Oriphiel

*whistles* This thread is still going?

John Wilkes Booth

yea. so really i don't think i contradicted myself with the whole compromise point. basically it seems like you are acting like it makes no difference which side is doing the compromising. i was saying when thugs make demands based on violence we shouldn't fulfill those demands. so in the civil rights scenario, the racists were making the demand that blacks just accept their status as second class citizens or else there would be violence. if they had just done this, maybe less people would have been hurt/killed. but the black protesters would have lost their rights in the process. this is akin to us censoring ourselves to appease bearded thugs. maybe less magazines will be blown up. yet our rights are degraded in the process. it's an undesirable compromise imo.

Oriphiel

Actually, the similarities are there. Both movements were about trying to gain human rights in the face of poverty and abuse. And both movements had large terrorist cells that believed that using violence was the answer. You have to remember that groups like The Black Panthers truly thought that violence/murder was the answer, when all they did was hold back progress by turning the world away from their cause.

Fighting terrorists is important, as it helps to protect people in the immediate future. But in the long-run, the only way to truly eliminate the terrorist groups is to root out the socio-economic factors that caused them to flourish in the first place. When African Americans were finally given equal rights, and eventually managed to escape from the low-income areas that they had been forced into, terrorist groups like The Black Panthers faded away.

John Wilkes Booth

wait, what does that have to do with not compromising our rights to appease terrorist groups? i didn't say we should go bomb them as retribution...

i mean if i'm being honest i do think a certain amount of military/police intervention is necessary in combating terror. but that seems like a completely different argument.

Oriphiel

Ugh. I feel like we just weren't meant to debate each other. Neither of us can tell what point the other is trying to make.

John Wilkes Booth

lol. oh well, i tried man. i mean i've said again and again i'm not advocating violence and you keep bringing it back to that.

Oriphiel

You do realize that your mission statement in this argument was:

Advocating violence is the entirety of your argument. The whole point to your argument is that we shouldn't let terrorists get away with harming people. My point is that rooting out terrorist cells is much more complicated than just shooting at them. The only way to stop terrorist cells is to overcome the factors that caused them to spring up in the first place (which I backed up by pointing out that The Black Panthers disappeared once racial equality reached a significant point of progress, and the socio-economic factors that had caused the group to form had disappeared). You're complaining that you don't like a certain flower, and want to pull it out of your garden. I'm pointing out that if you keep putting the same seeds in the same soil, you're going to get the same flower.

John Wilkes Booth

oh i see... 'fire shots' is a metaphor i use for talking ****, lol. that's what i was saying in that quote.

like i said before the only violence i would advocate in response to these attacks is however much violence is necessary to arrest the people responsible.

Oriphiel

And right there is the key to understanding the point I have been trying to make. It's acceptable to target terrorist cells that are attacking and murdering innocent people, using violence to apprehend and combat them, but if you don't take steps to root out the factors that caused the group to form in the first place, then another terrorist cell is just going to take it's place, and the violence will continue. I've already backed this up with historical examples of terrorism being stopped through socioeconomic changes (such as in the case of The Black Panthers). And it seems that we're now both in agreement that simply fighting/arresting terrorists is not going to stop the violence.

Are we done here?

John Wilkes Booth

that's fine and all but once again you're on a different topic than the one i was speaking on when i said we shouldn't compromise in the fact of violence. i was specifically arguing against self-censorship and nothing else... so responding that there are socioeconomic factors that go into the creation of terrorism isn't really a counter point to that.