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So when I use the term wrath in this context we could conclude that I am talking about the sinful version of anger. To that extent I think it's very obvious that anyone seeking out glee or spectacle in another persons death is acting in a sinful way. In this context we presume it is out of anger or revenge, which would necessarily be sinful. A better Christian would recognize just law and capital punishment, along with the necessity to personally forgive the perpetrator to save their own soul.
There's nothing secret about publicly sentencing someone to death in a court of law, killing them in a manner not publicized and then announcing that they have been executed.
The western tradition of public executions, along with burning witches, is generally not what people think of when talking about 'the west' which more often refers to the post enlightenment period and the major upswing in technology and standards of living through the 18th and 19th century. Which coincides with decreases in public executions and capital punishments along with a host of other social revolutions.
The US army has killed plenty of pregnant women in Nidal's lifetime. Should one only sympathize with pregnant women getting killed when they are American? That's what many Americans earnestly believe. Expressing themselves as completely incapable of recognizing any hostile act taken against them from the viewpoint of its perpetrators.
Nidal Hasan is a middle Eastern terrorist. He has a stamp from the US government and a birthplace far from his actual homelands, but knows in his heart exactly who he is. A martyr for a cause he believes is just, who shot enemy combatants in a successful ambush.
Maybe one day American soldiers will stop killing unarmed people in 'places of trust' the world over, but until they do, there's little rational to mourn them beyond anyone else when the shoe is on the other foot.
Not everyone is aware of the distinction, though.
This gives rise to speculations that the condemned was tortured the death, or not killed at all. Both are bad.
Actually, at least in England, the post-enlightenment period lead to the "Bloody Code" and a rise in executions, which were often public and treated as a spectacle.
This is a false equivalency and you know it, or should know it.
Please quantify this statement and back it up with polling numbers or another citation.
It's curious how one could get such a perspective. Certainly not from reading American novelists (such as Tom Clancy), or American scholars (such as Lawrence Wright) or American journalists (such as John Hersey) or American combatants (like Ian Fritz) or interacting with American Mottizens (we have GWOT vets on here, and I've never gotten that impression from them at all; rather the opposite.)
Repeating something doesn't make it true.
It is rational to punish traitors because the harm of their actions erodes trust, and as I think you know, a lower-trust society is a worse one.
I'm not getting this. Aside from being tortured by other inmates, which is routine in American prisons, I see no reason to assume that a prison intended for general population inmates or a military prison would begin torturing inmates because they changed the way they execute them. You could just as well torture them and execute them via firing squad.
The code was not supported by the people. Which is why executions went down, despite more capital punishment law being passed. And it was then ultimately abolished. In either case, people don't associate 'the west' with public executions. But rather the modern justice system that came after.
It's not. But people who are emotionally unable to sympathize with people born too far away do believe that it is.
I'm referring to the person in the Fox interview, people who share his sentiment, you and other pro-America guys on here. Who ultimately draw the distinction between good and bad, with America on the good side of every conflict. And they don't see that as unreasonable or questionable.
I get it from interacting with Americans. What is most peoples reaction to Timothy McVeigh when he called the children killed in the bombing 'Collateral Damage'? Yet so many Americans fail to imagine why some people refer to America as the great Satan.
We agree on that. What we disagree on, it appears, is what makes someone a national of a nation. With two Palestinian parents, I think you are a Palestinian.
Sure?
Generally speaking, when people are tortured it leaves marks that witnesses to executions will notice.
Who's "people"? I'm a Westerner, and I do. I have been in favor of public executions since I was in high school or before, in part because it is part of the Western, Anglo-American tradition.
I do understand the push-back against live-streaming it and the concerns about making it a spectacle, or that it might be a bad idea in this specific case. Those arguments track with me. But the idea that "here in the West we don't execute people publicly" doesn't, because it's not true.
Do you really think this is an accurate description of me based on my posting history?
Even if you are confusing me with Shakes, Trump's Own Strongest Soldier, I doubt this would be an accurate description.
Well, I think I am beginning to understand why. It should not surprise you if even the most reasonable and open-minded of people will become a raging nationalist when you paint people of their nationalities with a broad and unflattering brush.
