I've always believed that forced apologies were mostly worthless. We all remember the John Kerry feeding frenzy. I enjoyed it as much as any rabid Right Winger would but I have a few things that I would like to say about it. Personally, I never believed that he intended to insult our troops and I also believe that once the frenzy began and he finally realized that some troops may really have been offended, he was sincerely sorry for that. The problem he had was that since he knew he didn't mean it the way it sounded, he got indignant before he was repentant. His apology was carefully worded because politics is such a rabid game that he had to be careful. I believe 100% that he didn't mean to hurt the troops and so does everyone else. His forced apology was mostly crap that was meant to deflate the frenzy.
There are rare times when an apology that seems forced is sincere and most of us can recognize when it is. So what is the purpose of demanding apologies? Is it just to make the other party aware that they stepped in it? Is it to make the "victim" feel better? I just don't get it.
If I have to force someone to apologize to me, then I am certainly aware that they don't mean it. Why would I make the demand? Is it just to make them cry uncle? Is it a victory when they give in? What is the point? Do forced apologies have any real value?
R.I.P. Steven Malcolm Anderson
Minion
of the Week
One would generally "force" toddlers (who are notoriously self-centered as a part of natural emotional and social development) to apologize to teach that it is necessary to have regard for the sensibilities of other people. The reluctance of aforementioned toddlers to participate sincerely in this exercise is rooted in the well-accepted notion that humiliation sucks.
Whether this idea can be applied to notoriously self-centered adults in the public eye is another question entirely. ;-)
I find that approach leads to older children who apologize as a strategy rather than an approach to redemption. I found it more productive to use various incidents to lead toddlers to understand that they were wrong, or did something wrong, and that there is much benefit to such an admission and a request for forgiveness.
Kids learn more from our deeds than our words.
Yeah, me too. Aside from a reminder to us that we're not infallible because we're older or bigger, it's a great object lesson to them that it's necessary to recognize self-wrongdoing, and the appropriate action when you do so.
The fifteen-year-old likes to sulk about injustices against him, though. So I need to work on the forgiveness aspect a bit.
Some would say, other than hypocrisy, they learn everything from watching what we do.
And good for you for setting the example of apologizing, when appropriate. From all appearances, that lesson needs to be far more common than it is.
This reminds me of my nephew's strategy of crying whenever he got into trouble. He had my brother convinced that if he denied wrongdoing while crying, he "must" be telling the truth. Hilarity did not ensue when that put my brother in the position of believing my nephew instead of my mother-in-law.
The whole time-out process is what we use to educate as to right and wrong. The incident is not over until she tells us why we gave her the time-out and then it's time for the apology.
Why does this remind me of Pat Benatar's "Sex as a Weapon"?
I find that approach leads to older children who apologize as a strategy rather than an approach to redemption.
You make that sound like a bad thing.
humility doesn't suck.
When in doubt, apologize -- and without conditions. In fact, I've found that it's best to apologize even when you might have a doubt that you've hurt the other person. Taking it even further, apologize even when both of you are at fault. Be the first one to apologize.
Or, as John Lennon said, "Love means having to say your sorry 10 thousand times a day."
When the big guy forces Borat onto the bed, sits on his face, and screams "Eat my ass" I was torn between making sure that my son could get enough air on one side of me, and making sure that my screaming stepdaughter on the other side had her eyes sufficiently covered.
A bit later, Borat complains to the character "My mustache still smells like your testes."
Cohen is one dedicated comedian. No way would I have been able to stand that guy shoving his ass in my face.
If that scene is as funny as your description, I'd better bring my asthma inhaler.
You know the outrage over this wasn't about Kerry's statement itself. It was a bizzare dance that really was about something else. It was about Kerry's behavior after Vietnam. His going before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and lying about his fellow service men. Testifying to rumor as if he was an eyewitness and thus lending credibility to it. This man, Kerry, is an ethical monster and the servicemen understand that.
However this was approached improperly. They should ask for an apology over what really bothers them. I think they did it more to express their feelings of being publicly cheated by an impostor. The fact that Kerry is so powerful and previously popular politician shows that there is large part of the population that is unaware of his activities.
