After reading the taser and israel thread I am honestly appalled that you people would support stuff like this, some guy who didn't pose a threat being hurt for no reason, and a suspected criminal being killed without trial. How in the hell can any reasonable human being seriously support this kind of stuff?

11/21/2006 9:51:42 PM

Apathy

11/21/2006 9:53:00 PM

insecurity

11/21/2006 9:54:08 PM

e-Peen

11/21/2006 10:02:26 PM

Well, for one, they try not to load it with your filthy connotations so that they can make their own moral judgements without your impositions.

Quote :

"some guy who didn't pose a threat being hurt for no reason, and a suspected criminal being killed without trial"

How about I say it this way:

A crazed student who refused to give ID and also refused to exit the premises was subdued by police officers, and a known terrorist being killed before he could kill again.

That line is also loaded with the connotations.

Your outrage is not unusual, when you're absolutely sure you own morality and reasoning, then it probably is upsetting when people don't agree with you.

11/21/2006 10:47:27 PM

even adding the description of the student and taking out the whole tazing issue doesnt make the police one sound that much better.

11/21/2006 10:53:18 PM

Quote :

"A crazed student who refused to give ID and also refused to exit the premises was subdued by police officers, and a known terrorist being killed before he could kill again. That line is also loaded with the connotations."

Well I called it like I saw it, I'm not bound to non-bias on in my posts, and even with those connotations, I still think it's wrong to tase the kid as long as he wasn't a threat. And I still think it's wrong to kill a terrorist without trying him, I don't care what he did.

Quote :

"Your outrage is not unusual, when you're absolutely sure you own morality and reasoning, then it probably is upsetting when people don't agree with you."

I'm sure we agree on some basic things. I mean we both think stealing is wrong, right? I'm just so surprised that intiating violence agianst a non-threatening person and the Right of the accused to trial by jury isn't one of these basic things we agree on. I mean I can see abortion and stuff as kind of a grey area, but I'd think those were pretty universal.

11/21/2006 10:56:09 PM

its ok for a cop to defend themselves by using a taser to subdue someone who poses a physical threat to their person, it is not and should not be ok for a cop to use a taser as a compliance device simply because it is "less than lethal"

11/21/2006 11:08:36 PM

^agreed, and I don't see how any reasonable person can disagree with that

11/21/2006 11:10:06 PM

Quote :

"I'm sure we agree on some basic things. I mean we both think stealing is wrong, right? I'm just so surprised that intiating violence agianst a non-threatening person and the Right of the accused to trial by jury isn't one of these basic things we agree on. I mean I can see abortion and stuff as kind of a grey area, but I'd think those were pretty universal."

You can't be 100% sure he wasn't a threat. Perhaps the guy--foreign looking or not--was using himself as a biological weapon. Maybe he had given himself a highly contagious disease and was refusing to leave so he could infect the people there. The point is, he wasn't complying with the police when they asked him to leave, which was WELL within their rights. Sure, he was over-tased, absolutely. But the first one was not an excessive use of force.

Also, you think terrorists deserve a trial no matter what and I disagree with you. I don't think every enemy soldier or terrorist with a gun deserves to be tried in a court before we waste him. I would think THIS position would be the common sense answer and I'd say the vast majority of Americans would agree with me. Doesn't make it right, but if it is going to be common sense, the majority of people surely should believe it. I mean, what else does common sense mean then?

11/22/2006 7:57:11 AM

Quote :

"Well, for one, they try not to load it with your filthy connotations so that they can make their own moral judgements without your impositions. How about I say it this way: A crazed student who refused to give ID and also refused to exit the premises was subdued by police officers, and a known terrorist being killed before he could kill again."

HAHAHA you bitch about filthy connotations, but in the same thread refer to the student as crazed and the person in Israel as a terrorist.

Good job dumbass

11/22/2006 12:05:04 PM

not that i agree with him, but he was trying to make the point that he could make the same sort of connotations.