You should read the authors I mentioned. They are emblematic of what Americans read: Clancy was a tremendously popular novelist during the Cold War with the American right; Wright wrote a popular and interesting account of the path to 9/11; Hersey's writing about Hiroshima is, I believe, commonly taught to American students in grade school; and Fritz wrote in the Atlantic, one of America's most prestigious publications.
His parents were Americans also.
America specifically has popularized many ways by which you can torture people and not leave a mark. So if a prison institution were committed to torturing their death row inmates and believed they could hide those acts, and I don't know why that would become the case if you were to not execute those inmates in public, they could presumably do just that.
Most modern western nations don't execute people, full stop. The ones who did public executions dropped the practice before the turn of the 20th century. Did they do so in the past? Yes, but 12 year olds working in factories for 14 hours a day was also a thing in the past, but is not associated with 'western values'.
I don't know. I based it on your reply to me here, where you acted with incredulity towards the assumed legitimacy of the targets of Nidal Hasan. Who were all but one, as far as I can tell, directly involved with the US military in one way or another. Alongside that I think the Fox News interview was very emblematic of exactly the kind of viewpoint blindness that I see afflicting many Americans.
As an example, from the Fox interview which another person thought would make people less sympathetic to Nidal, acting like a military base is a 'place of trust' and that the military personnel therein where defenseless, and therefor the attack was cowardly. And that if Nidal had honor, he would have challenged the American servicemen to hand to hand combat. I mean, it takes me a while to get past the absurdity of hearing such things said, but to examine it further, did the US military conduct itself with such honor? Or did they kill close to half a million civilians through war campaigns across the middle east? Where none of those men, women and children in a place of trust?
I'm not surprised when Americans who consider themselves reasonable and open minded rise on their hindlegs whenever the legitimacy of their tremendously stupid and murderous zionist foreign policy is questioned. Because despite their beliefs about themselves as being reasonable and open minded, they're often actually not all that. They just egotistically believe that about themselves, whilst acting with complete disregard for anyone and anything but themselves and their preconceived notions of 'America's interest'.
And to follow your point about open minded American literary figures, as dramatic as all the media Americans make about the atrocities they commit can be, whilst cathartic for the American, doesn't actually absolve Americans of the reality of those atrocities that they committed. It's actually quite perverted to murder hundreds of thousands of people and then write a book about how horrifying that was. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that. But then just repeat the process as soon as some foreign policy idiot theorists conception of America's hegemony gets threatened.
As I said, we have a different definition of what a national is. You think it's the stamp from the government or similar. Which is a historically absurd definition that contradicts the etymology of the word 'nation'. I think it's your ancestry. If you don't want to engage with the topic, fine, but these assertions are inane. A person born of two Palestinian parents is Palestinian. He proved that with his actions as well.
The point I am trying to get at as regards executions is that appearances are important, and executing people in secret is a bad appearance. Even if you don't think people's executions should be public, you shouldn't want witnesses removed. Even if you can secretly torture people without leaving marks (which yes, we can) you should not act in such a way as to needlessly arouse suspicion that you are doing so.
The problem with Nidal Hasan's target wasn't that he targeted soldiers. Iran has killed somewhere between a dozen and two dozen soldiers in our war with them and none of the American commentators on here have acted like that was illegitimate in the same way that Hasan's was (or as far as I can remember, at all) because Hasan is an American who turned his gun on his countrymen.
I don't think you can point me to a single star-spangled flag waver on the Motte that has argued that Artesh soldiers, acting in the normal course of their duties, should be executed for the deaths of US soldiers. I think you are mistaking your own ideas about what Americans think with what they actually say they believe. Perhaps you have had other experiences off of the Motte that I can't speak to, but what you are describing of your experiences here does not comport with what I recognize.
If you are a soldier and particularly an officer, then yes, a military base is a place of trust, and generally stateside on a military base US soldiers are disarmed, and will go to jail if they carry a weapon on base. (This is a sorry and facile state of affairs, and I think the current admin may be working to change it, which is good).
