Wingers have an impressive ability to come up with excuses for doing a cut-and-run on our values when the going gets tough, but the rationalizations aren't worth a bucket of warm spit. You either have values or you don't. If you have values, they exist for their own sake and stand on their own, and can't be modified by external forces of opinion or behavior. Barbaric behavior by terrorists can never justify barbarism commited by us.
I should hope to god that there's a double standard in the world, one that distinguishes us from al Qaeda and interprets our behavior in the context of our values. If it were otherwise, then the world would simply count up the bodies and conclude that we must be roughly 40-50 times as bad as the terrorists, because that's the retribution for 9/11 that we've exacted so far.
I don't look at the body count as vindication of American ideals, but then that's just another area where we disagree.
Flame » in reply to "The soft nihilism of low expectations"
RightWing negotiable values
The whole thread (78 posts)
- Reactions
- Moral equivalency
- "Civilization won't stand long when when the self-proclaimed good guys use war as an excuse to take a holiday from civilization"
- And our side won't last long when we're the only ones using a rule book.
- "The soft nihilism of low expectations"
- Smoothly done, Robert...
- One for the road...
- We *should* know better.
- "the people in the marches have a deep and abiding hostility to the West and its values."
- The right-wing reaction to the story was faster.
- re: Nations
- Revisionist history of the highest order.
- Heh, heh. Phony point.
- Moral equivalency