Dick Cheney should be in prison, not on ‘Meet the Press’ - Greenwald

You clearly have no idea what pragmatism -a very real and very popular worldview held by many world leaders throughout history- is or you'd know how foolish this sounds. You aren't the absolute moral authority of the world.

Pragmatism is not an ethical stance. It's about as innately ethical as a recipe for rice pudding. Here's how it goes:

  1. Set goals.

  2. Achieve those goals while ignoring everything else (that's where the ethical problems occur).

It isn't necessarily restricted to one's own country. As I wrote, the case of the man killing his neighbours over his son's Frisbee can also boil down to purely pragmatic considerations. The implied ethical stance that you're taking is that only American citizens have moral status, but pragmatism itself is about as morally relevant as a recipe for rice pudding.

Way to completely avoid answering the problem of "Is it even fucking illegal?"

It's not a problem for me because I haven't been addressing its legality. How did you grow up so stupid that you can't grasp this? Again: this may be part of a discussion you're having with others, but not with me.

Instead, you resort to insults and call me feeble minded for not having a typical reddit kneejerk reaction like you.

I called you feeble-minded in regards to your ascription to me of the positions of other people you've been talking to lately. When I quote you on something, the stuff that comes next is addressing it. So when I quote you as saying "history stands with me on this one, and I can all but guarantee Cheney will not be convicted" and immediately remark that "you're miserably feeble-minded", the part that I quoted is what I'm referring to. I explained your deficiency in the next sentence, and it has nothing to do with "typical reddit" behaviour, as personally rewarding an accusation as that might be for you to make.

But what started this whole chain of comments is your failure to understand that reciting a popular Reddit catchphrase doesn't win you an argument. I'm going to repeat myself here, and I'm not going to respond to you unless you address this:

his is not about any sort of equivalence. It's about the principle of commanding others to commit illegal and/or immoral acts. If some degree of remoteness mitigates wrongdoing, then you have to apply that rule consistently. If there's a single counterexample (and as we've seen there is a very obvious one, but we could come up with many others), then the rule doesn't hold.

Now, remember that this is what this chain of comments is based on. The illegality and efficacy of American torture is a discussion for another time because it doesn't relate to any of the points that I made or objected to. I'm very doubtful that you'll comprehend that, though. My doubt stems from my understanding that you're a complete moron.

/r/politics Thread Link - rt.com