I am not sure I would say Hasan is a coward but shooting unarmed people is not generally what is associated with courage. I don't think Hasan acted much differently in terms of personal courage than any mass shooter, in the sense that he was brave enough to accept being shot by cops but not brave enough or willing enough to accept defeat to engage armed people from the start. I think that his target set could in some sense be seen as more "legitimate" than bin Laden's in the sense that they were primarily military, but also that his infamy should be greater because he betrayed a position of trust and violated the oath he took.
Did American troops kill close to half a million civilians during the Global War on Terror? No, they did not. The majority of civilian casualties throughout the Global War on Terror were not caused by US troops. I suspect you know this, which is why you used the phrase "through war campaigns" thus absolving the people who actually literally did kill civilians of their actions and rhetorically placing it on people who were innocent of their deaths, while at the same time providing a defense (a motte, if you will) if someone pointed out the inaccuracy.
I think it is completely fine to criticize the outcome of the Global War on Terror (indeed, I have done it myself) and to say that the GWOT led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. I think it is wrong to completely ignore consequentialist reasoning. But saying that the United States killed half a million citizens across the Middle East is no more sensible than saying Al Qaeda killed hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners through war campaigns across the globe – arguably less sensible, since after all Al Qaeda attacked the States.
Off of the top of my head, there are only two Americans who could reasonably qualify, and I don't think either of them felt bad about what they did, or ever pretended to.
Very well. I shall expect you, then, in the spirit of self-consistency, to refer to Trump as a European leader going forward :)
We agree that appearances are important. What we don't agree on is whether or not killing someone in private is 'secret' or not. How you could maintain that it would be, despite the American legal system is beyond me still. You keep asserting these caveats and scenarios that just aren't necessitated by anything. You can execute someone with witnesses and not have the event be public and without any risk of that person being tortured. There is no elevated arousal of suspicion regarding torture. You just keep asserting that there is and it's completely baseless beyond the average torture conditions in US prisons.
No, this is you looking at things from your American perspective. From the perspective of a Palestinian who is of a different ideological persuasion, America is still factually engaged in active warfare against people in the middle East. The soldiers in Fort Hood were not his countrymen or comrades but enemy combatants who play an active role in a military organization that has killed countless civilians in pursuit of an evil zionist ideology.
Regardless of him being a 'traitor', is a US army base a valid target? Does the US army kill innocent civilians? If the answer to these questions is yes, then what is this even about? The sympathy argument made in the Fox News interview is now even more inane than it was prior. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Inshallah.
I don't understand the point here. Iranian solders don't get to decide on when the war begins. The US just bombs them at an opportune time to the celebration of plenty of Americans. To the US that's a legitimate act of war. Why would Nidal have to operate by different rules?
If you are a combatant and see an enemy military base, it's a target. Do you see how you're just not engaging with a perspective that's not American? How the only way many Americans parse events is through American eyes? And how you repeatedly assert this frame again and again and never engage with anything beyond it?
Some might even say that killing the innocent makes you a valid target for just retribution. But many Americans seem incapable of understanding that other people also feel that way when they conceptualize of all the innocents killed by Americans.
Maybe this is a point of confusion but the exact number doesn't matter. Pick any number of thousand that you want. Are you pretending you don't understand the moral culpability of soldiers in service of an evil regime? How does America justify killing Iranian soldiers? The same way Nidal does when justifying the killing of American soldiers.
We were talking about public opinion. Maybe I can rephrase it so you better understand:
It's actually quite perverted to support the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and then read a book about how horrifying that was for the victims. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that. But then just repeat the process as soon as some foreign policy idiot theorists conception of America's hegemony gets threatened.
If you were serious about that conversation I would consider it, considering how ethnically split America is. It was basically complex colony of a wide range of Europeans. Held together by a common capacity to cooperate. Now it's unraveling through a host of ethnic contradictions as the share of non-Europeans who can't cooperate weigh the entire project down. I'd still prefer to refer to people of European ancestry who have lived in America for some time as Americans, for the same reason I don't refer to Germans as Europeans. But there's nuance there.
You specifically proposed "killing them in a manner not publicized and then announcing that they have been executed." That is secretive. I agree that the current American method of execution, which permits witnesses to attend, is not secret.