The anti-Vietnam war crowd think that they hold the high ground on that issue. They think "The war was wrong and I had the moral fortitude to be against it so I am superior." Unfortunately, it is not so simple. The anything goes tactics used by the anti-war crowd puts many of them on a much lower rung of the ethical hierarchy. In fact, some of them ended up below the level of people who just didn't care.
I feel Kerry and many others still owe apologies over Vietnam and now they also owe apologies over Iraq.
I was in opposition to the Iraq war on the grounds that attempting to turn in into a liberal democracy is a fools errand. Despite my strong feelings on this I did not feel the need to lie about other issues. There was no need to lie and say "we knew that Iraq has no WMD". That is counterfacutal. We knew no such thing. We certainly were not in there to steal oil resources. That's a lie. We didn't kill 100,000 iraqi "civilians". That's a lie. Abu Girab was not about an intentional policy. That's a lie. There certainly was sufficient justification for invading Iraq regardless of WMD and those reasons were expressed by the President. So saying this was only about WMD was a lie.
You know part of the reason why people are not more honest about these things is the concept of being a traitor. In this case a traitor to a cause. This concept does not allow people to operate on the basis of fact. The anti-war crowd seems to think this is only a factor for those who support our military actions. They get upset when their patriotism is questioned and yet they will turn like a pack of pirahnas on their own if the don't tow the line. Imagine a democrat demanding Kerry resign over the facts revealed by the Swift Boat veterans. Not going to happen.
I should more naturally be the ally of the Democrats. I used to vote Democrat but I feel hard pressed to do so anymore. There are so many issues I am more naturally aligned with them on. Issues of religion, science, sexuality, and the like. Problem is they are so hypocritical.
Seems like Republicans are constantly resigning over issues that Democrats have also committed and continue to commit. This is even when they are caught. You know what I'm talking about even if they don't. Like the resignation of Gingrich over such a minor and convoluted issue. Or the recent resignation of that republican Senator over the page boy incident.
Don't get me wrong. I think the Republicans are a den of theives also. I just like to hope that at least when someone is caught they would be tarred , feathered, and kicked out. It's hard to have that when most politicians who is suppose to be watching out for this have their hands in the till . You could see this dynamic when the Republics backpeddled on tough investgation the New Orleans Democrat who had the $100,000 in the freezer. Their support of the idea of not searching his political offices only shows they have something to hide.
I think laws against taping/recording conversations are also highly motivated by the need for politicians to cover their tracks. I see absolutely no harm in taping a conversation you are party where the other side is engaging in criminal activity. I think it's a right.
I curious as to how you justified your behavior to your 12-year-old stepdaughter. The way you describe it didn't seem like this was a pleasant experience for her.
I'm talking about this:
I haven't seen the movie but seems like this was not the right movie for her to be seeing at her age. Did she want to go? Did you tell her that there would be scatological humor, and this kind of crude humor?
I'm sort of torn on this issue but I am thinking it's wrong. I can see a need for say showing people getting killed in a war movie, and the need for older children to see that at the parents discretion. It's not exactly like bringing a Nazi home and having him killed in front of your child because we all know it is acting.
However, I see less difference between watching two naked men wrestle and sit on each others face via a movie and inviting a couple of local bums into your home to participate in the same activities. At least for this one activity.
It's one thing to pretend you have a bag of crap that you've placed on a table when we are in on the joke, and quite another to watch a video of someone taking an actual dump in a paper bag and set it on someone elses actual dinner table. So I can see a distinction their.
I don't see a compelling lesson that I would feel a child needed to learn out of such a scene that would require me to force that child to violate his or her natural sensibilities. People don't naturally gravitate to crap at the dinner table. I'm not saying a child this doesn't bother might not get a chuckle out of this if it was simulated and used as a device to humiliate a villian.
People don't naturally gravitate to killing either but we need to know that there are some that do and how to deal with them.
That was a little background so you can get where I'm coming from. Here's what I don't get. How can a scene involving to actual naked men wrestling and then one sitting on the face of another be considered "OK" on one of the criteria I have expressed above? By "OK" I mean something that can be justifiably argued necessary to subject someone else to. It doesn't seem to fit any of the criteria I have mentioned. Not compelling ones. Not so far as I can see.
