Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

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> Gray area.

I'm sure you believe you set something straight but you did not. Two things can be true at the same time and still not be in any kind of gray area.

Can you get out of a murder charge by saving someone else's life? Walk into a hospital and save one patient's life while stabbing the other to death? Rape someone but then give them a job that provides for everything? Pay for the preservation of an endangered animal only after you get the chance to kill some of the very same animals? You think Harvey Weinstein didn't pay the tuition or put a roof over one of his victim's heads? Yeah, think of him in the gray area.

Can you give me your example above and proudly proclaim "grey area" without sounding like the kind of person who thinks any wrongdoing gets wiped with a gesture of good will?

P.S. Gray should be the thin border where white and black touch and intermingle, not the whole damn thing except the white/black edges. That might ebb and flow and drift with generations and society but this moment is not it.

Can we decide that saving a victim from violence by applying violence to an aggressor is net positive? Yes, absolutely

Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you? Yes, absolutely it is a trick question.

Are you aware of any case where the US went to war under pretenses known to be false from the start, or interfered in the internal affairs of another country to cause loss of life, or allied with countries that committed terrorism against the US and others, etc. and none of the initiators suffered any consequences?

It's bad enough that morals can be twisted enough to justify just about anything and in any condition, and education these days lets anyone think they can justify anything simply by the fact that they said it. Don't add hypocrisy to that too.

>Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you?

Of course, I do. Not to say I don't have biases, or that I'm always have an access to 100% correct information. Life's not that easy, of course, but it still doesn't mean that it's always blurry, relative, and let's do nothing as your nihilist approach suggests.

And then when in your 'aggressive defense' you end up hurting somebody else who now uses the exact same logic to start attacking you? This is how war (and terrorism) perpetuate endlessly.

It only ends when one side or the other, and anybody who might have empathized with them, is completely annihilated or when somebody stops behaving, from their perspective, righteously. Neither option is probable, which is why society just keeps replaying history on an endless loop in history, with little more than technology offering a change of scenery.

If you want to see what will happen tomorrow, simply learn about what happened yesterday. The only trick is realizing what role you're playing.

We have historical experience which pretty clearly shows that not increasing the price of aggression surely doesn't stop it. Contrary to what feel-good gurus say about "breaking the cycle of violence", in real life, it only breaks when the price of continuing is getting too high. And yes, when it comes to war it's definitely not a fairytale with all good men rewarded, and bad men punished. So if you wanted to say to that war is bad - I think almost nobody would oppose it. Not answering with weapons to weapons means there will be more of it, however.

This would justify any number of attacks on the US.

They can certainly give it their best shot if they want to deal with the consequences. That's how the world actually works. Institutions like the UN are almost entirely powerless when it comes down to it, while eg NATO or the various militarily powerful nations are not. You can witness that with what has gone on in the invasion of Ukraine, what has the UN stopped or prevented? Nothing. The same will hold true when China invades Taiwan one day.

The countries with potent military capabilities dictate how everything goes in this world. It was true a thousand years ago, it was true a hundred years ago, and it's true today. It will always be true, for very obvious reasons.

Ok. Where did I say anything to the contrary.

Society breaks down if we follow this principle.

I feel they set it straight. You, on the other hand, don't seem to commit to any point but instead digress wildly between one half-baked example to the next with a postscript that could as well be a theory on color science.

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