11/22/2006 12:18:04 PM

Quote :

"You can't be 100% sure he wasn't a threat. Perhaps the guy--foreign looking or not--was using himself as a biological weapon. Maybe he had given himself a highly contagious disease and was refusing to leave so he could infect the people there. The point is, he wasn't complying with the police when they asked him to leave, which was WELL within their rights."

First off, that's just silly. Secondly, I don't see why a police officer should be able to use violence if the other party has not, that's stupid.

11/22/2006 1:05:39 PM

How do you propose he gets the non violent person out then? Grabing him and using preassure points is violence.

11/22/2006 3:20:43 PM

How is that silly? The fucking point was that you cannot possibly be 100% sure he wasn't a threat. If you disagree, then it is your perception of reality that is flawed.

11/22/2006 3:21:19 PM

Quote :

"How do you propose he gets the non violent person out then? Grabing him and using preassure points is violence."

They could have handcuffed and walked him out, if he wouldn't walk, they could have put him on a stretcher and rolled him out. There might be a minimal amount of force involved, but certainly not voilence, and definately not on par with using a taser.

Quote :

"The fucking point was that you cannot possibly be 100% sure he wasn't a threat."

It was silly because I can't be 100% sure he even exists, he could be a hologram. All other sorts of stupid things come up when you put it to an unrealistic level of scrutiny. Your level of scrutiny give those men free riegn to stun gun anyone they damn well please, from old women to infants. There is a realistic level of threat that's easy to see, and this guy wasn't at it.

11/22/2006 3:48:19 PM

I think they ought to be able to taze every old woman (but not infants, for obvious reason) that refuses to show ID when it is a rule and then refuses to leave the premises and begins to make a scene. Yes. Its not like this guy was just studying and they suddenly came up and tazed him.

Oh and on a side note: Did we get any more information on this guy? Did he have ID and was just acting like a douche?


[Edited on November 22, 2006 at 5:36 PM. Reason : read]

11/22/2006 5:35:27 PM

He did have his ID.

11/22/2006 5:37:27 PM

Thanks, I wondered that. Was he the only student asked to show the ID. What was their basis for asking him?

11/22/2006 9:44:08 PM

Basically its like this

People like to be cool on the internet by providing a counterpoint to whatever the conventional (and often common sense) wisdom of a thread dictates. Case in point: Read any of JonHGuth's early work in The Soap Box.

11/22/2006 10:05:54 PM

starting a new posting trend

similar to phbfd, except now its phbsd

posting here because sandsanta did

11/22/2006 10:27:44 PM

what bothers you is this thing called "truth." Apparently, it has finally smacked you on the head. maybe you will actually look at it.

11/22/2006 11:11:32 PM

im glad Kris already addressed the issue of us not being "100% sure" on him being a threat. i mean christ.

11/22/2006 11:49:24 PM

BREAKINGS NEWS

skinny arab who screams like a girl beats the shit out of several large police men

11/22/2006 11:59:24 PM

^Bruce lee was a skinny short foreign guy too, BTW

11/23/2006 10:53:01 AM

I like how conservatives who usually pride themselves on being realistic fall back on these unlikely thought experiments when called out.

11/23/2006 11:14:26 AM

^^ you obviously havent seen a bruce lee movie.

11/23/2006 2:08:40 PM

Everyone deserves a damned trial. Even Saddam gets a mother-fucking fair trial.

11/23/2006 2:24:22 PM

Yea Mike, you nailed it.

11/23/2006 6:54:05 PM

Quote :

"I like how conservatives who usually pride themselves on being realistic fall back on these unlikely thought experiments when called out."

Yeah, this is an unlikely event, sure. But so unlikely that you'd stake the lives of all those police officers and library patrons on it?

11/24/2006 8:24:51 AM

Gary could suicide bomb the brickyard any day now.

11/24/2006 9:02:44 AM

Yes, he could. So if they asked him to get a permit for demonstration and he refused and got beliggerent and they tased him, I'd be ok with that.

11/24/2006 10:08:32 AM

what if he already had a permit and was just being annoying.

