked no further than the video tape but the jury looked at all the evidence evidence which you and i have not seen when i see a bunch of policemen beating someone who s lying defenceless on the ground it s rather hard to imagine what this other evidence might have been so it s hard to imagine so when has argument from incredulity gained acceptance from the revered author of constructing a logical argument we re not talking about a logical argument we re talking about a court of law as the faq points out some fallacious arguments are not viewed as fallacies in a court of law ok granted however you are using this reasoning as part of your logical argument in this discussion this is not a court of law if the facts as the news commentators presented them are true then i feel the not guilty verdict was a reasonable one were you not talking earlier about the bias of the liberal media conspiracy the media is not totally monolithic even though there is a prevailing liberal bias programs such as the macneil lehrer news hour try to give a balanced and fair reporting of the news there are even conservative sources out there if you know where to look hurrah for rush btw i never used the word conspiracy i don t accept without far more evidence theories that there is some all pervading liberal conspiracy attempting to take over all news sources thou shalt not kill unless thou hast a pretty good reason for killing in which case thou shalt kill and also kill anyone who gets in the way as unfortunately it cannot be helped jim brown bible for loving christians thanks mathew i like the quote pretty funny actually i m a monty python fan you know kind of seems in that vein of course oversimplifying any moral argument can make it seem contradictory but then you know that already ha ha only serious i an atheist am arguing against killing innocent people you a supposed christian are arguing that it s ok to kill innocent people so long as you get some guilty ones as well hardly i didn t say that it s a good thing tm to kill innocent people if the end is just unfortunately we don t live in a perfect world and there are no perfect solutions if one is going to resist tyranny then innocent people on both sides are going to suffer and die i didn t say it is ok it is unfortunate but sometimes necessary i a moral relativist am arguing that saturation bombing of german cities at the end of world war ii was as far as i can see an evil and unnecessary act i would agree that it was evil in the sense that it caused much pain and suffering i m not so sure that it was unnecessary as you say that conclusion can only be arrived at by evaluating all the factors involved and perhaps it was unnecessary as let s say we now know that doesn t mean that those who had to make the decision to bomb didn t see it as being necessary rarely can one have full known of the consequences of an action before making a decision at the time it may have seemed necessary enough to go ahead with it but don t assume that i feel the bombing was morally justified i don t i just don t condemn those who had to make a difficult decision under difficult circumstances you having criticised moral relativism in the past are now arguing that i am in no position to judge the morality of allied actions at the end of the war you certainly are not in such a position if you are a moral relativist i as an absolutist am in a position to judge but i defer judgment you are arguing that the actions need to be assessed in the particular context of the time and that they might have been moral then but not moral now wrong they were neither moral then nor now they seemed necessary to those making the decisions to bring a quick end to the war i simply refuse to condemn them for their decision where s your christian love where s your absolute morality oh how quick you are to discard them when it suits you as ivan stang would say jesus would puke one day i will stand before jesus and give account of every word and action even this discourse in this forum i understand the full ramifications of that and i am prepared to do so i don t believe that you can make the same claim mathew and btw the reason i brought up the blanket bombing in germany was because you were bemoaning the iraqi civilian casualties as being so deplorable yet blanket bombing was instituted because bombing wasn t accurate enough to hit industrial military targets in a decisive way by any other method at that time but in the gulf war precision bombing was the norm so the point was why make a big stink about the relatively few civilian casualties that resulted in spite of precision bombing when so many more civilians proportionately and quantitatively died under the blanket bombing in ww even with precision bombing mistakes happen and some civilians suffer but less civilians suffered in this war than any other iany other in history many iraqi civilians went about their lives with minimal interference from the allied air raids the stories of hundreds of thousands of iraqi civilian dead is just plain bunk yes bunk the us lost servicemen in ww over four years and the majority of them were directly involved in fighting but we are expected to swallow that hundreds of thousands of civilian iraqis died in a war lasting about months and with the allies using the most precise bombs ever created at that what hogwash if hundreds of thousands of iraqi civilians died it was due to actions hussein took on his own people not due to the allied bombing regards jim b
