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Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing? Drop the moral relativism: some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
What exactly do you mean by "moderates" here? Not hating a person who rebelled to support slavery isn't what I would call "moderate".
If the worm were to turn and you were to find yourself at the mercy of your opponents, who would you rather it be someone like you who asks "Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular tokenliberal is a bad thing?" or someone like this...
I’d rather they pick the moral side to begin with, instead of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men for the sake of their ‘honor’, and then be honorable. With gentlemen like these, you don't need scoundrels.
Spoken like an ideal Cheka or Gestapo recruit.
I would argue that the socialist propensity for this sort of thinking is the main reason the Soviet Union and Germany went down the paths they did in the first half of the 20th century.
It doesn't matter if I'm a horrible person so long as I'm on the right side is an ok thought in theory but in practice it means your side is more likely to end up as "the baddies" because it's full of horrible people like you.
Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Complete misunderstanding of my point: It doesn’t matter if I’m a decent person as long as I serve an evil cause.
You might need to hurry up, because there's not a lot of them left, but talk to anyone who lived on territories that over the course of the years were occupied by Germans as well as Russians, and ask them their relative opinion of the Wehrmacht vs. the Red Army.
You're the one misunderstanding him. The point is that people like you are known to turn non-evil causes into evil ones.
Well who doesn’t love the germans. Those slavs could have taken solace in the fact that they would have starved to death in a very orderly manner.
Which causes, slavery, nazism? Anyway, we are not even disagreeing on the sides here.
Obedience, a sense of duty, loyalty, professionalism, those things are not good in a vaccuum. When they are present in people who serve evil, they become evil. They make things worse. It is morally blind to evaluate Lee’s qualities as if he had served the good. Had he been a cowardly, dumb, lazy drunkard, thousands of lives would have been saved. His honor has been a net negative for humanity. He failed morally as very few people fail. A mean-spirited, sadistic soldier in his army only has a small fraction of the blood on Lee's hands, he's an angel compared to Lee.
It’s like Scott’s ‘asymmetric weapons’ concept. Obedience, or, say, loyalty to your home community, helps both Hitler and Roosevelt, it’s a symmetric weapon. Otoh, disobedience, ie, asking the question ‘am I really doing the right thing here, should I give my loyalty to this guy?” is asymmetric, it is more likely to help the good guy and harm the bad guy.
Who's opinion do you think I'm asking you to ask for, if not Slavs'?
Nazism seems to fit nicely into the "would not have happened were it not for people deeply convinced they're on the Right Side Of History" template.
A quick glance at the modern progressive movement says otherwise.
Slavs. I think slavs who prefered germans to russians were a bit blindsided by the neatly polished hugo boss boots and would have died in much greater numbers under Generalplan ost than under any 5 year plan.
Show me people who fought for any side, anywhere, who thought they were wrong. I implied my side is morally good, that must mean I’m a nazi. Please. You said ‘people like me’ turn good causes into evil causes, then use nazism as an example, but of course, there was nothing good about nazism from the start. It was always on its predetermined path towards genocide and war. This was apparent. Alas, germans by and large chose loyalty to their country over morality and obedience over conscience. Like lee, like you and hlynka argue, is only right and proper.
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