Have you ever visited www.rotten.com? Do you know what a disturbing image is? Do you understand why they are disturbing? If you do find them disturbing would you feel violated if I were to bring you to a venue where I knew you were going to be subjected to such without telling you?
I am not asking you this because I myself find this stuff disturbing. I'm not asking you this because my history is spotless in this regard. I have at least accidentally subjected my own kids to movies that were more disturbing than I should have.
I had a kind of both fucked up and idyllic childhood. My father was quite liberal about child rearing. In this he was both right and wrong. In this he was both responsible and not responsible for things that happened. I ended up having to work many ethical issues out for myself. This was both good and bad. Good because I have what I believe to be a better grasp on ethical issues. Bad because I had to repeat many mistakes that others had already gone through the experience of making.
When I was very young I did find certain things disturbing. Naked people for one. I didn't feel comfortable being around naked adult males at the YMCA locker rooms. The skinning of a chipmunks for another. When I was at 4H camp and the nature counselor skinned a chimpmunk in front of us to show us how to harvest fur it when quezy. Especially when he pulled the pelt off the animal like it was a pullover sweater and the pelt was attached at the wrists. Seeing it invert like that and the tug and the clipping off of the little feet just was a bit much. I nearly fainted. I was there voluntarily however and knew what was coming. In fact I was there to toughen myself up about delivering harm.
Certain bad things that happened to me in the past and certain events happening in the world made me believe I needed to toughen up. Some of it was typical like a bully attacking me for no reason and others not so normal. One thing that bothered me was the Vietnam War and the fact that I might be drafted. Also there was the scare of atomic war. I was a serious kid about such things in part because I had nearly died on several occasions, and had been in danger of being murdered without even being aware. I had witnessed a statutory rape and didn't even know it was wrong at the time, had nearly drowned and other episodes.
I naturally did not anger easily and discovered that I did not recognize when others meant me harm until it was too late. I also had no desire to harm someone else, in fact it would have bothered me more if I'd hurt the other fellow. I didn't see the need. I wasn't a complete pussy. I liked to roughhouse and a bloody nose happening by accident didn't really bother me. Taking someone’s eye out would be a different story.
In any case I became completely inure to feelings of distress under such circumstances. In fact to the point where I was not attune to other peoples continued innocence in this regard, even adults. This lead me to being less than sensitive to others and I feel that if I had it to do over again I would do otherwise. Probably things that are would be more disturbing to others than see two guys wrestling naked.
The reason I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong is because others don't know your true intentions. I for instance do not have the desire to hurt others and yet my actions were designed to put the fear in others that was a possibility. It was in fact partially a defense mechanism. So I would do things like pop the heads off flies, club a fish to death, spear a frog, that were not truly necessary to survive or even to learn anything. Anything I could have learned from such I could have done in private. The purpose instead was to scare the other kids to keep them from making me a target of their cruelties to humans. These are not excuses but motivations I had at the time.
Another thing that influenced this was that my teachers (both educational and religious) were teaching me things that were not true. Teaching me that certain animals are not aware of pain, that they are not conscious, that they have no self-awareness, etc. I in fact I believe now that consciousness is on a continuum and that animals are self-aware. In fact, I believe that they even have rudimentary moral understanding.
It's more complex than that but I'll leave it at for now. In any case, I was not acting in my enlightened self interest because I was ignorant or mistaking on certain facts. It was bad for both my reputation and for my relationships with others that I behaved in this way. Which was bad for me. I did have friends who were "insiders" on this behavior but I am sure I alienated some who knew. I would mostly do this kind of thing around the tougher kids as a kind of warning. But it certainly was an abnormal way to deal with the challenges of childhood.
What I am concerned with is that such behavior does cause unease and fear in some individuals. In fact, it had bad effects on me. It may be necessary to kill a fish to eat but being totally inured to it's suffering to the point of thinking it a device for humor may well be disturbing to others. They might think you would find humor in the same treatment of humans. Just because I was making a distinction at the time doesn't mean they could, especially another child.
