{"id":526,"date":"2007-12-16T21:39:49","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T01:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=526"},"modified":"2007-12-16T21:39:49","modified_gmt":"2007-12-17T01:39:49","slug":"numbskulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=526","title":{"rendered":"Numbskulls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonmonthly.com\/archives\/individual\/2007_12\/012712.php\">This <\/a>is a masterwork of numbskullery:<\/p>\n<p>>I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don&#8217;t want our side to lose&#8230;.As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the end, someone is bleeding and dying.<\/p>\n<p>>You&#8217;d be amazed at how many people find these things nearly equivalent. A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid&#8217;s forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child&#8217;s bedroom. In his two-dimensional perception, the only important factor is that both resulted in a dead child. Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of &#8220;evil,&#8221; a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<p>>John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.<\/p>\n<p>>That was the motivation.<\/p>\n<p>>The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don&#8217;t do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.<\/p>\n<p>>At some point you have to decide if a known terrorist having a very bad day (after which he goes back to a hot meal and a cot) is more of a moral problem than allowing a terrorist to blow up a building full of people.<\/p>\n<p>>Yes, it&#8217;s good if we do it, when it&#8217;s for the right reasons. So far, it&#8217;s been for the right reasons. And no, it isn&#8217;t good when it&#8217;s done to us, for the reasons it has been done to us. Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.<\/p>\n<p>>Got it?<\/p>\n<p>No, I don&#8217;t get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a masterwork of numbskullery: >I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don&#8217;t want our side to lose&#8230;.As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=526\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Numbskulls<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inexplicable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}