Jordan 2, ISIS/L 1

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Musashi92 wrote:
I am currently drinking a Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier. What better way to wage war on those who want to ban bacon and wheat beer? Just like the Poles got back at the regime by wearing denim jeans, I offer my Teuton blood tribute to the gods and drink the sweet nectar of the motherland.
[/quote]

If the beer is German, then I believe it would be the sweet nectar of the fatherland[/quote]

Agreed. I like the Canadian beers also but they are hard to come by in Oz

[quote]SexMachine wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]SexMachine wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]TheKraken wrote:

Kind of playing devil’s advocate here but…How is it not comparable?

[/quote]

The Crusades were a response to a few hundred years of Muslim aggression.

The Crusaders didn’t attack and slaughter other Christians.
[/quote]

Afraid they did. The fourth crusade was against the Byzantines. Further, the shifting alliances in Jerusalem included Christians against Christians and Christians allied with Muslims.
[/quote]

Yeah, my clarifying post hadn’t shown up yet.

My point was to show how the Crusades were NOT comparable to ISIS’ jihad.

ISIS has gone out of its way to principally and primarily and mostly kill fellow Muslims (and of course everyone else they can get their hands on). That was NOT the goal of the Crusades. That goal, [u]GENERALLY SPEAKING[/u], was to repel the Muslims in the never ending game of geopolitics.[/quote]

Agree. But they were a very messy series of conflicts and the Byzantines got ripped off. They allowed thousands of European fighters to enter/cross through their territory then they(Holy Roman Empire/Europeans) decided to just sack Constantinople instead. Many crusades; many motives; all very messy.[/quote]

The Crusades actually began as the beleaguered Byzantine Emperor invited European Christians to fight as auxiliary troops, but soon the movement took on a life of it’s own.

[quote]Severiano wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]TheKraken wrote:

Kind of playing devil’s advocate here but…How is it not comparable?

[/quote]

The Crusades were a response to a few hundred years of Muslim aggression.

The Crusaders didn’t attack and slaughter other Christians.
[/quote]

Huh?

Tell me, o wise one, what is the origin of the expression “kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out”?

[/quote]

So, you’re denying what I posted?

But I should’ve written, “generally speaking.” The Crusades were launched to counter Muslim aggression.

Today’s ISIS? Well, an examination of the facts shows Muslims slaughtering Muslims at will and with far more Muslims than Christians being killed.

Is that comparable to the Crusades?[/quote]

I suppose “generally speaking” would have gotten you off the hook.

“Generally speaking”, no. Christians did not kill other Christians during the Crusades. Generally speaking it was Muslims and Jews.
[/quote]

Albigensian crusade was Christian against Christian. Otherwise you are right.
[/quote]

No Albigensian Crusade was a Crusade against Gnostic Heretics.

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
“Western idealism, universal freedom, is such that all lives are to be respected on a
basic, fundamental level” is some SIXTIES hippie bullshit.[/quote]

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is where I get that sense of idealism from, not the hippie movement.
[/quote]The Declaration of Independence lists those as “unalienable rights”. When that was written, they still owned slaves, were slaughtering native Americans by the village (men, women and children) and had no problem what so ever about waging a bloody war with Britain for seven years after that. Methinks there’s just a TOUCH of hypocrisy in that idealism… [quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
The commanders in charge during WWII certainly didn’t have that bullshit holding them back when we nuked the shit out of Japan. And HOLY SHIT… IT WORKED! Took the will to fight right out of those imperialist bastards to the point where they GAVE UP THEIR ARMY… [/quote]

Current historical thought holds that the U.S. destroying the shit out of the Japanese forces, to the point that the homelands themselves were threatened, essentially removed any legitimacy that militarist had. The Japanese people saw that their armies were not, after all, invincible. This paved the way for the more moderate factions to speak out.
[/quote]Imagine that…[quote]
[/quote]A history lesson that has nothing to do with the situation at hand OR what I wrote. [quote]

In short… You’re wrong. You are speaking out of your ass.
[/quote]No, you decided to give me a history lesson. Different times, different set of circumstances - I don’t think the bomb is the ONLY thing we should do. It’s a START. Do you REALLY think that I believe this is 1945? C’mon, buddy… [quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
But I’m just talking out of my ass. We should just pretend that shit didn’t happen and that the Japanese DIDN’T completely and utterly STOP all aggressive activities when we wiped out two of their cities. I’m not saying it’s NICE. I’m saying it would WORK. And that it’s a strategy that we should consider.

