Quote Originally Posted by pohibaba
Please, don't try to fucking argue the history of American interventionism with me. You obviously don't understand politics all that well if you're trying to convince the guy with a Libertarian Party sig that the Iraq War is a bad idea. But getting back on topic, your argument is pretty retarded. We should continue killing (mostly) poor people who may have committed a crime simply because war is a bad thing? What does one have to do with the other? Why can't you separate our foreign policy with the death penalty? Just because you don't agree with one makes the other trite? What if we had elected someone like Ron Paul who would've pulled all our troops home (and yes, I mean from all countries, not just Iraq) would you then have agreed with abolishing the death penalty?
Damn, you're so gangsta.

Anyways, I'm not arguing the legality/legitimacy of Iraq or the history of blah blah blah. My point was, via the examples, that we don't fight wars for some romanticized notion of good and evil.

Now, after my first reply you said you found it "silly" that "[I] can't tell the difference between protecting your country from a serious and immediate threat (which is all war should be about) and for killing someone out of some ridiculous notion of retribution which does no actual good."

I should note that you said "which all war SHOULD be about." Your logic is horrible because you're using an idealistic and purely hypothetical scenario to fortify your arguement.

The reality - which again I stressed in those examples - is that war is NOT always about protecting your country. If it isn't constant, than you can never use that reasoning. It's much to complex and the context of each war requires a lot of investment on part of the audience (the public) to grasp.

The next part of your arguement is to say that the "threat" which causes war is immediate and serious. This again is a S T U P I D generalization. Every war must be understood in it's own context and not through some sort of lens when it's always for the right reasons. That's not reality.

Finally, you stated that the death penalty represents a "ridiculous notion of retribution which does no actual good."

All punishment IS retribution. If this guy or any rapist/murderer were sent to jail they'd still be recieving RETRIBUTION for their crimes. Punishment is served. In a case like this, I could see him going away for life easily (rape/attempted murder/kidnapping/etc. etc.). You can keep telling yourself execution is uncivil but death is a part of life. The manner in which it's administered is leaps and bounds over the chair. Lethal injection is as painless as this form of punishment will get from reading about it. In fact, it may be the easy way out. This guy lies
down and dies within minutes. Yet, his crimes will affect the victims for the rest of their lives.

I would even say life would be more but there is always the possiblity of repeat offenses (the statistics speak for themselves) and high cost of upkeep.

So again, it goes back to how close one is to the sphere of killing. How close are we to this man's impending punishment - whether it's death or life w/o parole. Well, it's in the public sector so it affects us more immediately.

We're intelluctualizing this because it affects us more intimately then buying into some ideal that we're only shooting bad guys in foreign countries.