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Thread: "Explosion" in Manchester

  1. #151
    master of the pwniverse Member Fragony's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Why do you all assume there is a reason, is there anything reasonablebabout it. Killing young girls. Cwn't you see the weakness? Cruelty will only get you so far, and they know that as they are getting increasingl cruel. happy maelsröm IS you are soscrewed
    Last edited by Fragony; 05-28-2017 at 16:56.

  2. #152
    Iron Fist Senior Member Husar's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
    I may be mistaken, but what Pannonian meant was rather close to the knighthood oath
    Except that such a thing didn't really seem to exist.
    And one wouldn't say a knight wasn't a knight if he didn't follow the knighthood code to the letter, right?

    Quote Originally Posted by Fragony View Post
    Why do you all assume there is a reason, is there anything reasonablebabout it. Killing young girls. Cwn't you see the weakness? Cruelty will only get you so far, and they know that as they are getting increasingl cruel. happy maelsröm IS you are soscrewed
    Well, if there is a reason, it could be useful to know it as it may help stop this madness, no?
    Last edited by Husar; 05-28-2017 at 17:24.


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  3. #153
    master of the pwniverse Member Fragony's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
    Except that such a thing didn't really seem to exist.
    And one wouldn't say a knight wasn't a knight if he didn't follow the knighthood code to the letter, right?



    Well, if there is a reason, it could be useful to know it as it may help stop this madness, no?
    There is, your own Schauble said it, immigration is necesary to prevent inbreeding. The plan is working fine, something as pathetic as the childless mutti I'd use in my evil scheme
    Last edited by Fragony; 05-28-2017 at 17:39.

  4. #154
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
    I may be mistaken, but what Pannonian meant was rather close to the knighthood oath:

    Be loyal of hand and of mouth, seeking to serve every man as best ye may.
    Seek ye the fellowship of good men, hearken unto their words and remember them.
    Be humble and courteous wherever thou goest, not talking much, neither being dumb altogether.
    Allow no women or child to suffer by thy default, so that if ye may lift thy hand to assist one, do so. If thou must draw thy sword to defend them, do so unto thy own death.
    If thou come into fellowship with boys or men who speak in a disrespectful manner of any women or maiden, let them know in gracious words that this displeases thou and thy Lord, then depart their company forthwith.
    Thou art to defend and protect those who seek to worship in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and promote faith in Him throughout this earth He has made.


    http://www.knightforhire.com/oath_of_the_knight.htm

    So, loosely speaking, it can be thought to be ETHICALLY binding all warriors. But of course they never took it. Though the society presumes they should abide by it.
    That code has been held in abeyance for some time. It was promulgated in an era when protecting the womenfolk (a quarter of whom would die fulfilling their biological function) and children (as many as half of whom would succumb to disease etc. prior to attaining breeding age) was an absolute cultural/societal necessity. Even then, it was honored too often in the breach.

    Modern cultures, with their robust capabilities and vastly improved survivability chances due to medical health practice, no longer have a "protect them or it all falls apart" motivation for such an ethical standard in warfare. We honor it (too our credit) as a tradition that the strong should not exploit but should protect those weaker than themselves.

    However, in a strictly logical sense (setting aside sentiment and morality for those not identified as 'us.'), attacking the women and children is just as effective as any other choice in a long term struggle. Those will become and/or will breed the opponents of the future, so if there is no reasonable likelihood of absorbing them into the 'us' and making them your own, then killing them is every bit as valid as killing the opposing warriors -- and tactically much easier. Nits grow into lice, so squash them now.


    In this, ideology is the driving force. Islamist extremism labels us as the enemy (not without some justification, to be fair). Though ideologically driven, they are not irrational enough to presume that capabilities are close enough for a conventional victory OR a victory in the short term. Ideologically, to the extremist, we who are not of the Umma are ALL valid targets in a war that can only be won through generating an attrition cost that we are unwilling to support. It is their only conceivable route to victory in this conflict. The other choice would be to negotiate, and negotiation requires compromise -- which is impossible as one cannot compromise core truths that define your own identity.


    THAT is why there is a binary solution set here. Islam must altar itself to change that outlook in much the same manner as Christianity moved away from violence as a tool for religious faith. Today, violent Christianity is almost unheard of and is actively opposed by the mainstream. It is highly marginalized. That same degree of marginalization has yet to occur in Islam, though any fair minded person must note that the VAST majority of Muslims have no interest in terrorism as a tool for defending or spreading the faith.
    The other choice in the binary set is extirpation, with all of the horror such would entail.