11/24/2006 11:11:09 AM

Quote :

"Yeah, this is an unlikely event, sure. But so unlikely that you'd stake the lives of all those police officers and library patrons on it?"

It's also possible that the police officers are shapeshifters created by Muslim scientists in the future, and sent back through time. These shapeshifters can detonate at any time and level an entire city block unless you knock them out first.

11/24/2006 11:18:32 AM

Muslims inventing something useful? Now you know that IS impossible.

11/24/2006 11:20:32 AM

The point is here, you're justifying extreme measures through unlikely, outlandish thought experiments. It's borderline braindead.

11/24/2006 11:21:23 AM

Quote :

"Yeah, this is an unlikely event, sure. But so unlikely that you'd stake the lives of all those police officers and library patrons on it?"

Let's take what you're saying as true. So here's our logic: If some event that could threaten our lives could happen, no matter how small the chances, we must take action to prevent it.

So using that logic, we see some woman and child, now there is some chance that the woman could be a terrorist and that the child could actually be a bomb, and that the only way I could possibly stop her is to shot them both. Now this is certainly a possibly, but should I shoot that woman and child dead for absolutely no reason?

11/24/2006 1:07:05 PM

^ Well that depends... are they brown?

11/24/2006 1:11:23 PM

Quote :

"it's wrong to kill a terrorist without trying him, I don't care what he did"

Quote :

"I can see abortion and stuff as a kind of a grey area"

Ah, but the terrorism one is a grey area. Terrorism neatly straddles the fence between "crime" and "warfare." You wouldn't expect our military to try every target it went after in a declared conventional war, even if those targets were very specific individuals. So what makes terrorists -- of any kind -- so special? I think we all agree it would have been wrong to blow up Al Capone without a trial or anything, and I think most of us would be have been down with blowing up Saddam during that first "decapitating strike" of the war.


So what makes terrorists fall more on the first side and not on the second? The absence of a declared war? Their status as internal threats? Their use of asymetrical warfare? Because Korea, the Confederacy, and the American Revolutionaries, respectively.

11/24/2006 3:19:43 PM

Quote :

"Terrorism neatly straddles the fence between "crime" and "warfare.""

Even in civilized warfare you don't just kill an unarmed man. They still have trials and prisons and such. We have specified rules on this.

Quote :

"So what makes terrorists -- of any kind -- so special?"

In reality, they are nothing more than criminals. I know it's a popular way of thinking now to somehow classify them as soliders rather than criminals, but they aren't.

11/24/2006 3:31:14 PM

Since when was war civilized? Do what you have to do to survive--kill or be killed.

11/24/2006 8:45:15 PM

Quote :

"Even in civilized warfare you don't just kill an unarmed man."

No one batted an eye when we tried to blow up Saddam Hussein on the first day of the war. No one bats an eye whenever we blow up some installations full of unarmed people. If we bombed all of Iran's nuclear facilities tomorrow, a lot of people would be screaming a lot of things, but none of them would be, "But the poor scientists didn't have guns!"

I think you need to try a different tack here.

As to your second point...

I agree that they're not soldiers -- they don't generally meet the criteria that the world has agreed upon as defining a soldier. But they aren't just criminals, either. That's why we have the word "terrorist," it's something that doesn't really fit well into either camp.

11/24/2006 9:27:22 PM

Quote :

"No one batted an eye when we tried to blow up Saddam Hussein on the first day of the war"

Morality isn't based on popular opinion.

Quote :

"But they aren't just criminals, either."

Why not?

11/25/2006 12:37:50 AM

McDanger hit the nail on the head. Nobody wants to admit the ridiculousness of some of these thought experiments out of fear of being depicted as the "closed-minded liberal" (ie: joshnumbers, jerrygarcia, a few others i don't remember) that's become a favorite caricature of many of the people on here, (who, in fact, are caricatures themselves).

[Edited on November 25, 2006 at 12:56 AM. Reason : .]

11/25/2006 12:55:40 AM

I'm curious, Kris, where morality fits into your worldview?

And while I see your point, it wasn't really a response to mine.

