Or they were planted feds goading (entrapment) peaceful Mike Pence-executioners into committing violent crimes.
Yep. Totally. Up until the perpetrators were pardoned. Then they were back to being patriotic heroes and freedom fighters again.
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In this particular case, why do you consider that only the argument consonant with American value had any merit at all?
One of my colleagues told a story about a patient who had a background in the US military and was interested in security issues. President George HW Bush was scheduled to arrive at Pearson Airport in Toronto for a state visit, so this patient went to the airport and innocently asked some questions about the security arrangements that were being made for the Presidentâs arrival. Of course, he got no answers. It seems he did not give his name or otherwise identify himself.
A few days later, my colleague received a phone call from the FBI or CIA saying they had identified and investigated his patient and had determined he presented only a low risk to the President. No further actions were being taken, but they wanted his doctor to be aware.
Two years later, the Major League Baseball All Star Game was being played in Toronto and Bush was attending. My colleagueâs patient had tickets for the game. However, as soon as he passed the entry gate, he was approached by two men in dark suits who asked him to accompany them to a room. There, they informed him that he would not be allowed to attend the game. They politely apologized for his inconvenience and assured him he would receive a full refund.
They had immediately picked this single low (but evidently not zero) risk individual out of a crowd of 50,000 people. This was 1991. Imagine what could be done with todayâs technology.
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Gil, I am unsure whether there is a language misunderstanding here and so I will first clarify, in case you have not understood me.
I am not saying that the argument is the only one with any merit BECAUSE it is the only one consonant with American values; I am saying that the argument is both the only one that has merit AND the only one consonant with American values.
Now, the following response is appropriate if indeed you have NOT misunderstood me:
I think that if you believe there is merit in the position that Japanese Americans needed to be interned during the war, you should set that position out and explain why; the exercise will demonstrate to any fair-minded person that there is no merit in that position. But I will caution that, in my experience, when people do take that position, they expose themselves as being absolutely morally bankrupt or, at best, like FDR, overly trusting in people who are morally bankrupt; and it is very, very difficult to image how one can take that position without being so.
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28 posts were split to a new topic: Objective Morality, Naturalism, and Euthyphro
I wonât split the thread just yet, in case this find its way back on topic. But please keep comments related to Objective Morality in separate replies to make splitting easier.
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Not to be confused with the âerythritol dilemmaâ, which is the concern over whether or not an artificial sweetener containing erythritol disturbs the balance of intestinal flora and fauna.
I just hope that nobody asks me to explain further the details of Alvin Plantingaâs views on whether or not properly-basic-beliefs are objective or subjective. My studies in philosophy were quiteâŚtedious. To me, much like watching paint dry. I just couldnât get all that excited about them. I would make a lousy philosopher.
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And this is how America fell: Supporters of Donald Trump, rather than taking actions to reverse their regrettable error in electing a madman, instead spent their time twiddling their thumbs and prevaricating on religious apologetics.
(And yes, Gil, I donât believe you are American. But there are plenty of Americans just like you, and they have led their nation to this place.)
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My concern is that some of them are doing MUCH MORE than twiddling their thumbs: They are very actively defending Donald Trump, attacking those who criticize him, and even serving as his stormtroopers in aggressive ways.
I can no longer remember the German term but in the Nazi era there were many members of various denominations in Germany who called themselves âStorm Troopers of Jesus Christ.â I thought about those Nazis when I was watching live TV coverage of the January 6 insurrection and saw Christians symbols and signs in the crowd.
I also recalled the Nazi slogan promoted in the churches: âOne Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!â
I am extremely concerned. In the USA there are millions of people who could easily undergo the same transformations which so many German experienced in the 1930s.
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At the same time, my recollection is that it was only relatively recently (the last couple decades or so) that a consensus has emerged that the mass internment of Japanese-Americans was an atrocity. Of course, today that consensus will likely be erased as âtoo DEI.â
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I wouldnât be surprised if webpages about the mass internments have already been taken down from government websites.
All of this is chilling. (I am not a happy American these days. And Iâm horrified that so many people who call themselves Christians are participants in this madness.)
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I would be absolutely shocked if they havenât. And if they havenât, it is almost certainly a mere oversight.
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Sadly, I must agree with you.
The âerasing of historyâ so as to create a new ânational narrativeâ has a history which far too many of the MAGAs in my community know nothing about.
A number of U.S. states are purging past racial atrocities from the teaching of history because âWe want students to be proud of their countryâ and âI donât want my child to feel guilty for being white.â So they think we must keep students ignorant of history. For their own good. (Yikes.)
