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One of humanities greatest strengths is it's compassion, clearly you do not share this trait.
compassion helps people get along. it makes life easier for people. compassion == helping people. but compassion can be used any number of ways. compassionate conservatism is bush's term for not aiding people, and therefore helping them help themselves.
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3000 people isn't much...... compared to what? the global population? And why are you comparing it to the global population anyway?
i'm comparing it to the number of people who die of non-terrorist causes. at least 100,000 people on average die every day.
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3000 people die, you don't care, 5000 people die you don't care, 10,000? 500,000? a million? a billion? Where do you draw your line and why do you draw it there?
i care about people dying. but you're talking about people who died 8 months ago. the dead are beyond help. i draw my line at my family, my friends, in general, the people who are important to me. when they are dead i miss them for their contributions to make this world a better place to live. i can't put a line on a number of souls, because then you quantize human life. it wouldn't be right to fake remorse for people whom i've never met, just because its an unusually large number of people.
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Bollocks they do, some opinions are not ok, saying you think that black people should be rounded up and killed is NOT ok, saying that Hitler was an ok kind of a guy is NOT ok, and saying that innocent people dying doesn't matter is NOT ok either.
everyone has a right to his/her opinion. we allow groups like the kkk because the principle of free speech mandates that speech be censored only when there is no doubt that it will harm people. racist speech harms people when it provokes people to violence. but otherwise it's no reason to censor. if a person doesn't like it, he/she responds with more anti-racist speech. believe me, this happens all the time in internet chat-rooms.
in any case, i'm not talking about speech, i'm talking about an opinion. it is not up to us to mandate opinions. we are not the ultimate judge of right and wrong. racism is not clearly wrong. killing people is not clearly wrong. we have been brought up to believe it is. in my humble opinion, i believe racism is wrong, and that killing people is wrong. but my beliefs do not give me an ability to enforce them on others.
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I pity you for your lack of empathy, you lack one of the fundamental traits that our society is built upon.
i have empathy. i just use it wisely, where it will help people most.
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It makes perfect sense, American citizens are deemed more important than foreigners, as in citizens of other countries.
i'm assuming you mean more important to our government. that's true, but that's because our government can only enforce its laws on its own people. foreigners are out of our jurisdiction, except when they reside in our country. (in which case they are not necessarily foreigners.)
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Because America is in this case the one doing the killing! How can you not see this!? America attacked Afghanistan not for the Afghan people but for America's sake,
that's partially true. remember, it was the northern alliance, afghanistan's own people, who did most of the killing on the ground.
yes, we did attack for our own sake, to prevent more terrorism. it just so happens that our actions have made lives better in afghanistan.
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and hence has a responsibility to the people who's lives are affect, that's why resources ARE spent trying to minimise casualities. I don't think there was anything wrong with America's actions over Afganistan, there were relatively few civilian casualities, the reason being that care WAS taken.
exactly.
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my argument is against your attitiude, an attitude which takes a large portion of the blame when considering anti-US sentiment around the globe, an attitude that is both morally repugnant, intellectually flawed and socially damaging.
why is my attitude bad? i simply don't care about the dead. i think you're misreading me somewhere.
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It might well cost less to help prevent malaria, but the US isn't causing malaria!
malaria is no country's fault. but shouldn't we cure it anyway?
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Self-determination, that's a good one,
thanks. i'll save that one for the joke thread.
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it's ok for the US to step in and have a huge negative effect on a country, but when asked to help rebuild it the "self determination" card gets played. Again, fortunately the US government seems to be moving away from your stance, which is a damn good thing.
my stance is that self-determination is a good thing all the time. i have never argued that having a huge negative impact on a country is a good thing.
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Well for a start you're moving the goal posts, this argument centres around casualities specifically CAUSED by US action. But an aside from that, your point is still totally invalid since accepting aid in no way whatsoever means that the accepting country "surrenders to the American culture".
i meant that accepting aid shows that the country is not strong enough to survive on its own. it's a self-esteem breaker if there ever was one. a country which cannot survive by itself has no real reason to exist by itself. the welfare of its citizens is always in danger.
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Say there is an African country facing a famine, they need are help, you seem to be suggesting that somehow helping them harms them in the long term which is frankly rediculous, giving them food helps them FULLSTOP.
go beyond food. how does the food get to the people? do we distribute directly, or does their government? we would be more involved than you think. we are taking responsibility for the lives of the citizens. we are essentially showing that the government can't even support itself without outside help.
food makes a famine stop, by definition. but sometimes something more important than survival is culture. pride in a culture holds that culture together. when people have no pride in their government, that government will have no power. a government without power is not a government.
the american indian culture is a great culture passed down through generations. the american indian people are a race of people who once inhabited large expanses of the american continents. what are the american indians without their culture? just human beings trying to survive because it is their instinct to do so. replace the words "american indians" with any other group of people, and the meaning's the same.
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It's not in the dim and distant past, it's in the last century, people will let it go when US foreign policy doesn't tread on other countries, and then wipe their hands of the whole affair when asked to sort out the mess they created, citing "self-determinism". I think US foreign policy is changing and for the better, mainly because attitudes like your's are being replaced with more responsible, compassionate, and generally less assinine ones.
sure. but to me, the last century is the distant past.
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Of course the people love freedom, i'm sure they love air too, and food for the matter, yet they don't proclaim those with such figure.
freedom is the cornerstone of our culture. food, air, and water are just ingredients for survival.
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Just about EVERY person in a democratic country "loves freedom" together with most people in non-democratic countries.
true. in america this ideal is a part of our culture, though. germany, england, france, etc... were germany, england, and france without freedom. freedom has been incorporated in the last two centuries. but america without freedom isn't america. american culture is based on freedom.
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This idiocy that "American loves freedom", is just an attempt by the super patriotic to make it seem like the rest of the western world doesn't.
i guess that's mostly true. i believe we are a freer nation than many other democracies because of the structure of our government. no branch of government can overlook freedom just because it's convienent at the time. the bill of rights cannot be altered without a great deal of majorities. how many european nations have this guarentee? is freedom just another law that can be repealed?
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Not really, because the rest of the world sees it for exactly what it is, an attempt to make America look good when in fact every other democratic country is EXACTLY the same.
notice the sarcasm tags.
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That's nice but some what irrelevant, i don't have a stereotyped view of America, most of the people I know hate America, and they have some good reasons too. In some instances I just disagree with them, but in others I do think that the US is as bad as they claim BUT I also think that just about every country is pretty bad, it's just that its more noticable with the US because they're a super-power. In most of the current world developments i'm pro-US, I do think a lot of people jump on the band-wagon when attacking the US, and are hypocritical for not realising that their own country is in most ways just as bad if not worse.
i totally agree.
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Perhaps, maybe you're missing a key part of brain that is responsible for empathy, maybe you've been so shielded from the real world that you've lost most your humantiy, maybe.....
shielded? how am i shielded? how are you coming to this conclusion?
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Most people don't need to fake their emotions because they have real ones.
this is where we disagree.
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"perhaps when i approach death i will learn to worship it. and maybe i'll genuinely feel for a person i've never met."
Worship it!?
my attempt at sarcasm
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"don't judge me on my emotions when you're not willing to help those you really "care" about"
I'm not in a position to help the people who die in Afghanistan, that doesn't mean i don't care. If i could help them I would because, unlike you, I do care.
i do care about the living. i just don't see a reason to feel sad over the lives of people whom i've never met, whose families i've never met, who have been dead for eight months.