Subject:
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Re: Who are we to judge?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 22 Sep 2001 13:51:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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176 times
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Snippety snip
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Richard Marchetti writes:
> Secondly, I also see no problem with valuing world cultures
> equally
All? This isn't about Christian(1) vs. Islamic cultures, this is about
relatively free cultures vs. relatively barbaric ones.
Our culture (faults and all, taken as a whole) is superior to the Taliban
(virtues and all). That makes no statement whatever about the relative
superiority of Islam and Christianity.
> What
> say you we do away with Osama bin Laden and all the political systems that
> placed him in power?
I'm OK with that even if it takes down our current corrupted system as well.
The problem is where to start. Fixing our culture first may mean the other
problems go unchecked at least for a while if not for ever.
I'll draw an analogy to systems that have more than one bug. Fixing the easy
bug is sometimes not the right place to start. Because what you think is a
bug may well just be a symptom of something worse. There's a term for that,
it's called easter egging, and it's bad engineering. (2)
The problem with my analogy is... guess what? bin Laden may well BE the easy
problem rather than the hard one, compared with changing how the US
interacts with the rest of the world (and its own citizenry for that matter).
But sometimes my analogy is WRONG. You sometimes HAVE to fix the easy bug
first or else the system will collapse before you can get around to fixing
the hard one.
Knowing which situation you are in takes analysis. Lots of it. Which is what
we(this tiny forum, thousands of others elsewhere (the entire online
community can talk of little else no matter where you go), the US, the
world) seem to be doing to a certain extent. It doesn't HURT to preposition
assets as long as those assets won't be needed to fix the real problem
somewhere else, but it sometimes doesn't help either.
1 - the repeated invocation of God in Bush's speech on Thursday is about the
only part I found fault with. You can't say "this isn't about religion" and
then say "god is on our side". Sigh.
2 - My car had a cruise control problem recently. The service people easter
egged it, replacing the servo, the main computer, etc. etc. No fix. It took
3 hours of debugging after all that was replaced to determine it actually
was the brake switch. (3) They tried to charge in and fix the symptoms
without carrying out the system analysis needed to know what the real
problem was.
3 - Do you think I happily paid them for the first 2 visits or do you think
I raised a stink. You know me... of course I raised a stink and only paid
for the brake switch.
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Who are we to judge?
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| Larry Pieniazek wrote in message.... <snip> (...) Is this the same speech were he said "You are either with us, or with the terrorists"? I have a problem with this because I certainly don't agree with the US's retaliation, does that make me a (...) (23 years ago, 23-Sep-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Who are we to judge?
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| (...) Those two statements are really quite different, and I see the whole as the beginnings of a convoluted argument intended to illicit precisely the sort of arguments I would mount against it. The first part of the argument is related to one's (...) (23 years ago, 22-Sep-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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