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You're not behing callous...you're being a nihilist. Do you really see no distinction between the deliberate mass murder of 3,000 innocent people, and random a

by defen 16y ago

You're not behing callous...you're being a nihilist. Do you really see no distinction between the deliberate mass murder of 3,000 innocent people, and random accidental deaths? Where are your values??

pyre 16y ago
How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!
- defen 16y ago
  I honestly don't know how to respond to someone who genuinely feels the way you do. Our thought processes are so divergent that I don't think it's possible for us to have a productive debate.
  - pyre 16y ago
    The original post was trying to talk about the (over)reaction of people to 9/11. Your argument against that was to take up an ad hominem attack on the poster's values. Your argument implies that you feel that it is impossible to over-react to loss of life if that loss was intentionally perpetrated by a person (or group of people). I provided a counter-argument by bolstering the original poster's point using a statistic of (mostly) intentional murders instead of a statistic of accidental loss of life. Now you have to argue against the original point on other grounds if you wish to proceed. tl;dr Don't attack people personally, and don't try to make an emotional appeal to win an argument. Those tactics might work for some people, but they sully the debate/discussion so far as I'm concerned.
    - defen 16y ago
      Since you're into elevated debate, I'll tell you why I responded very negatively to your original post. You said "How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!". You were clearly trying to make me look bad by using heavy sarcasm to draw a parallel between the number of deaths caused by spousal murders vs the 9/11 attack. But it's a very bad comparison because murder is not a fundamental property of marriage. No one gets married in order to murder their spouse, or murders their spouse to bring glory to marriage. On the other hand, jihad terrorism is a defining property of the brand of Islam practiced by the 9/11 attackers and thousands of other people throughout the world. Nihilism is the rejection of meaning, and if you can't see that the 9/11 attacks had meaning well beyond the death toll, both to the attackers and the victims - and I'm not talking about the reactions to the event - then you're a nihilist. It was an unprecedented military-style mass murder of civilians by organized, motivated enemies who also had their own set of beliefs. They weren't just some guys who randomly decided to fly two aircraft into downtown Manhattan. It wasn't a human mistake. And it wasn't an earthquake that killed a lot of people.

by defen 16y ago

pyre 16y ago

How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!

defen 16y ago
I honestly don't know how to respond to someone who genuinely feels the way you do. Our thought processes are so divergent that I don't think it's possible for us to have a productive debate.
- pyre 16y ago
  The original post was trying to talk about the (over)reaction of people to 9/11. Your argument against that was to take up an ad hominem attack on the poster's values. Your argument implies that you feel that it is impossible to over-react to loss of life if that loss was intentionally perpetrated by a person (or group of people). I provided a counter-argument by bolstering the original poster's point using a statistic of (mostly) intentional murders instead of a statistic of accidental loss of life. Now you have to argue against the original point on other grounds if you wish to proceed. tl;dr Don't attack people personally, and don't try to make an emotional appeal to win an argument. Those tactics might work for some people, but they sully the debate/discussion so far as I'm concerned.
  - defen 16y ago
    Since you're into elevated debate, I'll tell you why I responded very negatively to your original post. You said "How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!". You were clearly trying to make me look bad by using heavy sarcasm to draw a parallel between the number of deaths caused by spousal murders vs the 9/11 attack. But it's a very bad comparison because murder is not a fundamental property of marriage. No one gets married in order to murder their spouse, or murders their spouse to bring glory to marriage. On the other hand, jihad terrorism is a defining property of the brand of Islam practiced by the 9/11 attackers and thousands of other people throughout the world. Nihilism is the rejection of meaning, and if you can't see that the 9/11 attacks had meaning well beyond the death toll, both to the attackers and the victims - and I'm not talking about the reactions to the event - then you're a nihilist. It was an unprecedented military-style mass murder of civilians by organized, motivated enemies who also had their own set of beliefs. They weren't just some guys who randomly decided to fly two aircraft into downtown Manhattan. It wasn't a human mistake. And it wasn't an earthquake that killed a lot of people.