I lived in the country and it's hard for city kids to understand but we do make such distinctions. Problem is that with transportation we would have kids from urban or semi-urban backgrounds who just didn't "get it".
This is not something that “the religious” were immune to. There are plenty of church-going kids that have this kind of background where the use of animals as food items inures them to the suffering of animals. They are taught to do this under certain prescribed boundaries but it’s very easy to run beyond and many do. I think certain arguments that would have made me reflect on this were not explicitly discussed in either a religious or public school environment. In fact, I have never heard the kinds of arguments I would make done in public. It’s not a perspective that the P.E.T.A. types can even understand so they can’t make the arguments. They think animal cruelty is wrong on the basis of what are weak or invalid reasons, their own squeamishness, that animals have the same rights as humans and the like. Their opponents can rightly state that animals do not have rights. This however is also an incomplete and shallow understanding.
So now that I have aired some minor portion of dirty laundry you can see I am not doing this because I am such a sensitive soul myself. On a certain level it really does not bother me that your daughter saw this stuff. For all I know some day your daughter might be asking "Make my face smell like your testes." So why should it bother me. Then again she may turn out to be the kind of lady who isn’t into that sort of thing. In which case it might bother me that she was subjected to this movie.
After your description I don’t even want to see this movie. At first I was against his humor. It’s kind of racist. I saw the guy on Letterman or Leno and thought some of his stuff was funny. It still bothered me though. I’m not directly offended but it bothers me that others would be and not because they are over sensitive. Some of it was hilarious like his digs at Madonna when he said he was having a kid in the hopes of selling it to her. That’s funny, but he mixes it with this crass stuff. I can only take so much of that.
Jim Carrie for the most part is funny but I can’t take that bit where he makes his ass talk. It just isn’t funny and I’m embarrassed to be in the audience when he does that bit. I’m not saying you can’t find it funny, or that I wouldn’t have at 17 years old but it no longer works for me.
It’s sort of like porn. I’m not against it but I don’t see how those guys get off on the scatological stuff.
So in any case, I don’t know if it’s just me but I’m thinking you left us hanging there with too little info on why you would be taking a 12 year old girl to see to naked men wrestle and sit on each other’s faces with there asses. Perhaps you made a mistake and were not aware of this scene? I don’t know but it sure has me wondering. Is your stepdaughter fine with this? Have you talked with her about it. I’m still learning at 47 years old so I do would like to know. Perhaps I’m being a pussy and she’s just fine with it. I don’t see how this prepares her for an adult life.
She's a big Cohen fan, she was screaming with laughter, and she loved the film. All the members of our family have a fairly edgy sense of humour, and her side of the family are as tough as nails.
I understand that this kind of humour isn't for everyone, but I know my kids well. The eight-year-old didn't go, for example.
Also, we found out that when she and some friends went to the theater recently to see a light comedy, they instead snuck in to see Saw 3. That we were not so liberal about. Violence and sadism are as not nearly as benign as a silly wrestling scene and a few penises on the screen.
Oh, and Borat isn't racist. Not even close. He's mocking racism.
I think this sums up the problem....someone has some real iiiiiiiiiiissues.
And what the f*ck are you doing, asshat? You think you have a clue what was in John Kerry’s heart when he left the jungles of that godforsaken war, having killed men and ordered other men to implement the very rules of engagement he deplored when he returned? And almost none of what Kerry said or testified to has been proved untrue.
You wouldn’t know a lie or an ethical lapse if it bit your ass off.
I know and respect the Good Queen for not banning but perhaps someone could supply some code so that only every 10th word you write appears. The posts would still be way too long and still plenty inane but at least it would save people some time.
Find yourself a good editor and an even better therapist.
Yeah, I'm sure I've earned a good banning more than once myself but at least I try to keep my idiocy mercifully short and to the point.
Hahaha, you Canucks. Obviously, in this country violence and sadism (especially in revenge) are "entertainment" and penises are "obscene." Fortunately for you, we export our “values”.
Speaking of Canada, did you see the Economist's Democracy list that just come out? It ranks countries according to a number of indicators that measure how much of a democracy it is. Canada comes in ninth-best position (damn you Sweden, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and Australia).
