Originally posted by: Vic
Originally posted by: tss4
Originally posted by: Vic
As to tss4, he split a hair and thinks that makes him a winner. There is nothing logical in that. He knew what I meant, but chooses to ignore it.
lol, your arguement was rooted in a falicy. There was no hair splitting and I challenge you to demonstrate that there was. You told Tab he was wrong, gave a reason for that, and then was proven wrong. But you chose to ignore that and instead complain that someone would actually examen the facts of your arguement. Doesn't make you a "loser" and me a "winner" (I wasn't aware we were competing) but it does make your logic wrong. Perhaps you should go back and examen your logic again, and at least attempt to support it with logically correct arguements. If you can't take criticism of your arguements then perhaps you should not be posting to a discussion board.
No, it was not. Pray tell, how do your hair-splitting definitions prove my argument fallacious? And if they do, then the only possible explanation was that Tab's argument was false to begin with, for if "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" are the same things, then one man's terrorist could not another's freedom fighter, for both would be the same to both.
I didn't say they were the same thing. I said they were not mutually exclusive, which you keep implying they are. You can be both. That really is the crux of the problem, you don't understand that both terms have a very real and well defined meaning. You don't get to make up any meaning you want just because it suites your arguement.
This is BTW the inevitable path when arguing with a subjectivist. As they have no belief in reality, but only in perception, they are always arguing that a thing is not equal to itself, or that a thing is in fact something else, both of which are more or less the height of illogical thinking. And as a rational objective reality is the only common frame of reference among individuals, and they deny that such a thing exists, communication is made impossible. The key issue with a subjectivist is that morality is whatever selfishly serves him, while immorality is whatever does not. As a corollary to this, when an argument serves him, he agrees with it. When it does not, he does not, regardless of its strength or obviousness.
All fine points, and feel free to make them and support them. But the example you used was based on false meanings of the two terms and thus did not support your case. Come up with a better example next time.
But to help you understand... given that a terrorist is a individual who kills non-combatants for the sake of his own personal power (i.e. 9/11), and given that a freedom fighter is an individual who kills only combatants in a just war for the sake of acheiving freedom for his people (i.e. George Washington), the terrorist is always immoral and the freedom fighter is always moral.
again, your almost right but yet still wrong. A terrorist kills non combatants anc can be called immoral for that (but so did we and every nation in the world, so we would be called immoral too). The difference between us and terrorsit is they rely exclusively on that tactic. In addition, your comment that they do so for personal power is false. Personal power is definately one motivation behind some terrorists, but there are monay terrorsit that rely on idealistic motivations.
As for a freedom fighter, they can participate in a just war, for a just cause, but use immoral tactics. Hence, a freedom fighter is not always moral.
Again, terrorism is a tactic, and freedom fighter is a description of ones motivation and cause. These are not mutually exclusive terms.
I am not a subjectionist. I would agree that some things are moral and some things are not AND that our perspective only goes so far. Good is good and bad is bad, but that isn't neccesarily the case with freedom fighters. (allthough, if you truly believe targeting innocents is immoral then you can make that case for terrorist. But that means you condemn the US for dropping the bomb on Japan as immoral as well as countless other incidents employed by almost every modern army.)
I understand that you don't want to accept these definitions, but without definitions, one cannot make distinctions, and if you decide to reject that obvious logic in this case, then Tab's argument was meaningless in the first place.
I accept the true definitions, not made up ones. A strong arguement doesn't need to bend definitions or make them up to suit the arguement. I believe in reality, which includes morality AND undisputable facts such as defintions.