Actually, I am describing what I've seen on the Motte, a place we both comment on. You claimed, without providing any evidence, that "you and other pro-America guys on here...ultimately draw the distinction between good and bad, with America on the good side of every conflict" and are "completely incapable of recognizing any hostile act taken against them from the viewpoint of its perpetrators." I don't think this is an accurate description of Americans on here, even the ones I've argued with about foreign policy.
What's your point here? I don't think anyone is denying that Hasan sees the world something along these lines, although I am not sure this is exactly how he would articulate it.
Because
And Nidal is not a combatant of a foreign army. What I am articulating here isn't some weird "American" perspective, we have customary traditions and international law that describe these sorts of things. Nidal doesn't fit the definition of an enemy combatant.
Did any of the people Nidal shot kill innocent people?
Getting things right generally matters. If you are unfamiliar with the dynamics of the Global War on Terror and who killed hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Middle East, perhaps you should withhold some of your judgment until you have a better understanding of what actually happened.
Are you pretending American and Iranian soldiers are co-belligerents? Or than American soldiers swore an oath to uphold and protect the Iranian Constitution?
Does it have to be hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Isn't it perverted to support the murder of...one person?
In your definition, a black guy who ancestry has been in America for hundreds of years, or a Native American guy whose ancestry has been in America for thousands of years, is less American than Donald Trump, who's a latecomer.
It is not secretive to openly process someone through the justice system, sentence them to death in a fair trial, house them in a a valid (for US standards) prison facility on death row, and then unceremoniously kill them. You provide no argument, you've just asserted that this is secretive somehow again and again. If you believe these institutions are working in secret, make that case. If you don't believe that, give a justification for why institutions that are not working in secret would start if the method of execution was changed from being a publicly broadcasted event to a private one. Why would that elevate the risk of torture?
But that is exactly my experience both here and elsewhere when talking about Us foreign policy. And is in part what you are doing in this very conversation.
This is the perspective of another person. I'm sure he would articulate it differently, but this is what I presume motivates many middle Eastern terrorists.
But you don't engage with it. Instead you assert the American perspective. Despite all the innocents killed by the US. How are you not seeing this? It reminds me of this exchange between Michael Scheuer and the House Homeland Security Committee.
From his perspective he was. He sees no reason to dignify the sanctity you or others reserve for the US and its actions on the world stage. And as he demonstrated, and like America has demonstrated against many a innocent victim across the globe, those rules and laws are just a piece of paper. Those US soldiers are dead just like those civilians are. If you want to pretend that the motives of the shooter don't matter, go ahead. But I think they do. And I think that a military like the American one, that has done some many horrible things in the service of a demented foreign policy can't play victim or hide being international law, sitting on a throne of dead women and children. That were to the US at the time 'convenient targets' they later choose to call 'Collateral Damage' after the women and children dead are counted.
Can you acknowledge how absurd it would sound to a person who identifies with the victims of those attacks that people representing the organization that committed those atrocities are complaining that they themselves were attacked in a 'place of trust' that's actually a military base?
Here you are asserting your American frame. There's no argument. Just an assertion that, to you, Nidal did wrong based on specific premises. I don't think oathbreaking is the main problem when people commit a mass shooting. I think you're just being obtuse to rhetorically distance yourself from the moral arguments made by the victims of Americas zionist foreign policy. Trying to qualify the event through ways that can't be equated with the actions of US armed forces. But when we do look at the actual issue at hand, which is the killing, there are plenty of equivocal examples to be drawn on.
Did any of the civilians bombed by the US?
I'm familiar with the death toll and the number I mentioned is generally accurate, depending on how much faith you put in US universities doing research into the topic. I already said, however, that the total number would not matter to the point of contention, given that it's very high in any case. High enough to make a mockery of any US serviceman who pretends to be a victim when killed. Especially so in Yemen.
What do you think this chain of replies is about? You said Americans were generally well versed in the moral cost of the actions they support. Noting several popular authors who you allege are read in America. I maintained that many Americans generally were not, given the repeat support they show for bombing innocent civilians.
