Preaching vegetarianism-for-health for general use seems silly to me.
I agree. I'm not doing that. In fact, I don't really actively preach for people to completely stop eating meat. I really think people should do it less though and if they do, they should think a bit more about what they it. For example: If you eat meat, if you have no excuse to not eat that animal's ingrains as well but a lot of people refuse to do that. I don't think eating the liver of an animal is more or less "disgusting" than eating it's muscles [especially since a lot of people wouldn't eat the heart of an animal, which is a muscle too].
I object when people actively encourage other's to consume meat though.
Also, in terms of personality: my first test showed that I was supposedly INTJ but that actually came from INTPs commonly confusing themselves for INTJ - I am actually INTP though.
Hey look, linguistic gymnastics.
Sorry for not replying to everything you said here but I really have to object to this. If you accuse me to do "linguistic gymnastics" then I accuse you of not being ample clear on what a hero supposedly is. Petrov - in the context you mentioned - can be considered a true hero, for he saved an immeasurable number of lifes without hurting anybody else's. Gandhi can be considered a hero for the same reasons. If you call them "hero" I will not disagree.
If you can't accept that a hero - by my defintion - must refrain from using violence then we can only agree to disagree. In any case,
my definition does not match the one you have introduced in the beginning of the discussion.
I'm only going to touch on this part of it a little, but if you're going to try to push ethical/moral relativism in this discussion you're saying John Basilone's "mass murder" is the same as Adolf Hitler's mass murder. Agree to this point or concede that you were reaching, because you can't have it both ways.
I don't actually concern myself with philosophy a lot anymore because the only philosophy that matters to me is the one that is actively performed: ethics. And I truly think that at the moment I've found an ethical framework that I can comfortably live and work with, even though - being myself - I constantly question it.
I don't care for what labels you use either. Basilone's actions are not the same as Hitler's in my opinion and I think it's a lame thing to accuse me of under the pretext of me suppsedly applying "moral relativism" in this discussion. Just because I consider both oft them mass murderers doesn't mean I judge their actions as the same. But in the same hand I don't think it's legit to accuse me of treating them as the same just because I say Basilone's a mass murderer.
My point was that Basilone had more than put his service in and had a long, cozy life ahead of him as a hero. He'd have danced up the ranks to a highly-paid bureaucratic position with ease and probably found himself constantly being requested to speak at universities and military colleges and generally have admiration and love heaped upon him no matter where he goes.
And yet he decides that this is not what he wants, and goes back to the war. Given his skills, he probably saved a few more lives prior to his death. If you still want to handwave all of that as not heroism because of a cultural relativism argument you are being obtuse as ****.
No, I simply have found that simple answers are the best to deal with seemingly complicated matters. Basilone murdered people, probably quite a bunch of them. Agreed or not? It's not a question of "yeah, he did but ...". It doesn't matter
why he did it. HE DID IT and because of that I will not consider him a hero. It has nothing to do with being "obtuse" either. I understand why you think he is a hero. I accept it too. I do not think he is though for reasons as simple as possible: he took somebody else's life and it was not an accident. More isn't needed to be done for me to exclude the possibility of him being a hero. I'm not damning him for it [unlike Hitler] but I under these circumstances I can't call him a hero.
Uh, I already have to stop you. Batman does not murder people. He has an explicit rule against killing people, ever. Superman also doesn't kill people. Neither does Spiderman. In fact, the vast majority of superheroes do not kill people, and people that do kill people (The Punisher, Cable, Wolverine) almost always end up classified as an antihero. So, you're already bungling your definitions here and these definitions are allegedly where you're drawing these beliefs from.
Dunno what to say here. If that is the case, then I simply was wrong about them not being heros [by my own definition]. I was 100% sure that all 3 of them actually killed somebody at one point in their stories - not accidentally. If they don't, that's even better and I guess I won't object if people consider them heroes.
I argued under the impression that their stories played in kind-of black and white context where the "good guys" kill the "bad guys". Even if you take out the killing part it'd still be kind of black and white, in which case I'd still find it laughable.
Apparently, I was wrong about the whole thing though. All that stuff has never been part of my childhood folklore.
Wait, he's austrian, right? Then I also picture him as a gay porn star.
I was with you until you said that <_<