You apparently had a problem with a country HANGING two convicted terrorists in response to their group BURNING A MAN ALIVE… [/quote]

No, I have a problem with responding to brutality with brutality. Declaring war and beating a country to submission after they attacked us is fine. What the U.S. did to Japan is perfectly fine, and in my honest opinion the U.S. should have destroyed Japan and completely rewritten them in the manner we did with Germany. The Japanese should have been humbled to the point that they are forever apologetic to the East Asian countries they brutalized as does the Germans to the Jews. None of this happened, and it still pisses me off.
[/quote]I can’t argue with you on that point - that’s pretty fucked up.[quote]
As I mentioned to Aragorn, I was responding more to this “These ISIS terrorists are scum and should be treated as such.” portion of Gkhan’s posts. Fighting and killing people is fine, but when we descend to being as brutal as they are, then what moral ground do we have? It becomes a pointless exercise and we lose any justification we had in destroying them.

[/quote]Who gives a fuck about the “moral high ground”? War is not won with “morality”, it is won by destroying your enemy to the point where he cannot attack you anymore. THAT’S IT. Morality has no place in war. Especially when you are fighting against religious fanatics who will willingly DIE for their cause. At that point, you can throw your morality out the window if you want even a CHANCE of winning against such a determined enemy. Our “justification” in destroying them lies not with any “moral authority”, it lies in the fact that they are burning people, cutting their heads off, raping villages of women and girls, and persecuting EVERYONE who they come across - even other muslims. FUCK THEM! They don’t get the privilege of being treated like a “normal” enemy. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply here - it’s not like THEY will follow it! Sometimes to be a champion, you must explore the darkness too…[quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
We aren’t dealing with a Western democracy. We are dealing with a pack of sub-human animals who are brainwashed by an evil religion. And that religion is spreading and putting ALL Western democracy in grave danger.[/quote]

BULLSHIT. The Germans killing off 6 million people and forcibly murdering and sterilizing anyone they don’t like doesn’t qualify them as “sub-human animals?” What of the Japanese murdering tens of millions of East Asian peoples? Doesn’t that qualify them as “sub-human animals”?
[/quote]

I wasn’t alive during WWII, so I can’t really DO anything about that now, can I? Can YOU? Why are you so pissed about something that’s outside of your sphere of influence. It happened, it’s over, end of story - learn from it and move on. ISIS is HERE and NOW. They are a blight on our planet that needs to be wiped out. We have the power to do it, but not the will. Why aren’t you pissed off about THAT?

Meanwhile, fucking Obama keeps insisting, “they aren’t muslims”. Islam is a religion of peace. And all that other apologetic liberal bullshit.

If terrorists aren’t muslim, then why did they all get a copy of the koran when they were in Gitmo? Why were they allowed to pray five times a day? CUZ THEY ARE MUSLIM!

Why did we (at least CLAIM) bury OBL in a clean white sheet at sea according to a MUSLIM tradition?

Our President is a fucking LIAR and he is twisting the truth so that he can undermine American values.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
The Declaration of Independence lists those as “unalienable rights”. When that was written, they still owned slaves, were slaughtering native Americans by the village (men, women and children) and had no problem what so ever about waging a bloody war with Britain for seven years after that. Methinks there’s just a TOUCH of hypocrisy in that idealism… [/quote]

Their hypocrisy (which many of them fully recognized and had no choice but to deal with given the South) is besides the point. You accused me of hippie crap and I told you that I get my ideals from the Declaration.

Edit-
To add a bit more to this-

You can never uphold an ideal perfectly, nor do people necessarily try very hard. But it is vitally important that the common people keep the ideal alive. That is what it means to keep government and people accountable for their actions.

to claim that X is a failure and a fraud because of occasional misjudgments is a bad argument for that reason.

The U.S. is founded on the principle that we are all free people and must have the freedom to seek our desires. Things take time, and as time passes we see this principle coming to fruition decade by decade. I personally believe that much of the turmoil today is a result of this fruition, and I am perfectly fine with that.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
A history lesson that has nothing to do with the situation at hand OR what I wrote. [/quote]

You wrote that the a-bomb ended the war. It was part of it, but not the only thing.

Plus, the all important thing- The Japanese didn’t surrender unconditionally, and that was really the reason why they gave up. If we continued to demand unconditional surrender then in all likelihood they would have fought on, a-bomb and Russians in Manchuria be damned.

