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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

So if you are to be killed by Hitler, it's okay if Stalin kills you to prevent that? What happened with "initiation of force is bad, period"? If there's no moral absolute, then there's no point in debating what's better and what's worse. It's just some atoms wobbling in the spacetime.

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If Stalin was able to save the lives of 50 million people who would otherwise have died by killing 10 million of them (which I don't necessarily think is actually the case, but supposing it was), I call that a good act. "initiation of force is bad, period" is not a good moral philosophy.

Yeah, Stalin is a great savior of humanity. Let's give him a Nobel prize for killing only 10 million while he could easily kill everybody. Thank you for showing me the path of enlightened.

You can't judge events of the past from todays norms of morale. And if you think you can - give me a name of a leader during first half of last century that was absolutely clean and innocent and whose decisions did not kill anyone.

All political leaders are psychopathic manipulators and sadists. Normal, sane person would strive to avoid ordering one group of people to point guns at another group of people as a part of a Grand Plan. Normal person would use weapons and violence only as a last measure when all else didn't prevent getting him/her in that awful situation.

That was not what I said, I said that Hitler was not a lesser evil than Stalin.

Explain why someone should spend time debating with you?

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