So to incorporate your example, yes. If someone murdered an innocent person on command of someone hoping to benefit some twisted foreign policy, then wrote a book about how haunting the face of their victim is as it twists in pain in their dreams. And then someone else reads this, says it affected them dearly, and then goes out and supports killing innocents in search of the same gain the murderer sought, I would call that perverted, yes. The emotions felt by the reader were purely self gratifying and perverse. The emotional turmoil just another experience to be had.
No, I don't understand this. I'm saying that when you don a military uniform, you represent that force.
For the most part, yes. And this is demonstrated by the plurality of blacks living in America today. And the history of the native Americans, who never in their thousands of years of history on the continent did anything to make it into America as it is generally known to be. That was all 'Europeans'.
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The guy is a Palestinian Muslim who just so happened to be born in the US. His actions are reflective of someone who is a Palestinian Muslim jihadist, not of an American schizo. Why didn't he just go shoot up a school or something? It's because he's a Middle Eastern terrorist.
He's not a Middle Eastern terrorist. We can say that he behaved like a Middle Eastern terrorist, or that he shared their sympathies. We can argue that this is true in some spiritual sense, if we want.
But ultimately he was born as an American citizen to American immigrants who naturalized, and despite this he found that his sympathies lay elsewhere, to the degree that he was willing to kill his fellow soldiers out of misplaced affinity towards a group of people who were never really his own.
To claim that he is Middle Eastern is to deflect scrutiny from how he came to be radicalized.
This is just ethnicity denialism.
"Middle Eastern" is not an ethnicity.
I called him a Palestinian, which is a type of Middle Easterner, just like a German is a type of European.
I agree that "German" is a type of European, and "Germans" refer to people live in Germany, or it can refer to an ethnic group of Germans, typically of German linear genetic descent who live in Germany or in German enclaves or who otherwise have a cultural affinity to Germany, or it could simply refer to a German genetic line. The problem with using the last definition is that it often makes little sense to refer to people who are of one genetic group but another cultural-political group as belonging to the genetic group. For instance, referring to Fred Trump as a German causes more confusion than clarification.
And "Palestinian" has similar issues when used here.
If we're focusing on genetic lineage, it might be more precise to refer to Hasan as Arab or perhaps Palestinian Arab (since there are a few non-Arab Palestinians). If we're focusing on ethnicity in the cultural sense, I am not sure it makes much sense to refer to him as Palestinian - he can't speak Arabic, and as far as I know spent little if any time abroad. From what I've seen, he himself might have used the term "Arab" instead of "Palestinian" if you asked him to describe his ethnic or genetic background.
From what I can tell, whatever feelings towards Palestine or Palestinian identity he may have seen in himself did not play much if any role in the shooting - he saw himself as acting to defend Islam and the Taliban (which obviously are geographically and ethnically distinct from any Palestinians he might have sympathies with), not Palestine.
I think it's fine to say that he is of Palestinian descent, or that his ethnic background is Palestinian or Arab, or what have you. You can describe him accurately. But describing him as a Palestinian terrorist causes more confusion than clarification. It would cause similar confusion if you referred to Donald Trump a European political leader (even though Donald Trump is ethnically 100% European).
To describe him as an American causes even more confusion because Americans basically never shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, sometimes do. When you say that an American became an Islamic radical and shot up a military base, it buries the lede. If he were a black guy or a white guy or even a Mexican-American who had converted to Islam and done this, sure, that's an American guy who became an Islamic terrorist. But his actions were clearly that of someone from an unintegrated Middle Eastern background who happened to be born in the United States. I don't think you can just normatively decree that anyone with an American citizenship is American and you have to call them as such out of an ideological dedication to a civic nationalist project. It obscures much more than it clarifies, it's kind of an abuse of language.
If a Transylvanian Hungarian killed a bunch of Romanians for anti-Romanian reasons, it doesn't really make any sense to insist that the perpetrator is actually Romanian even though he's a Romanian citizen from Romania. Clearly such a person wouldn't belong to the national community even if they were unambiguously legally Romanian. It's the same thing with Hasan. Yes, he was born in America and an American citizen but if he wasn't from an essentially foreign Muslim family he never would have acted the way he did, like I said above maybe he would have been mentally disturbed in a normal American way and just shot up a school.
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