In any case, it was MEANT to be a history lesson.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

Who gives a fuck about the “moral high ground”? War is not won with “morality”, it is won by destroying your enemy to the point where he cannot attack you anymore. THAT’S IT. Morality has no place in war.[/quote]

You’re confusing war goals and base brutality. As I wrote, it is one thing to be fighting wars. It is another to match brutality with brutality.

For example, why bother keeping prisoner of wars? They waste your food and manpower. Just kill them, right?

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I wasn’t alive during WWII, so I can’t really DO anything about that now, can I? Can YOU? Why are you so pissed about something that’s outside of your sphere of influence. It happened, it’s over, end of story - learn from it and move on. ISIS is HERE and NOW. They are a blight on our planet that needs to be wiped out. We have the power to do it, but not the will. Why aren’t you pissed off about THAT?[/quote]

You miss the point. The German and Japanese took part in arguably the worst war-crimes and atrocities in human history. Are they NOT to be called sub-humans simply because it occurred 70 years ago?

You are dealing with classification here, and so time is not particularly relevant. It may be that the Germans and Japanese TODAY are not sub-humans because of the enlightening light of Western civilization, but they certainly seemed to be sub-human to me 70 years ago.

And why am I pissed off about things that occurred 70 years ago? Well gee… BECAUSE MY GRANDPARENTS AND UNCLES LIVED THROUGH IT AND THEY NEVER RECEIVED JUSTICE.

[quote]Gkhan wrote:

[quote]Severiano wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]TheKraken wrote:

Kind of playing devil’s advocate here but…How is it not comparable?

[/quote]

The Crusades were a response to a few hundred years of Muslim aggression.

The Crusaders didn’t attack and slaughter other Christians.
[/quote]

Huh?

Tell me, o wise one, what is the origin of the expression “kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out”?

[/quote]

So, you’re denying what I posted?

But I should’ve written, “generally speaking.” The Crusades were launched to counter Muslim aggression.

Today’s ISIS? Well, an examination of the facts shows Muslims slaughtering Muslims at will and with far more Muslims than Christians being killed.

Is that comparable to the Crusades?[/quote]

I suppose “generally speaking” would have gotten you off the hook.

“Generally speaking”, no. Christians did not kill other Christians during the Crusades. Generally speaking it was Muslims and Jews.
[/quote]

Albigensian crusade was Christian against Christian. Otherwise you are right.
[/quote]

No Albigensian Crusade was a Crusade against Gnostic Heretics.
[/quote]

To a Catholic, everyone who isn’t a Catholic is a heretic. And vice-versa: an astounding number of Protestants of my acquaintance vociferously deny that Catholics are Christians.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
To a Catholic, everyone who isn’t a Catholic is a heretic. And vice-versa: an astounding number of Protestants of my acquaintance vociferously deny that Catholics are Christians.
[/quote]

I know a couple who are passive-aggressive towards Catholics. Heck, there’s a girl at my parent’s church who dates a Catholic guy. The fact that he’s Catholic is actually a big deal, and these are otherwise fairly liberal people who live in SoCal, so one would think they would ascribe to the whole “yay everything is awesome!” type of Christianity.

Incidentally, I really do not like the “yay everything is awesome!” type of Christianity. It’s… just not right.

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
To a Catholic, everyone who isn’t a Catholic is a heretic. And vice-versa: an astounding number of Protestants of my acquaintance vociferously deny that Catholics are Christians.
[/quote]

I know a couple who are passive-aggressive towards Catholics. Heck, there’s a girl at my parent’s church who dates a Catholic guy. The fact that he’s Catholic is actually a big deal, and these are otherwise fairly liberal people who live in SoCal, so one would think they would ascribe to the whole “yay everything is awesome!” type of Christianity.

Incidentally, I really do not like the “yay everything is awesome!” type of Christianity. It’s… just not right.[/quote]

Well, as an escapee from a yay everything is awesome church in California, I can tell you that the same sort of passive-aggressive anti-Catholic sentiment pervaded there too. It’s like how you will never really trust the Japanese. Ain’t enough water in the world to pass under some bridges.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Well, as an escapee from a yay everything is awesome church in California, I can tell you that the same sort of passive-aggressive anti-Catholic sentiment pervaded there too. It’s like how you will never really trust the Japanese. Ain’t enough water in the world to pass under some bridges.[/quote]

The one my parents went to back in MA didn’t. I should remember that it’s never a good idea to generalize.

I don’t actually hold ill-will towards random Japanese people, nor the Japanese culture in general. I love judo ffs.

