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Comment by alanwatts | Hacker News Reader

Killing someone because they killed someone is an infinite loop.

So we shouldn't have done anything after all the major terror attacks in the past decade ? You need to elaborate more on your general point.

The burden of being virtuous is that you should not use the same methods that the vile used on you. Something needed to be done about the terror attacks. But that something shouldn't include torture and the summary execution of people.

I don't think we used the same barbaric methods. Terrorists have the intention of killing any nearby civilian , even if they are non government or military most of the time they play their attacks.

(warning: anecdote)

I knew a guy who joined the US Marines and talked about how he wanted to "shoot towel heads." I don't believe that the US armed forces are purely virtuous at the top, bottom, or in between levels. There likely is a non-zero number of service men/women who get some sort of sick joy out of murdering non-Americans.

So your saying that the whole United States Armed Forces is non virtuous, based on one guy you knew? This is a huge claim.

That's literally not what he said at all - he said "a non-zero number", meaning (i'm assuming here) an amount that exists but is difficult to quantify, yet not so low as to be completely ignored.

"I don't believe that the US armed forces are purely virtuous at the top, bottom, or in between levels.". I think the non-zero number could be upwards in the positive millions, according to this claim.

My tone above is clearly one of doubt, thus saying "just like there are some residents of middle eastern nations that want to kill American civilians, there are some Americans who want to kill middle eastern civilians."

> I don't believe that [they] are purely virtuous

The only claim I'm making is that there are members of the US military at all levels that don't have God-Like Perfect Morality.

I heard they made a movie about that guy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/

We just water boarded them and paraded them around naked in prison before sending them to a CIA black site in a foreign country where they were tortured to death.

By hey, we had paperwork and believed enhanced torture was a legal loophole.

So we shouldn't have done anything after all the major terror attacks in the past decade ? You need to elaborate more on your general point.

We'd be a few trillion dollars ahead, and a lot of dead innocent civilians around the world would still be alive.

So: yeah, pretty much. Sometimes turning the other cheek actually is the optimal thing to do.

>So we shouldn't have done anything..?

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So, I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything, though that might would be better than repeating ourselves over and over again in an infinite negative feedback loop, manufacturing that which we seek to eliminate. For every innocent life that has been taken a hundred revengeful combatants are born from that persons friends and family.

>The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. ... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

-Dr. King, Where Do We Go From Here? 1967

http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...

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