From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 00:47:12 MST
Natasha writes
> [Barbara wrote]
> > You can listen to their unembedded reporters online:
> > http://www.democracynow.org/about.htm
> Excellent. Thanks.
Hi Natasha. Do you happen to know whether that site is
balanced or not? Have you listened to it?
> I'm glad that Damien posted a news story that
> reported Iraqi casualties. I do not want to
> think that only American lives are important.
Shudder. Yes. Absolutely all the truths must
and should come out. Our tempest in a teapot
was a rather arcane matter of subtle etiquette
IMO. A completely separate post by him or anyone
else wouldn't have caused the slightest objection
from me, that's for sure!
But it does bring up the question of the mindset of
those---no one I know of, especially on Extropians
---who would think human lives unimportant so long
as they were "the enemy", or belonged to a "subhuman"
or despised ethnic group.
I suppose that it had evolutionary advantages at some
point in the past to see others as not "the people".
Hopefully, we are beyond that in most ways.
The second point about this is why are the American
soldier casualties and the Iraqi civilian and soldier
casualties of more concern than, say, the approximately
one-hundred fatalities on America's highways each day?
I think that there *is* a good explanation for this,
but it takes work, and I'll answer another time.
For that matter, a third point is "why are the lives
of non-combatants often assumed to be more valuable
than the lives of young soldiers?". I'm afraid that
anyone who thinks that the death of a soldier is okay,
but that the death of a civilian is somehow worse is
laboring under the delusion that war is some sort of
game, and certain people have signed up to play.
This is to be distinguished, of course, from the
entirely separate question of the morality, especially
in war time, of the deliberate killing of soldiers
as opposed to the deliberate killing of civilians.
Lee
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