I do detest the fact that they got away with a lot of horrible things, and that occasionally the old-school militarists will pretty much flaunt that they got away with it.

[quote]Chushin wrote:
Um, and you are…what?[/quote]

As equally mistaken as Angry_chicken, and thus speaking out of my ass as well.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

To a Catholic, everyone who isn’t a Catholic is a heretic. And vice-versa: an astounding number of Protestants of my acquaintance vociferously deny that Catholics are Christians.
[/quote]

You’re correct, yet splitting hairs here, so Gnostics are considered Christians? Possibly…

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Yeah and who gives a crap if they hung these two terrorists or not? They were already on death row, the woman in particular for being part of an attack on a Jordanian hotel which killed 60 people. Shit, in my hometown there’s a guy who’s been on death row since the late 80’s and the crimes he committed against a small unarmed child would make for a good horror film but no one has the balls to end his life and he’s still alive almost thirty years later.

These ISIS terrorists are scum and should be treated as such. They cry when we bomb their “women and children” and yet showed a video of a little kid executing some Russians. If that’s the case, well your women and children are fair game. They burned this pilot alive and, as far as executing the two terrorists, sure it was an emotional response, sure it was a gut reaction and total revenge, but that’s the kind of thing ISIS understands, so I say go for it. After all Mohammad said attack your enemy the way they attack you, and finally, someone’s had the freaking balls to do it.[/quote]

The essence of democracy and Western idealism, universal freedom, is such that all lives are to be respected on a basic, fundamental level. This shouldn’t change even if the other guy commits something horrible.[/quote]

There are problems with idealism, caused by other people. They apply to any ideal. If you isolate someone and make them think about a perfect world, they will accept ideals like “do the right thing”, “respect all human life”, etc. It would even be easy to uphold ideals like this in a perfect world.

But in a perfect world, everone would uphold the same ideals with no dissent. The world already isn’t perfect and it never was. So in practice, the above ideals are more practically stated as “i’ll do the right thing if they do”, “i’ll respect human life if they do”. After repeated transgression, different groups of people begin to say “they don’t do the right thing to me so i won’t do the right thing to them.” I’m not defending anyone’s actions here I’m just saying this how humans behave compared to how they think.

You could stand back and watch two kids kick and scream and pull each others hair and say one of them should take the high road. And probably one of them should. But neither of them actually will

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]magick wrote:

Current historical thought holds that the U.S. destroying the shit out of the Japanese forces, to the point that the homelands themselves were threatened, essentially removed any legitimacy that militarist had. The Japanese people saw that their armies were not, after all, invincible. This paved the way for the more moderate factions to speak out.
[/quote]
Whoa there, partner.

Where are you getting this from?

Unless I am delusional, the decision to surrender was made by a small group of men who were split on what to do. Ultimately the emperor broke the tie and made the decision. The “Japanese people” had nothing to do with it.

[quote]magick wrote:
Furthermore, we hung a lot of German war criminals. We didn’t touch any of the Japanese war criminals,
[/quote]

Oh,really? Do tell.

[i]In Tokyo, Japan, Hideki Tojo, former Japanese premier and chief of the Kwantung Army, is executed along with six other top Japanese leaders for their war crimes during World War II. Seven of the defendants were also found guilty of committing crimes against humanity, especially in regard to their systematic genocide of the Chinese people.

On November 12, death sentences were imposed on Tojo and the six other principals, such as Iwane Matsui, who organized the Rape of Nanking, and Heitaro Kimura, who brutalized Allied prisoners of war. Sixteen others were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the remaining two of the original 25 defendants were sentenced to lesser terms in prison.

Unlike the Nuremberg trial of German war criminals, where there were four chief prosecutors representing Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR, the Tokyo trial featured only one chief prosecutor–American Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant to the U.S. attorney general. However, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings, and Australian judge William Flood Webb presided. In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.[/i]

[quote]magick wrote:

In short… You’re wrong. You are speaking out of your ass.
[/quote]

Um, and you are…what?[/quote]

Oops. This may be my fault actually. I said recently that hardly any Japanese were executed for war crimes compared to Germans. Whilst this is true:

I certainly got the numbers wrong. I should know better as The Second World War is an area I’ve studied in depth. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten a lot over the years. It’s been over ten years since I last studied it.