    How does Islam come to embrace the Enlightenment to the degree that Western Christianity has done so and thereby properly relegate religion to the spiritual and moral/ethical spheres of life? Will not be easy as the current dominant forms of government in much of the Islamic world (Monarchy, Dictatorship, and Warlordism) have little to no interest in an enlightened population.
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  5. #155

    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    That code has been held in abeyance for some time. It was promulgated in an era when protecting the womenfolk (a quarter of whom would die fulfilling their biological function) and children (as many as half of whom would succumb to disease etc. prior to attaining breeding age) was an absolute cultural/societal necessity. Even then, it was honored too often in the breach.
    The chivalric ethos, it should be noted, is largely an invention of High Medieval court literature.

    How does Islam come to embrace the Enlightenment to the degree that Western Christianity has done so and thereby properly relegate religion to the spiritual and moral/ethical spheres of life? Will not be easy as the current dominant forms of government in much of the Islamic world (Monarchy, Dictatorship, and Warlordism) have little to no interest in an enlightened population.
    We've discussed the topic of Enlightenment w/respect to Islam, but as I mentioned then, applying a direct analogy creates a misleading expectation. Keep in mind that much of the Reformation and Enlightenment was borne of material struggles between monarchs and aristocrats against the worldly power of the ecclesiarchs - before it became a bourgeois and intellectual exercise. The Islamic world is undergoing an Enlightenment analogue, but it isn't one we find congenial because it aims to detract from petty secular power in service of manifest theological ideals. It is an evolution from the old despotism infused with religious elements, just not the direction we can easily tolerate.
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  6. #156

    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Let me continue the tangent on crimes against humanity in war, for the reader's interest. The Franco-Prussian War, as in a number of other ways, strikes a familiar figure here.

    Aside from the capitulated French government calling in the military to massacre Parisian Communards in 1871, while the German occupation watched from the city boundaries, there is the infamous Siege of Strasbourg from the war's outset. Source is the introduction to the eponymous book by Rachel Chrastil:
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

    Strasbourg lay at the heart of the conflict. When German forces entered French territory in August, Strasbourg was the first major city they targeted. For six weeks, from August 15 to September 27, the armies of Prussia and Baden
    bombarded Strasbourg. German bombs killed three hundred citizens, wounded three thousand more, and caused enormous damage to public and private buildings, including the cathedral roof and the irreplaceable libraries
    housed in the New Church. The siege exhibited the important issues raised during the Franco-Prussian War in microcosm: the targeting of civilians, the destruction of cultural sites, the revolution in the midst of war,
    and the sacrifice of one’s own civilians for the cause. The siege alone did not determine the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, of course, but the symbolism of Strasbourg elevated its importance in the minds of French and German alike.
    The loss of Strasbourg, along with the rest of the region of Alsace and most of neighboring Lorraine, was one of the most important consequences of the war.
    Despite this long history of war, the crisis that the inhabitants of Strasbourg faced in the summer of 1870 came as a shock. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Europeans’ tolerance for violence in everyday life was declining[...] With this decreased tolerance for civilian violence came the belief that civilians should no longer be the victims of wartime violence.
    By the nineteenth century, many Europeans had come to view war as an exceptional experience in which civilians took little part. War, many believed, ought to be circumscribed. Military personnel alone had the duty to put themselves in harm’s way...
    It was nearly impossible to maintain the distinction between soldiers and civilians in war, and especially difficult when an army tried to capture an entire city. To complicate matters, some civilians believed that they had the right to take up
    arms to defend themselves from invasion; military leaders could not agree upon the proper response to such actions. All in all, the sharp line that many civilians believed to exist between themselves and soldiers proved less durable than they had hoped. Bertrand Taithe tells us that in the nineteenth century, “the boundary between the military and the civilian sphere—in effect, between the social orders of war and of peace—became more blurred and porous than ever before.”
    In northern and eastern France, civilians felt the terror of occupation and died as hostages. The Prussians burned the entire village of Fontenoy in retaliation for partisan resistance. Paris came under siege for four months of cold and scarcity.
    But in many areas of France, and in all of Germany, civilians went about their business and did not suffer from rationing, hunger, or systemized murder. The French finally surrendered on January 28, 1871. The Franco-Prussian War clearly did not share all the characteristics of the wars of the twentieth century, but it shaped the experiences and attitudes that made those catastrophes possible. It was one of the first conflicts in which both sides had signed the Geneva Convention and in which both sides failed to live up to it. When the Prussians targeted civilian noncombatants in the bombardment of Strasbourg, they made possible Dresden, Leningrad, Sarajevo, and Gaza. When civilians accused Prussia of breaking the “laws of war,” they anticipated war crimes trials at Nuremberg and The Hague. When bombs destroyed libraries and set the cathedral on fire, they prefigured the destruction of cultural heritage in Leuven, Rheims, and Baghdad. And when Swiss humanitarians intervened on behalf of besieged civilians, but unwittingly helped Prussia conquer Strasbourg, they paved the way for the ambiguous successes of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
    Strasbourg’s civilian men often claimed that women and children were the primary victims of the Prussian bombardment. But they were wrong. Prussian bombs killed far more civilian men than women.
    This error fit with the dominant gender paradigm. Just as nineteenth-century women faced exclusion from politics and increasingly from economic life, they also were no longer supposed to be touched by war.
    Men were supposed to protect and provide for their wives and children. Civilization itself, it seemed, depended upon shielding women and children from wartime violence.
    In the midst of these difficulties, a group of Swiss dignitaries proposed a new response: humanitarianism. Humanitarianism was a particular expression of human sympathy characterized by an emphasis on aiding victims,
    the physical movement of humanitarians to the site of suffering, and the belief that concrete action could alter the status quo and confer transcendence. Many factors contributed to the development of humanitarianism, including
    Enlightenment projects of social betterment, ethical imperatives to help strangers, and the valorization of sympathy, along with mass media, rapid transportation, and advanced fundraising techniques. In the 1850s and 1860s,
    during the Crimean War and the U.S. Civil War, a few Europeans and Americans began to apply humanitarian aid to soldiers. Prior to 1870, however, wartime humanitarian aid had not been extended to civilians.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 05-28-2017 at 23:57.
    Vitiate Man.