Guess where the US comes in?
This is where I get all smug.
Ha! Perhaps we should just disband the union before we're overtaken by the Czech Republic. Being part of an empire in decline is never fun.
How’s the job market looking up there ol’ buddy?
Yes, but manually masturbating hamsters for Proctor and Gamble doesn't count.
I just got back from out of town. What did I miss? And what was that about hamsters?
Dude, you are kinky. Did you get that from the nuns?
I believe that Kerry's testamony was in fact based on lies.
"I think this sums up the problem....someone has some real iiiiiiiiiiissues."
Actually that's normal. Seeing other kids naked didn't bother me. I was around 5-7 years old at the time. Were you a big fan of adult male genitals at that age? Maybe that sums up your problem, whatever that means.
Actually, sexualizing young children is not as benign as you might think. I know several people who as young children during the heady days of the sexual revolution were exploited by the hippie crowd and their "free love".
On the other hand going frog spearing never hurt anyone.
You can believe that pigs have wings, dipsh*t (actually, I wouldn't think you any less insightful if you did). Based merely on your pathetically ignorant beliefs, you don’t go slandering the morality of an apparently dedicated and honorable public servant who went to war and killed and bled for his country and then bravely confessed to and stood against moral outrages he participating in. You especially don’t do it on the say so of a bunch of warped, frustrated old fools who made despicable assertions about a fellow soldier’s conduct under fire of which they had no first-hand knowledge, for partisan political purposes.
You really should avoid discussing your moral judgments altogether, you haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.
I suggest you actually inform yourself about what those "bunch of warped, frustrated old fools" actually asserted and whether they are factual or not. I also suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts about whether they had first hand knowledge or not before you make claims that they didn't. I also suggest you familiarize yourself with exactly how many days (not weeks) that the vets who actually stood by Kerry actually served with him. While those who served with him for long periods in close proximity, those old fools, don't particularly like him.
You just made yourself perfect example of what I was talking about.
You're new around here, Brian, so I'll forgive you for not knowing that I've written more on the subject than you've probably ever read. And I should correct myself on one thing. Actually, you really should avoid discussing just about anything, you quite consistently haven't a clue what you’re talking about.
I have read much of what you wrote on this subject, shep. You were often wrong then, and you are often wrong now. Your facts frequently are actually incorrect opinions, and your conclusions frequently aren't logical. For example, you seem to be defending one vet at the expense of ridiculing all the others. That's an incoherent position at best.
And the quality of your comments has only decreased. You used to avoid insults.
Brian,
I suggest you drop this topic in this venue. It won't be fruitful. Trust me, I have experience.
Yours,
Wince
You’re entitled to your own opinion, Wince, not your own facts.
One vet, according to all contemporaneous testimony and records (and at least two subsequent official investigations), distinguished himself under fire, was (lightly) wounded in combat on multiple occasions, was discharged and returned to protest this country's war policy (specifically, the rules of engagement) and its inevitable consequences. More than thirty years later, in the midst of a campaign for president, a group of vets who had no first-hand knowledge of Kerry’s actions, organized and funded by Republican attack-dog partisans, spread viscous stories going to murder, cowardice, lying under oath, and other charming accusations.
There’s nothing "incoherent" about the position that people who smear others for partisan political ends should be condemned for their conduct and that the victim of that smear campaign doesn’t deserve to be called an “ethical monster” by some piss-ant engineer who thinks that morality is doing what serves one’s self-interest. The fact that you can’t tell the difference suggests that your moral compass is spinning a bit freely as well.
That you’re still arguing on behalf of that mendacious, despicable sh*t and the bankrupt Republican part line after the last three years, as you’ve been proved wrong about just about everything, tells to me that you simply aren’t up to judging my opinions or mastery of the facts. In the future, just so you know, I’m not the least bit interested in your opinion unless you can back it up with something more than your delusional arrogance.
If you sense anger, you got one thing right. I’m outraged by what your chosen political party has done to my country (not to mention the rest of the world) and I’m sick and tired of arguing "the facts" with people who’ve proved themselves impervious to the observable reality of that damage, its causes and their own responsibility for failing, to this very day, to reject it. Sorry.