[quote]Gkhan wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

To a Catholic, everyone who isn’t a Catholic is a heretic. And vice-versa: an astounding number of Protestants of my acquaintance vociferously deny that Catholics are Christians.
[/quote]

You’re correct, yet splitting hairs here, so Gnostics are considered Christians? Possibly…
[/quote]

Possibly, possibly not. It’s immaterial, as the Cathars were Dualists, not strictly Gnostics–though they shared some beliefs in common with the Manicheans and the Gnostics.

They were deemed heretics because they denied that the Eucharist actually, literally contained the body and blood of Christ, and also because they criticized the practice of the Church selling “holy water” to gullible pilgrims at a profit.

St. Bernard of Clairvais had this to say about them:

If you question the heretic about his faith, nothing is more Christian; if about his daily converse, nothing more blameless; and what he says he proves by his actions … As regards his life and conduct, he cheats no one, pushes ahead of no one, does violence to no one. Moreover, his cheeks are pale with fasting; he does not eat the bread of idleness; he labours with his hands and thus makes his living. Women are leaving their husbands, men are putting aside their wives, and they all flock to those heretics! Clerics and priests, the youthful and the adult among them, are leaving their congregations and churches and are often found in the company of weavers of both sexes.

Of all the extant Christian sects at the time, they gave women the most equality and representation within the faith.

In other words, they were the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the 14th Century.

No wonder the Catholic Church annihilated them.

Ever read what Friar John of Pian de Carpine said about the Mongols? I was going to post it, but changed my mind. Among their own people they were very Christian-like, not Christians, but they had a lot of their traits.

In the thirteenth century Catholics considered Dualists and Shamanists heretics. If you believe in the Bible yet have a very different interpretation of it, does that make you a Christian?

Here’s more about what the Cathar’s believe, though I may have gotten them mixed up with the Bogomils, sorry:

“There were two doctrines at the beginning. The moderate dualist Cathars believed that God created all spiritual beings and that Satanael rebelled and was thrown out from heaven. He then created the material world and imprisoned some Angels in physical bodies, human or from animals, which are the jails of divine beings, who want to be delivered. Christ was sent on earth, in a body made of light, to teach the people the way of liberation. Those people who fail to reach spiritual perfection during their lifetime continue to be reincarnated until they do. In the more radical version, the evil creator of the world was thought to be Godâ??s eternal enemy, rather than a rebel Satanael.”

http://www.nullens.org/an-outsiders-view-of-freemasonry/part-a-old-craft/a-6-bogomils-and-cathars/#.VNY_TeY7s6Y

So, what your saying is during the Crusades Christians killed Christians?

If a belief in Jesus and a basic belief in the books of the Bible & Apocrypha is all you need to be considered a Christian, I guess the Crusaders DID kill a lot of Christians because under your definition, that makes Muslims Christians.

[quote]SexMachine wrote:
Oops. This may be my fault actually. I said recently that hardly any Japanese were executed for war crimes compared to Germans. Whilst this is true:
[/quote]

Na, I never bothered to read up Japan POST WW2 and this is a direct result of my ignorance.

Completely my mistake.

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:
There are problems with idealism, caused by other people. They apply to any ideal. If you isolate someone and make them think about a perfect world, they will accept ideals like “do the right thing”, “respect all human life”, etc. It would even be easy to uphold ideals like this in a perfect world.

But in a perfect world, everone would uphold the same ideals with no dissent. The world already isn’t perfect and it never was. So in practice, the above ideals are more practically stated as “i’ll do the right thing if they do”, “i’ll respect human life if they do”. After repeated transgression, different groups of people begin to say “they don’t do the right thing to me so i won’t do the right thing to them.” I’m not defending anyone’s actions here I’m just saying this how humans behave compared to how they think.

You could stand back and watch two kids kick and scream and pull each others hair and say one of them should take the high road. And probably one of them should. But neither of them actually will [/quote]

The entire point of ideals is that they’re meant to give us a direction towards a world that is probably unfeasible, but IDEAL.

[quote]Severiano wrote:

Do you wonder why they used the whole f16 montage and dead children prior to the burning in their footage? They use collateral damage as a recruitment tool and link everything from f16’s to drones as a type of cowardly weapon. [/quote]

I’m glad they took the time to execute unarmed helpless civilian hostages, and cartoonists in France. I’m glad they set off bombs in market places swarming with civilians. Great that they murdered 2000 + unarmed Christians in Nigeria and shot up a Mall also killing unarmed Christians. The Boston bombing was also a nice touch as well…

Nice to show us how a brave holy warrior fights as opposed to someone who uses a cowardly weapon.