RE: Can America ever truly pay for its sins?
January 10, 2022 at 1:46 pm
(This post was last modified: January 10, 2022 at 2:45 pm by Spongebob.)
(December 10, 2021 at 4:14 pm)Helios Wrote: America was never defeated in battle in Vietnam or Afghanistan they lost for political not military reasons
I don't completely agree. It's comforting for Americans to think this and I believe this is what most Vietnam era politicians would like people to believe. But the fact is the US threw bombs, guns and soldiers at this country for years without reservation and never broke their resolve, not even close. We were not beaten by force if you are comparing what the allies did to Germany and Japan in WW2, but we also didn't win by force. If anything it was a stalemate. But political will, popular acceptance and treasure are all important and valid elements in any war. If you don't have those things on your side, you can't win a war. In the beginning, none of those things were a factor, but as the war progressed they became the biggest obstacles. The war simply could not be won under the circumstances we found ourselves in. FF 50 years later, the Afghanistan war is very similar. We may not have lost this war, but we certainly didn't win it either.
(December 11, 2021 at 5:22 pm)Ravenshire Wrote:(December 5, 2021 at 9:09 pm)Ahriman Wrote: When lions kill and eat gazelle, do the lions then apologize to the remaining gazelle? Of course not, because it's simply a part of "lion nature" to eat gazelle. Human nature is amoral and has much less to do with empathy than most people would like to believe.If you are going to argue that humans are amoral, just as any animal with no understanding of morality, then you truly are, as has been stated earlier in this thread, a sociopath.
I want to address these two statements in bold, both of which are demonstrably wrong.
First, there are several works demonstrating that animals other than humans understand the concept of fairness. Frans de Waal's book, Our Inner Ape is just one; there are lots of others. Him and other scientists have conducted scientific studies that definitively document the behavior of apes and other animals that demonstrate they understand such concepts. This doesn't mean they share our understanding of such concepts but they do have them.
Further, to argue that humans are "immoral" is simply ignorant. There's far too much work to argue such a thing. Individuals may be thus, but there's simply no evidence to suggest this applies to humans as a specie. What you @Ahriman don't understand is what this means. Just because you don't agree with the morals of some group doesn't mean they have none. It just means you don't understand them, and morals are not a simple black/white thing; they can be very complex.
Why is it so?
~Julius Sumner Miller
~Julius Sumner Miller