War.mongeR1

I know this is not shocking or anything, but it amazes me that this happens in our modern world. It's the same kind of garbage that the early Salemites pulled. Really sad.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23162712

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"Common sense is not so common." -Voltaire

RandomGuy

I have heard this is very common in rural areas of Africa, probably more common than in the middle east.

FatCobra

Middle East are a bunch of animals, I'm not surprised. Maybe me thinking that is Intolerant, but everyday I look on the news, they continue to prove me right.

Augustus Gloop

Unfortunately, extremist ignorance isn't limited to Middle-Easterners. They have saints and sinners the same as everyone else. Take a look at certain areas of America for similar crimes against humanity.

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FatCobra

Of course, no country is without lack of people who should live in caves with bears and snakes, and use poison ivy for toilet paper. But to me, at least the way its portrayed on the news, every combatant in the middle east will stoop to the lowest of lows to kill someone, even if its a innocent civilian, some even using their own kids as bombs. No other country or group of people in todays modern world does that, to my knowledge.

Augustus Gloop

Actually, the Vietnamese did that to us, and we enabled the Afghanis to do that to the Soviets. When you're a tiny nation facing a massive superpower, people sacrifice themselves in ways that seem horrifying to us. We haven't had to defend our nation against attack in a long time though, who knows what Americans would be capable of to keep our sovereignty?

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FatCobra

Thats a good point, but I think if we ever had to defend ourselves from another nation we would find better ways then to send our own Children strapped with bombs to kill several soldiers or civilians. And we probably wouldn't be making videotapes of enemy soldiers having their heads chopped off in the name of our God.

ScratchMonkey

The US is currently at the top of the military food chain. Suppose we had an extended occupation by aliens from space that legalized child porn and all the other things you think are bad. What would you do to fight it?

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FatCobra

I would find every child I could find, strap them with a bomb belt, and lob them like I was giving away free t-shirts at a baseball game at the alien scum.

Augustus Gloop

I'm not arguing that it's horrible, I'm just arguing that Islamic extremists are somehow more 'barbaric' then any other extremist in the world. I know it seems like all of them are crazy, but afaik, Islam is a religion of peace, just as Christianity is.

Remember Red Dawn? Those weren't exactly babies, but they were young highschoolers who would do anything to punish the soviet troops for invading their town.

Read Charlie Wilson's war for an amazing accounting of how the Afghans bled the Soviet Union's treasury until the Soviet Union collapsed.

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Kerostasis

Scale of barbarism in war, from most to least honorable:

--Sending soldiers to kill enemy soldiers (Current position of US)
--Sending civilians strapped with bombs to kill enemy soldiers
--Sending children strapped with bombs to kill enemy soldiers (what Vietnam did)
--Sending civilians strapped with bombs to kill enemy civilians
--Sending civilians strapped with bombs to kill your own civilians and disrupt their economy, because you're afraid they might turn against you if they ever work their way out of poverty (where Al-Qaida is today)

Yes, desperate times call for desperate measures, but Islamic Extremists still manage to use an entirely different definition of "desperate measures" than the rest of us. I don't think we'd go that low even under your alien occupation scenario.

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ScratchMonkey

I'd +rep you if I could, Kero. I happen to agree with you on this thread, but even where we start to part ways, you make me think.

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Augustus Gloop

I don't know how comfortable I am with a breakdown of relative levels of murder. In any case, we all agree that involving civilians and children in war is pretty unacceptable. Where we differ is in FatCobra's inference that barbarism is limited to the middle east, and that Kerostasis's belief that Islamic Extremists have sunk to some kind of new moral low.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much new under the sun as far as barbarism goes.

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FatCobra

Barbarism isn't limited to the Middle East, what I believe is that the middle east has the worst kind of it in todays current world.

Kerostasis

Suppose we remove all implication that Islamic Extremists have "sunk" to a lower point, and suppose we take the stance that in historical context this level of barbarism is really nothing new.

Would you be equally uncomfortable making the opposite assertion, that the West has (recently) risen above that historical level of barbarism? Or will you only be happy with a viewpoint that places both of us on the same moral level?

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