Huh. You can teach an old dog new tricks.

[ernunnos]

Some people just don't believe in evil. It's a common liberal affliction. Criminals are just good folks who've made a mistake, or who have been driven to crime by poverty or some other misfortune. It's a very common delusion. abz6598 just made a post about how that attitude is promoted in the Spider-Man movies and comics. It's the individual equivalent to

Comments

[radiantsun]

I generally think it is too bad that we live in a world where it is necessary to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon-- the fact of the matter is we do. So good for him.

I do belive there is evil in the world. There is a book by Scott Peck, called People of the Lie where in he tries to come up with what exactly evil is and how it manifests in people. Its been a while since I read the book--- but it was pretty interesting. There is another book called The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom which also attempts to quantify evil-- it doesn't do a good job at that, but if you look at it as a really intensely interesting history book, it is great!

[faustin]

It's the individual equivalent to the libertarian belief that if the U.S. would just stop provoking other nations by its interventionist policies, there would be no aggression in the world.

Who are the quacks who get to represent libertarianism AND peddle this nonsense? I think I represent libertarianism, and I believe in responding with force.

RE: Buff, you mean a Fortress America that's not a political or governmental creation? Just armed & ready citizens?

I'm all for taking the fight to them, I just wish the gov't wasn't doing it. Let, eg., Blackwater & co start working for an NGO with a non-national mandate to end motherfuckers who propose terrorism. It needn't represent the USA. It could represent all righteous people everywhere (who are supporting it), and NOT represent the dimwits who can't handle bringing force against terrorists.

I say this partly because I'm interested in people telling me why this idea is stupid.

[faustin]

I know how radical the idea is, and how "common sense" (i.e. to-be-expected ignorance) obviously recoils at it.

I hope you know that I consider you a friend, so don't be too offended by this, but you're disqualified from thinking on this one about three times over. First, no education in real economics. Second, no background in critical analysis of ethics or philosophy. Third, you're a Democrat, which means in addition to lacking the inoculation against political stupidity (from points 1 and 2, economics and ethics), your political biases already overdetermine your antipathy to this issue.

So, true to expectations, you missed the main points entirely...

and guess who has the money these days?This money would not be taken from people who don't believe in what it's being used for. The money would only be there if, in fact, there are people willing to support the cause. This is a little bit like "taxation ONLY WITH representation". I actually think it's wrong that Americans who don't believe in the war should have to pay for it, and

[talldean]

From the liberal standpoint you've expressed, "Criminals are just good folks who've made a mistake, or who have been driven to crime by poverty or some other misfortune.", it absolutely covers "If a terrorist is basically a decent man, he must be motivated by intolerable U.S. foreign policy rather than the doctrines of a religion he was raised in from birth."

Then again, that would require admitting that not all religions are equal, and saying that a pacifist religion (Buddhism) is better than a religion whose followers use it to justify war (Christianity) is better than a religion which has dogma promoting war.

[talldean]

Remove Buddhism from the list, then; the idea still holds. :-)

[maradydd]

Every time I read stories like this one, I like to remind people of the incident seven years ago in Houston where a couple of teenagers stole a car and a gun and started driving around the Montrose holding up pedestrians, until they picked the wrong guy:Hjalmar Sundeen was walking his dog Wuppie Puppie, a 55-pound black "muttweiler." Hjalmar, 51, took his usual route down Woodhead to the corner of Morse. The eight-year-old dog was sniffing the grass when Hjalmar spotted a car with only the parking lights on. The passenger yelled something at him, but Hjalmar couldn't understand if the guy was asking for his wallet or wondering where Waugh is (it's just around the corner). Hjalmar says he turned around, said, "What?" and a guy standing three feet behind him shot him in the face

[scarybaldguy]

Usually he carries an H&K .40-caliber revolver.

A what?

[maradydd]

Yeah, I won't pretend the Houston Press actually knows anything about guns.

[no_brakes23]

I seriously doubt he missed them by 2 hundreths of an inch.

Also, is an HK40 revolver based on a Mateba, or did H&K start fresh with their own design?

[pentomino]

re: foreign policy, I can't see how you can provoke evil through attacking people. You can create enemies if they have to fight you to keep what they have, but then wouldn't they spend time defending their homes and trying to reduce our ability to attack them? So, maybe we don't create terrorists by attacking Iraq.

OTOH, I do think you can enable evil through either inaction or alliance with sociopaths. If the seeds are there, you can nourish it into full bloom, or starve it so that it barely sprouts. So the liberals may have a bit of a point when they say we shouldn't support Saudi Arabia's ruling family, or that we shouldn't have supported Saddam just because he was the lesser of two evils, &c.

I've heard more than one talking head on TV claim that the whole reason Kim Jong-Il is doing all this nuclear posturing is to get the US's attention. This fits into the model I've just described; he might be thinking, "Hey, you're propping up all these other corrupt regimes. Why not mine, too?"