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    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  7. #157
    Member Member Gilrandir's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
    Except that such a thing didn't really seem to exist.
    Only a few posts back you claimed the opposite:
    Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
    The difference is that the knighthood ideals and the Hippocratic oath are written down and the members of the relevant organizations claim to adhere to them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
    And one wouldn't say a knight wasn't a knight if he didn't follow the knighthood code to the letter, right?
    I doubt if there was a procedure of deknightization for the breach of the code. They had other means to teach the perpetrators the meaning of the letters in the code if needs be.

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    Islam must altar itself to change that outlook in much the same manner as Christianity moved away from violence as a tool for religious faith.
    "Altar" as in "put oneself/somebody on the altar to sacrifice ones life"?
    Quote Originally Posted by Suraknar View Post
    The article exists for a reason yes, I did not write it...

  8. #158
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
    ..."Altar" as in "put oneself/somebody on the altar to sacrifice ones life"?
    That was a typo. Metaphorically, though, there is a connection as what I think Islam needs to do is sacrifice its previous self definition and replace it with something that reflects the Enlightenment concepts (and of course they would manifest this differently as their history is not that of the West, as was noted above correctly). It took hundreds of years from Bernard of Clairveaux's Crusade speech for the church to fall away from the use of force as a tool for evangelism. But it has been thoroughly eschewn.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

  9. #159
    master of the pwniverse Member Fragony's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Accidently made a great typo, I would have pretended it was intentional and look clever and cryptic and confusing
    Last edited by Fragony; 05-29-2017 at 16:02.

  10. #160
    Iron Fist Senior Member Husar's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
    Only a few posts back you claimed the opposite:
    I didn't I was talking about "what Pannonian meant" aka the warrior code. He may have meant something close to the knighthood oath, but such a thing does not have to exist just because the knighthood oath existed...


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  11. #161
    Member Member Gilrandir's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
    I didn't I was talking about "what Pannonian meant" aka the warrior code. He may have meant something close to the knighthood oath, but such a thing does not have to exist just because the knighthood oath existed...
    I'm not sure myself whether the latter existed and if it did whether it was in the form I linked. Perhaps it was a romantic introduction of later age writers. Or it was changed to look romantic.
    Quote Originally Posted by Suraknar View Post
    The article exists for a reason yes, I did not write it...

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  12. #162
    Iron Fist Senior Member Husar's Avatar
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    Default Re: "Explosion" in Manchester

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
    I'm not sure myself whether the latter existed and if it did whether it was in the form I linked. Perhaps it was a romantic introduction of later age writers. Or it was changed to look romantic.
    Well, given that knights were noblemen and noblemen were supposed to be better humans than peasants and the whole nobility was backed by religious logic and so on, it would be relatively safe to assume that they did have some more or less official moral code, whether they stuck to it or not.
    Warriors on the other hand exist(ed) all over the world, in hundreds or thousands of different cultures, religions and tribes and to assume they all had some moral code that could now be used to decide whether a guy is a warrior or not seems a bit like a stretch. Supposedly pictish warriors would sometimes throw themselves into roman spears so their buddies could kill the Roman, so if that's true even the suicide aspect would not be a part that wasn't done by warriors before.
    And just because one can say ISIS terrorists are warriors and have a kind of bravery, that doesn't make them any more noble or less despicable anyway. The assumption that the label of warrior would imply some kind of virtue seems quite off to me.


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