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Well, of course, consensus can be morally bankrupt, and one doesnât have to look any deeper in time than WWII to see some conspicuous examples.
But I grew up in Seattle â born in '62 â and went to school with kids whose parents had been in the camps. The whole thing was viewed a good deal less favorably by people here.
The big group that was on the other side of this was WWII veterans. My dad used to be a member of the Elks club, and heâd get into arguments with his fellow WWII vets. Heâd served in the US Navy in the Pacific, and most guys his age â especially those, who, like him, had served in the Pacific theater â thought that the internment had been a good idea. Asked why we did such an awful thing, they would say, âwell, what about Pearl Harbor?â The obvious point that that was not done by Japanese-American people any more than the Malmedy massacre was done by German Americans like many of their own families fell on deaf ears.
I can sort of excuse those guys. A lot of them had been through hell. And while the moral wrongness of the internment was always crystal clear, they seemed to feel that internment had been a very small insult by comparison to having to watch men die rooting Japanese soldiers out of caves in the various horrible battles in the Pacific. And so they were, of course, completely wrong, but hard experience sometimes makes for feelings which are not easy to erase.
That is indeed horrible. But I have been surprised at the ham-handedness with which these issues get dealt with by supposedly âright-thinkingâ people. I did find that my own daughter had a certain amount of personal guilt over âwhite privilegeâ and whatnot as a result of school treatment of these things, which we had to have some careful conversations about. The distinction between personal and societal guilt gets blurred by both sides, sometimes, in this thing, and itâs a very important distinction. I tried, and I think I succeeded, in persuading her that privilege is neither your fault nor the product of your personal merit, and that it therefore falls to the privileged to try to remedy the inequalities in our society. Responsibility, not guilt.
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Wanting the best for our kids and keeping them from harm is part of what makes us human. But how far some groups are prepared to go in isolating themselves is frightening. I learned British history, didnât see any skin colour but white until a broken leg took me to the city hospital, learned my place in the class system. What changed me was travel.
Sure, minorities, their languages, their culture, their beliefs, are under threat from globalisation. But does it have to be so binary, caught between corporate greed and wilful ignorance?
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Indeed, that would not be surprising. But one thing that was disturbing even in past years was that we tended to just ignore this bit of history. I didnât learn about it in elementary school. One day, when I was perhaps 11 or 12, I read a newspaper article about it and was completely shocked â shocked that we had done this and that nobody had mentioned it. I brought it up with my parents, who told what they knew of the whole sordid affair. My parents deplored the internment; and they were quite conservative people. But in those days it was possible to be labeled a âconservativeâ and to hold individual human liberty as the highest of values.
My father had a navy colleague named Yamamoto â not sure how that happened. Late in the war some Japanese Americans were able to enlist, or itâs always possible that heâd been in the navy already when this all started. But the absurdity of that seemed profound: if you really DID have a good basis for believing that every Japanese American was a sabotage risk, the last place in the world youâd want to put one of them would be on a US Navy ship in the Pacific. It spoke to the dishonesty of the whole thing.
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Indeed. I was always baffled at that factâeven in high school when my history teachers in our conservative agricultural community decided that they MUST cover important topics which werenât in our history books. I can still remember two of the topics specifically and they were (1) the horrors of the Nazis, from the rise of Hitler to the end of WWII, and (2) the Japanese-American internment camps.
I donât remember ANYONEâs parents in that community complaining about either inclusion in the curriculum. Back then it seemed like there was a pervasive attitude of âI love America, warts and all.â and âIf we are going to make America a better society, we have to work on the problems.â Iâm not saying nobody in that community was racist or tribal. Some were. But it sure seemed like there was a lot of respect for telling-the-truth, history included. So we certainly talked about lynchings and Jim Crowâthough certainly not as much as I might personally prefer looking back to that era. For example, nothing was said about the fact that a notorious mob-spectacle lynching in 1930 took place not all that many miles south of that town. We were mostly given the impression that mainly the Deep South was the scene of vicious racism. (There was just nothing all that âangry MAGAâ that I recall back then, except for a very few John Birch Society families I knew of.)
There were anti-fluoridation flyers on cars in the high school parking lot about once a year, calling it a Communist plot to weaken America. (Perhaps that was from one of those John Birch Society dads.)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post just now has the headline âU.S. gets Russian and Ukrainian commitment to Black Sea ceasefire.â No doubt if I went to the White House press office the release would be titled, âU.S. gets Russian and Ukrainian commitment to Black Sea ceasefire.â
Hmmm. I wonder whatâs going to happen with the invitations to the next White House black tie event.
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AND here comes that thread split!