Agent, thats horseshit. Thoreau is a man. nothing more. you agree with his philosophies? fine. that doesnt make them right. you are an elitist SOB with this attitude Agent, that I dont have the authority to speak on something since i havent read thoreau. thats crap, and you are despicable for suggesting it.
Well its really simple Janus you often speak of how great your school is, how great the college is you are going to, but then you say stupid things like this. Either you are enlightened or not, either you are in favor of enlightenment values or not. But if you choose ignorance you can’t then claim to have knowledge to support your claims only emotion which is the direction you have chosen here. To say that I am full of crap for espousing Thoreaus ideas is as nonsensical as you saying you can reasonably defend your position having not read them. Again are you really standing for knowledge or for emotion. Am I elitist, yes b/c I have learned and read a lot, but I use that to enlighten others, so at least I share. Since I have obviously read more things than you despite not having gone to such a great school says very little about your education and your school. What’s more I don’t expect people to take what I say based solely on my word. That is I want people to counter it so I can prove the error of their ways and enlighten them. You want to lecture, and never have your ideas/wisdom challenged b/c you think you are blessed of divine providence. Who is being the elitist. I want people to think for themselves b/c all are equally capable of it, you want them to only listen to your and yours.
heres a clue buddy: a philosopher develops philosophies. that doesnt mean they are right or wrong, they are one way of seeing or doing things. since you adopt his, you cannot disclaim mine because i havent read his. this thinking gets you nowhere. i cant even believe you would be so narrow minded and pigheaded.
Your are the narrowminded and pigheaded one, and note it was you who resorted first to the unenlightened namecalling. If these ways are so wrong then dispute them with words and wisdom. If not then shut up. I’m sorry your education hasn’t been as good as you’d like to think, but too bad. The fact is that I believe in enlightenment, and if you can counter me with words and ideas then do so, but no more of your sentimentality.
The sad fact Janus is that you are somebody who believes in credentials ie I went to Harvard therefore I must be smart, but the reality is that a great many of the great intellectuals of American society haven’t gone to these schools, and there is a reason for this. These schools foster the idea in their students that they are better than everyone else so when people graduate from them they feel like they have nothing to prove. So when they enter the academic community they are shocked to find Mich grads and profs that can easily counter them, and even one up them. They are so elitist and narrowminded that they are unwilling to prove why they are right, and expect people to take their words as fact like they would the word of god. Everyone is smart enough to read Mill, Thoreau and DeTocqueville you don’t need to be an eastern aristocrat to get it, but this is exactly the unenlightend belief they like to propigate. In otherwords we the masses need them to interpret it for us. Who is really the elitist Janus?
I’m a bit confused, are you saying that the President of the United States, all of our upper brass and all cabinet level officers should be on the frontline with M-16s?
I’d think that very irresponsible considering they need to be making command decisions, not dodging bullets!
Jen I commend you on your class eventhough I don’t usually agree with you on politics. However, you make a good point once again proving wisdom is not the exclusive domain of the eastern aristocracy of Janus.
Yes you are right leaders shouldn’t be at the front lines b/c that would be foolish, but I was speaking to an ideal of how one can justify an action. The quakers actually apply a methadology similar to the one I expressed. Quakers are naturally pacifists, but instead of arguing that it is okay merely for them to not fight they go farther and argue all of war is wrong b/c it is unreasonable for them to ask someone like DFish to fight for them by proxy. It is to be said that they cannot ask someone to do something they cannot do themselves out of good conscience.
(BTW, that’s how I read your unjust war because they will sacrifice others but not themselves.)
This is roughly what I was getting at, but war isn’t just about sacrificing lives, but also other things as well. I don’t want to pay for it therefore it is unreasonable for me to expect others to do this. However, I would’ve been quite willing to pay for WWII via taxes as it served not only the greater good but also my own as Hitler was a really bad guy.
In my mind, a war is just if the world as a whole benefits from the war, and especially if my side (country, state, organization, whatever) benefits from the war. Though, that does mean you have to put a price on human life and that is something we are all loathe to do - regardless of standing on issues of war and peace.
But this is far too easy of a fix. By this reasoning it was just for the Germans to start WWII b/c it lead to the end of colonialism which has benefited the larger world as most of the world is in either the third or 2nd worlds. What’s more this discounts any sort of judgement of a war where little was gained or lost on either side. Case in point Korea. Was the greater good served by fighting a war in Korea in which the borders at the end were roughly the same. Wouldn’t by your definition make this and Vietnam unjust. What about the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Also were you to counter with that the point of Vietnam and Korea was to fight communism then again the greater good wasn’t served as it didn’t hurt/weaken them. And in the case of Vietnam our participation may have helped the NVietnamese win control of all of vietnam.
BTW, Bob Dole was a World War II hero, lost the use of his arm for this country, about the biggest sacrifice I can imagine short of death, and I don’t think I’d want him running this war.
But again war isn’t just about life, its about dollars. Did Bob Dole support Vietnam? I’ll bet he did since he is one of those Nixon types, but a lingering problem of Vietnam has been paying for it. Did Nixon raise capital gains to pay for the Vietnam war, especially after he escalated it in 1968-9.
