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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.
Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.
I don’t get what you’re saying here. They weren’t so bad, compared to some hypothetical regime that would commit a genocide of equal proportion, but would purposefully, systematically torture people before killing them… is that your point?
I don’t think a bullet to the neck under stalin or getting stabbed under pol pot was worse. They didn't go out of their way to make undesirable units suffer either.
Yep. I mean, say the Catholic church thought I was a heretic or something. Or some bush war where half the point of the army is that it's where you stuff your psychopaths so they do something useful. And I think that's mostly attributable to the professionalism of the German army. Sure, they served an evil regime - granted! But I think you're just underestimating how much farther an army can fall, and how much more personal suffering it can cause if it has lower standards.
My point is - there is still a point to praising honor and professionalism in the army of Sauron. I would absolutely honor the righteous Orc who ran a tight ship and whose men only ate alive a small fraction of his POWs. - In war, you may die either way, but you can still have a preference whether to die with your limbs attached and your rectum intact. Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives. The lowest of humanity is very, very low.
This seems like a debate between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Your "righteous" (and possibly genocidal) Orc who's running a tight ship and whose men are only eating one PoW in twenty alive is probably better at running his ship than the Orc on the next ship over who are eating every single PoW alive and leaving PoW bones laying around on the ship deck. That "righteous" orc is making a greater contribution to the army of Sauron.
Yeah - police officers in really bad neighborhoods, ER doctors in the same areas, maybe people in psych units, people in maximum security prisons, and combat soldiers might see stuff like this. I'll grant that the Nazis were orderly in their mass murdering. I've heard it said essentially that outside of the huge piles of bodies coming out of the murder factories they built, the Nazis behaved more or less decently...although that is one hell of a qualifying statement. It's like saying "Sure. Hans is a decent guy if you're not looking at the 50 bodies he's got buried out back. Ivan, however...Ivan's a bit more disorganized with his shit. And let's not even talk about Akira, he's hopped up on meth and eating the bodies."
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