91–95 of 95 posts
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Ukraine getting support in defending their territorial integrity from Russian separatists seems really out of place in your list.
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One important difference between Kaczynski and political leaders is that Kaczynski acted on his own autonomy. Political and military leaders require others to carry out their violence which defuses the moral stain by making so many others complicit (including the voters in democracies). Even an autocratic leader like Putin relies on his citizenry to carry out his will in such a way that it is difficult to even make s…
That is, if I hold a gun to your head and tell you to kill your family or else I'll kill you, you are not absolved of guilt if you do so, but you're also not the most evil person in the room. Put another way, its worth asking (in this strawman I've constructed) "would you have killed your family if I hadn't made you?".
The brilliance of strongmen is that they engineer this culture where everyone around them depends on the strongman for protection from worse evils. I've read repeatedly that in Russia, everybody knows that the propaganda issued by the Putin regime is just that, but they are also convinced that every bit of news they hear from the outside world is also propaganda, so its a question of the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. Basically, "if you think Russian oligarchs are bad, let me tell you about American oligarchs..."
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I am not defending Bush (a Yale grad, but that's beside the point) and the like. Unabomber was a psychopath who purposefully murdered people. "he did less damage" - "then a lobbyist or McKinsey" is a wild statement. He was a purposeful murderer. Trying to lump McKinsey consultants and politicians (horrible people, most of them, I am sure) with a serial killer is normalizing murder. Murder is a line that, I imagine, i…
George H.W. Bush went to Yale. His son, George W. Bush went to Harvard. I'm not trying to excuse, or minimize, Kaczynski's crimes. I am asking you to understand that in the case of revolutionaries and political leaders, the difference between heroes and terrorists is ultimately decided by the people of the future. It is very easy to see serial killers and bomb makers as individually evil, because its a very personal…
A factual correction: George W. Bush was both an undergradate at Yale (Class of 1968) and got his MBA at Harvard (HBS Class of 1975)
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For the sake of argument, 100% agreed. However, that's still irrelevant and does nothing to alleviate the fact that he killed many innocent people. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.
Who says that? Parent's talking to toddlers? Surely no one making decisions of consequence in our world. They certainly prefer tit for tat.