Why isn't it OK to shoot an unarmed man? Because of the lack of honor of the thing? How the hell does that fit into your worldview? With criminals, I could see a reason -- you don't know if they're guilty yet -- but in a wartime context like the one I brought up and you seemed to label "immoral," where you know quite obviously who the enemy is, then what's the reason? Why is it that when he picks up a gun from the table we can off him, but when he puts it back down we can't? And what really counts as "armed" anyway? With Saddam we're talking about blowing him up with two invisible stealth fighters and a slew of cruise missiles. He wasn't remotely armed against that. Can you shoot a guy if he's got a pointy stick? A knife? A gun? And what can you shoot him with? Something comparable?

11/25/2006 2:50:24 PM

While I don't want to respond for Kris (I can't speak for him), let me explain partially why you're having such a hard time understanding his usage of morality.

You seem to think that morality is some sort of objective standard, some rulebook (or something) sitting somewhere in the galaxy in which things are deemed as "right" and "wrong." Being a theist, this is understandable. God is the originator of your rulebook, and the rulebook itself is a proper interpretation of the Bible.

However, people make moral judgments all the time without any objective standard in mind. All it takes is a human brain capable of drawing a personal distinction between right and wrong.

11/25/2006 4:18:02 PM

yeah really...its not that hard to figure out whats right from wrong

11/25/2006 5:08:27 PM

Quote :

"Why isn't it OK to shoot an unarmed man?"

Certainly one incedent wouldn't have a huge negative impact on the world, it would have some negative impact, utility of his relatives being diminished, his future economic contributions snuffed, but those are small in comparison to the effect of the precedent being set if this action is deemed as acceptable behavior. Then these actions would start happening everywhere and the impact would snowball. This goes for wartime or peacetime.

Quote :

"Why is it that when he picks up a gun from the table we can off him, but when he puts it back down we can't? And what really counts as "armed" anyway?"

Surely I don't have to explain to you why self defense is considered morally acceptable.

Quote :

"With Saddam we're talking about blowing him up with two invisible stealth fighters and a slew of cruise missiles. He wasn't remotely armed against that."

I never said that was acceptable.

11/25/2006 5:40:48 PM

OK, I wrote a lengthy response and then the machine crashed, so this one will be fast and dirty -- just the way Kris likes it.

McDanger -- I think you know I'm not an idiot, plz not to talk to me like one. I've been up and down the "(a)theism and morality" road many times on this site, and your paragraph-long summary did not enlighten me to anything that those lengthy threads did. I was referring very specifically to Kris, who espouses views on human nature more radical than those I see put forward by most here.

Now onto the man himself, on your first point:

1) The precedent is already long-set, it's a bit late to be worrying about it now.
2) You're going to need something more than Kris fiat to show that a government performing an action under certain circumstances will cause that action to "start happening everywhere."

As to your second thing, you seem to have missed my point. Yes, it's self-defense if "we" are just other guys in the room with our own guns, because he could shoot at us. But what about a stealth bomber? It's not like Saddam picking up a pistol from the table puts that in any kind of danger.

So now here you can either say, "Yes, it is acceptable to blow up Saddam, because he is armed," in which case you have attributed a great deal of moral weight to a small object in his hand that has no actual relevance to how the situation will play out -- his bare hands are just as useful against a B-2 as any handgun is. Or you can say, "No, it is not acceptable to blow up Saddam, because he is unarmed against that threat," in which case you have basically said that it is immoral to ever use a more powerful weapon against an enemy, which is frankly quite silly.

11/26/2006 11:33:03 AM

Let me clarify myself. Here's what you said:

Quote :

"I'm curious, Kris, where morality fits into your worldview?"

This betrays the opinion that your ideology has a monopoly on morality. I was simply pointing out that all it takes for somebody to decide that something is right or wrong is a human brain.

I know you understand more than that statement betrayed (who DOESN'T have a worldview that involves some notion of right or wrong?), but come on. Stop suggesting that your brand of morality is the only. The best? Perhaps. The only? Bullshit.

11/26/2006 12:12:15 PM