I find a fair war for eternity, in which the people that die are willing combatants, preferably to a week long genocide in which an innocent caste of thousands of people are wiped out.

As much disdain I have for the new censorship rules, it seems like this thread crosses the line in a worse way than the Putin / Kim Jong thread did

But all in all it's a stupid comparison. I'm saying that if 5 civilians of your nation are killed, it probably isn't proportionate to kill 400 civilians of the enemy nation.

Agreed. This thread is idiotic. Obiwan's bullshit annoys the hell out of me but I don't want him killed. FFS, SYnapse.

All right Synapse, fine, why don't you write a letter to your representative and see how long it takes before MI-5 shows up at your door.

( ^Sorry, agreed with Chaqa ^ - and that's a damn rarity)

Welcome to planet SYnapse. Take only pictures, leave only footprints. Please do not feed the crazy.

SYnapse you are now having the same argument in two threads at the same time. Stop spamming please.

"I find a fair war for eternity"--

And rationalizing after that is just that--rationalizing that you'd rather people die for an eternity rather than have an end come to this conflict, albeit at a horrific (but FINITE) price, one brought on by rocket attacks and fiery reprisals.

I'm fairly bad at math, SYnapse...

But even *I* can tell more people would die in your War For Eternity plan than even the tragic 750 or so that have died in this war.

I would not prefer the elimination of the Jews by the Nazis to a infinite war between them. Apply your logic to another situation and see if it stands up to the light of truth.

"Some of you may remember that, awhile ago, SYnapse posted in a college thread, extolling the virtues of skipping college and studying for yourself, and mentioned how far he'd been able to make it in philosophy on his own.

Stay in school, kids."

lmfao +1

---

SYnapse, please refrain from calling people out in thread titles.

So you want the tolerant ones to kill off the violent ones.

Like the Sikhs did, fairly pacifist until they needed to defend themselves to survive and become more militant until, during the anti-Pakistan riots in 1947, thousands of Sikhs killed more than a million Muslims. That didn't work so well...

The only way for the meek to inherit the earth is to trick the violent ones to go into a never-ending political forum where everyone cherry picks the comments everyone else makes to make attacks, never acknowledges reasonable comments make by their opponents, and makes spin-off threads based on personal attacks.

And then everyone else hits the mute button.

Will do. Forgetting the title, would you care to comment PE? Why do we tolerate people who condone the deaths of hundreds of innocent children due to some kind of political balance of power? And what is the solution to these kinds of people?

Nice idea Theodosius. What would be the moral implications of locking them all in a infinite-war virtual reality? Or deporting them to a cast-off region of space to fight their war forever?

"I would not prefer the elimination of the Jews by the Nazis to a infinite war between them. Apply your logic to another situation and see if it stands up to the light of truth."

Except they're fighting Hamas and NOT the Palestinians, as you yourself pointed out...

So they're working for the "elimination" of Hamas, and NOT the Palestinians.

Can you not remember the conniption fit you through over this distinction not 15 minutes ago?

And thanks for comparing the democratic State of Israel to fascist Nazi Germany.

You're doing wonders for your Antisemitism image today.

Also this is a pretty good quote:

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

But y'all on the political left need to quit pretending that you're tolerant then lol. Embrace intolerance. There's nothing wrong with intolerance *per se.* Tolerance is a weakness -- an unwillingness to follow one's moral compass to its logical conclusion. If something is morally repulsive then it ought not be tolerated. Everyone is intolerant to some ideas and to some extent. What contemporary battles of "tolerance" are truly about isn't tolerance vs. intolerance, but the things people are willing to tolerate.

This doesn't necessarily imply the use of force to repel that which is intolerable, although it may in some circumstances; that's another argument for another time. But the modern left's obsession with tolerance seems at best misguided and at worst an insidious PR campaign to represent their intolerances as tolerance, and to claim the high ground over their political enemies as a result.

"Why do we tolerate people who condone the deaths of hundreds of innocent children due to some kind of political balance of power?"

