Re: More bush Contradictions
princesspupule wrote:Finn d'Abuzz wrote:Bi-Polar Bear wrote:In the debate when stem cell research was brought up bush said that he couldn't condone sacrificing life to save another......
So tell me why that is his main defense for his shitty Iraq war?
A somewhat subtle difference that is, perhaps, beyond the ken of an ignorant lout.
As respects Iraq, Bush is not sacrificing lives that have no say in the matter. If one joins the military of any country, then one must accept one's role as a potential sacrifice. The history of war is replete with instances of the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the whole. Anyone who voluntarily joins the US military must accept and acknowledge that they might be the sacrificed for the greater good.
But the dead aren't all military, Finn. The babies and women had
no say in this conflict, but Bush has chosen to sacrifice them anyway.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/
And that's a good point princess.
If there is zero tolerance for innocent civilian casualties, then it is virtually impossible to wage a war. That would be a very good thing if all societies throughout the world possessed the same zero tolerance, but they don't.
Innocents died in WWII (A war almost no one contends was not "just"), but if we had had no tolerance whatsoever for such deaths their numbers would have been far greater, because we would not have defeated those who strove to dominate the world.
The presidents position on stem cells, however, doesn't represent zero tolerance for the sacrifice of innocents in favor of a greater good. There is no ban on embryonic stem cell research. This is a Democratic canard. There isn't even a ban on the governmental funding of embryonic stem cell research. What there is, is a ban on the use of federal funds to create new embryonic stem lines. Private embryonic stem cell research is legal. Governmental research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells is legal.
There is another difference between the two situations.
A nation can prosecute a war without deliberately targeting citizens. To the extent that innocent civilians have died in Iraq, it is not because they were specifically targeted.
Embryonic stem cell research cannot even be imagined without the deliberate and expressed intent to sacrifice an innocent.
Of course the families of innocents killed in Iraq will grieve no less because their loved ones were not deliberately targets, but the decision to go to war is based upon the preferences of the families of those killed, no nation would go to war. Here again, though, we are confronted with the fact that even if some countries applied this approach to decisions of war and peace, all countries certainly would not and that would leave the conquerers to fall on the rest of the world like wolves on sheep.
George Bush is not often given credit for nuanced thinking, and perhaps he didn't avail himself of it in making these decisions, but the issues do not lend themselves to one simple and consistently applied maxim:
Any sacrifice of an innocent is OK if it involves the possible advancement of a greater good.
or
No sacrifice of an innocent is OK, no matter what the ultimate purpose.
Since Finn's got better things to do in the morning than debate the likes of either of us, I thought I'd just point out that fact to you, BPB. 
:wink:
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