See what I mean. Not fruitful. Never will be fruitful. There are some topics, some venues and some people which are not worth mixing.
shep,
You’re entitled to your own opinion, Wince, not your own facts.
If you read carefully, you'll discover that I didn't present any facts, I presented only opinions.
I’m not the least bit interested in your opinion unless you can back it up
Tried that before, at considerable length. Someone convinced me it was not fruitful.
Yours,
Wince
Trouble is, you never succeeded (length isn't the issue, facts are). That's why it's never fruitful.
Yours,
Wince
I've already said I'm not wasting anymore time on Shep in the other thread. His summaries on Kerry are so sketchy they almost apply to Hitler except had serious wounds not scratches.
All hail saint Kerry or perhaps Shep wants us to worship him.
Good. Now you and I can discuss it!
1. Can Kerry still have a Nixon goes to China moment and patch things up with the Vietnam vets, including the Swift Boat Vets? I say he can, and that it would show such significant statesmanship that he would suddenly become a good candidate for the Presidency. I wouldn't vote for him, because I still wouldn't agree with him on most issues. But I would admire him, in the way I admire Tony Blair, even though don't agree with him on most issues.
2. Can the Swift Boat Vets have a Nixon goes to China moment and patch things up with the Vietnam protestors, including Kerry? I say they can, and the man who lead them to that point would earn a debt of gratitude from the nation.
3. Would a national reconciliation council allow us to recover from the Vietnam syndrome? I say it could, and would be a logical follow on to number 1 and number 2.
How could these things be done? I have some ideas.
But this leads us back to an earlier point in the thread.
4. Could shep/Brian/Wince have a Nixon goes to China moment and patch things up with the opposition on this thread? I say we could.
If I were to do so, I would start thus - although I warn you that I may not be man or Christian enough to finish. I apologize for this statement:
When someone cannot tell the difference between facts and opinion and is not willing to learn, discussion is unlikely to be fruitful.
Look, I do think that shep, along with most everyone else, has a tendency to label opinion as fact. But it is patently unfair to say he is unwilling to learn. It is more accurate to say that I was unwilling to discuss. An honest discussion of this matter would have to examine David Hume's scepticism and Logical Positivism.
Supposedly, you might say, "I see Henderson has painted his house." A Logical Positivist might reply, "Well, he's painted this side." A second Logical Positivist might reply, "Someone has painted this side, but maybe not Henderson". A third might say, "The color of this side of the house has changed from what I remember, but what makes you certain it was paint?"
What we generally have in blogs, political rhetoric and even the news media are assertions with wildly varying degrees of reliability. Not only do we not get our own facts, frequently there are no facts to be found, merely well-informed speculation. Worse, we are all too often pointing to different monsters on the edges of 17th century maps and discussing whether they are best dispatched with harpoon or musket.
Yours,
Wince
Wince
Nothing to argue with there. But, since you admittedly self-sensor your sources of information away from those with which you disagree, you limit your access to facts, opinions and your ability to learn.
But it isn’t really about facts. As you comfort yourself by repeating, facts are often hard to know. However, by hewing so close to what you want to believe, you dismiss some of those rare, knowable facts that manage to slip through your self-filter and might inform your understanding.
You might want to consider the possibility that my opinions and facts aren’t wrong, it’s just that you don’t like them (obviously, you like them far less than those of some bile-filled grunt who never even bothered to really listen to what John Kerry was saying about Vietnam).
Yours,
Wince
Looks like a very good recommendation. I'll move it to the top of my "to read" list on your say so, Wince. Thank you.
What would be required is for Kerry to come clean. Release his war records, expose the BS that was happening at VVAW, and such. That however is not going to happen because it would alienate his base and not gain him many new supporters.
Many of the anti-war crowd don't merely want us out but want to see the other side "win" and to embarrass the US even if it means twisting the facts. So instead of seeing unfortunate incidents for what they are and trying to push for corrective measures they instead try to portray them as policy. Instead of Abu Ghraib being about some sick bastards who were not trained (who needs training not to do that sick crap) or supervised well enough it becomes about the administrations pro-torture policy. Not because they provide evidence but because they just strongly believe that Republicans/Capitalism are evil.