I'm not condoning those deaths. I didn't say that. At all.

I said I'd rather Israel defeat Hamas than have those children die for ETERNITY.

We really shouldn't try and kill Obi - we should try and kill the terrorist that might be hiding explosives in his cellar by dropping a targeted missile from a great height. If Obi happens to die then we are immune as it's the terrorists that could have been in his cellar that really killed him.

^ /thread

"Why do we tolerate people who condone the deaths of hundreds of innocent children due to some kind of political balance of power? And what is the solution to these kinds of people?"

No idea. For all the bad both Israel and Hamas perpetrate -- and there is a LOT of it -- judging by Hussein's Iraq and Assad's Syria, centralization of violence against innocents appears to minimize it. How many more would die (ignoring the international response in this analogy, as that would likely amplify it more) if the United States invaded Israel and Palestine, knocked off both regimes, and left? The cruel reality is that states are often simply the most effective gangs among gangs -- and while this is a potent argument against states as "good" entities it's also a potent argument for their existence, as they do have incentive to keep other gangs down.

Are the state government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority similar in this respect? We'll never ultimately know until we knock them down and find out. But judging by similar efforts in the region over the past decade, I'm not especially interested in finding out, because I think it's dangerously likely to be the case here as well.

No no no, Maniac, you've got it all wrong!

It's better to let the that terrorist fire rockets at you from the safety of my bedroom for all eternity...and you only fire rockets back.

I'll still die, so no worries there...

But by ensuring that there's fighting for an eternity, many MORE people can die too!

I mean, that's clearly the only rational course to take, eternal warfare...

Hey there is plenty of evidence that obiwan's cellar has a terrorist living in it, trust me.
When I fire the missile, it is very precise and intelligent in the way that it flattens his house. The terrorist used obiwan as a human shield, and his whole family too, they are all complicit.

I feel the need to congratulate Obi for arguing his corner in the face of, at times, a rather brutal opposition. I can't say I agree, but I salute the effort.

For the record, a couple of people have asked in PM why I'm not locking this thread, so I'll explain publicly here:

SYnapse wasn't calling for obi to be killed. At least that's not my interpretation of it. He used obi as an example of someone he considers "intolerant" and then posed a philosophical hypothetical about the moral rightness (or wrongness I guess, as it seems to be playing out, lol) of killing in the name of tolerance. He shouldn't have used obi as an example in the thread title -- we don't condone that -- but as the thread has a valid philosophical pretense to it, and obi as an example was tangential, I don't interpret it as a call to kill obi and don't feel intervention is justified. The central thesis of SYnapse's post is clearly not "let's kill obi," so it's hard for me to argue that it's a threat against obi.

I apologise for snapping at obi, but I wanted to discuss this way that I sometimes feel - what if we could remove those who hold the moral majority of us back. That's what the thread was asking. The responses (some amusing) show me the flaws in this way of thinking, and there are no quick solutions to removing these problems or people. However sometimes it is really frustrating when you can't change somebody's mind and you feel that they are wrong - wrong not like "you believe in God, you are wrong" but wrong "you like murder, I do not", and you feel all kinds of retributional rage. I have always been on the left, but the Karl Popper quote really touches a nerve. How can we tolerate the intolerant?

I guess this is why some on the political right believe in capital punishment, and very rarely I share their view. The Israel/Hamas conflict is really indicative of a capital punishment mentality, but as said in the other thread if a cop goes into a hostage situation guns blazing it's not "justice" because he kills the hostage-taker. The goal always needs to be to preserve life. I believe that there is substantive, internationally recognised proof that Israel has not taken sufficient steps to reduce loss of life.

Ie. Iron Dome preserves life. Killing a Hamas terrorist preserves life. If you have to kill 10 people to get him, and he has killed 1 person, clearly you're not preserving lives. The state of Israel is just contributing to a massive bodycount.

Mods please silence Synapse from the forum for at least a week or return my donation. Please. There needs to be a precedent set here.

oh nearly forgot - lol