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Originally Posted by mburbank
I am saying that I see no serious evidence that we have matured away from barbarity as a species. In certain rich parts of the world, we have moved our barbarity to less viceral, more removed practices, because our technology and economy allow it.
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Men who engage in beheadings, and then transmit it via the internet all around the world, aren't lacking in the resources to be clean killers. They can buy a camera, you think they can't buy a gun or a crude bomb?
Hezbollah terrorists used high tech British gadgets like night vision goggles during the war with Israel. A comfortable, well-educated radical will soon have access to nuclear weaponry if we sit back and watch.
They don't behead other humans because they don't have our resources. I'm sure they have, at the very least, an old Russian AK-47 laying around. Their barbarism isn't a means, it is an
end. Incidentally, what was Mohammed's take on beheading infidels?
Max, I know you don't see any difference between them and us, that has sort of been the debate here, no? Perhaps it stems from a fundamental difference on what the root of terrorism is. I feel it is an extreme interpretation of a particular religious document, one with systemic, pervasive, and problematic roots all throughout the muslim world. This is why I see the difference between us and them, and believe that this is a distinction between liberal society and closed society. There's a whole lotta gray in the middle there, but the black and the white are still quite apparent, IMO.