Generally true. But the other side would also have to come clean. For example I strongly suspect that I would be appalled by the policy governing the bombing campaign in Cambodia.
Yours,
Wince
What exactly about the bombing campaign would you like to know that you don't know about already? Is it going to change your mind on anything? Is it going to, for instance, make you believe that communism hadn't already let to the slaughter close to or more than 100 million people prior to the Vietnam war? Is it going to make you believe that all the Vietnamese and Cambodians slaughtered by the communists are alive today?
My aim is reconciliation. That usually requires movement on both sides.
What exactly about the bombing campaign would you like to know that you don't know about already?
I want to know the policy governing the bombing campaign. Did it follow international law? Did it follow U.S. law? Why does Rudy Rummel say it caused a 200,000 person democide? If so, what U.S. policies, if any, still need to change?
Is it going to change your mind on anything?
I don't know.
Is it going to, for instance, make you believe that communism hadn't already let to the slaughter close to or more than 100 million people prior to the Vietnam war?
No.
Is it going to make you believe that all the Vietnamese and Cambodians slaughtered by the communists are alive today?
No.
Those are things that the doves have to answer for to help effect reconciliation. Mistakes prosecuting the war are what the hawks, such as myself, have to answer for to help effect reconciliation.
Yours,
Wince
When we catch one politician with his hand in the till we don't wait for every politician in the other party to confess all their sins before we act. Kerry has been "caught" and now needs to come clean.
Gonna be hard to know the exact policy that with Nixon dead and many others. There was an investigation already and the pro-war side already pretty much lost on this issue. What more do you want?
I guess by that you're asking if it violated any treaties we've agreed to. Isn't the accepted position that it broke the neutrality of Cambodia?
Again accepted position is that it did not.
Actually I don't think they need to answer for the deaths unless they used deception to get their way or sided with the communists, and on an individual basis not as a group. I think Kerry qualifies.
I oversimplified. Reconciliation is a complex process. BTW, I was a dove at the time, too.
Gonna be hard to know the exact policy that with Nixon dead and many others. There was an investigation already and the pro-war side already pretty much lost on this issue. What more do you want?
Well, I probably should just read Rummel, and see what he says. But the fact that the pro-war side lost may just mean that people are believing various myths about Vietnam.
Isn't the accepted position that it broke the neutrality of Cambodia?
I haven't accepted it. Cambodia wasn't neutral. Cambodia wanted to be neutral, but since it was unable to enforce it's neutrality and keep out the NVA it wasn't neutral. If I want to be well, but if I don't get a flu shot because I can't afford it and I don't even try to get help from any of the richer folks who have helped peolple get flu shots before, and I catch the flu, I'm not well. I'm sick with the flu.
Actually I don't think they need to answer for the deaths unless they used deception to get their way or sided with the communists, and on an individual basis not as a group.
I think they need to acknowledge that those deaths were preventable, that we were in a position to prevent them, and that their preferred policy made that prevention impossible.
Yours,
Wince
That’s some moral equivalency you’ve got there, Wince. The Vietcong, Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, Cambodia, the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, and New Zealand all killed people. “[T]he doves” didn’t kill anyone (although I hear they’re delicious done Creole style).
"I think they need to acknowledge that those deaths were preventable, that we were in a position to prevent them, and that their preferred policy made that prevention impossible."
You can believe what you wish but we are getting a stark lesson right now about the limits and costs of trying to prevent “preventable” deaths, assuming that’s what you think we’re doing in Iraq. And you don’t even know how many of those Communist killings wouldn’t have occurred without us trying to prevent “preventable” deaths. Not to mention our own deplorable killing of hundreds of thousands of innocents, blood that is on our hands. On it’s face, it is a fool’s errand to try to use massive military force to save lives.
As you can see. Some are just irrational and believe in contradictory positions. They believe that pacifism is the only justifiable course and yet also believe the massive military force (sans carpet bombing and nukes) used in WWII was valid.
Also regarding this statement ...
Does that make them morally culpable if they didn't lie, take forcable action, advocate for communism, or the like? I don't think so.