A common standard of ethics needs objective morality, otherwise it’s just popular vote like the one you describe. What would you do if the popular vote didn’t match your views?
That is a big flaw in WoW’s setting regardless of how others like DC or Gaiman’s tracts have handled the subject. Not to toot my own horn, this matches up to a thread I made on a similar subject (some of which, especially the title, aged far too well given what came out about certain devs in the lawsuit mere weeks after I posted that).
Fortunately my views are rather easy to accommodate since they are centered on the “Don’t Be A Jerk To Others” principle. But if the United States became for instance a Christian Fascist Theocracy, I’d do my best to get myself and my family out of it. As my family would be full of people they would not accept, or relegate to some second or third class form of citizenship or slavery. (Yes, Virginia Slavery is alive and well in the United States, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Revenge is bad because it’s a tit for tat cycle that never ends. Ask the Hatfields and McCoys some time about it.
Objective morality doesn’t exist, it’s not something that you can point to other than being someone’s package of subjective parts that you like. So the goal is to build social contracts which are liviable to as much of the population as possible.
Not necessarily, as we can say what being a jerk means and what count as revenge is subjective. You proved me right about subjective moral standards being a popular vote (and claiming objective morality doesn’t exist is itself a form of objective morality). Also, while I don’t know if you’ve taken steps to overcome your bigotry (one shown by your choice of example for a threat), if so, good on you though there’s still some work to do.
Fact of the matter is Thad, that no American religion constitutes the personal threat to me and mind that matches Christian Fundamentalism. The Hasidics, the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Pastafarians, they don’t have people in government proposing and enacting draconian laws that are making real negative change in this country. Or removing the civil progress that’s been so painfully earned these last few decades.
Of course that’s MY subjective call, you may be just fine with all of them,
Your remarks remind me of white supremacists citing US crime statistics to paint black people as a threat to them. Do I have to bring up screenshots of your past comments?
Even Sam Harris, for all his flaws, considered radical Islam as a bigger threat then Christian Fundamentalism (for all I know, he may still be one of your idols).
How many Islamists are in public office in the United States advocating the imposition of Shariac law? How many of them are organising book burnings, library defundings, How many participated in the January 6th Insurrection which broke the chain of successful transitions of Presidential Power? Yes I am aware of incidents involving Muslims including a fairly recent one here in Jersey City, but they far pale in comparison to the sheer number of Christian and Christian-inspired violence.
Not content with that, American Christian missionaries have traveled to countries like Zimbabwe and have successfully pushed for laws that would sentence people like my husband to actual literal death. Laws they would happily have imposed here if not for our safeguards which balk them… for now.
I am not blind to the activities of groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the repugnant misogyny of Sharia Islam in Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East… but they are a remote threat compared to the domestic Christian one.
BTW, Harris is opposed to all dogmatic beliefs…including Christianity.
Harris is critical of the Christian right in politics in the United States, blaming them for the political focus on “pseudo-problems like gay marriage”.[58] He is also critical of liberal Christianity – as represented, for instance, by the theology of Paul Tillich – which he argues claims to base its beliefs on the Bible despite actually being influenced by secular modernity. He further states that in so doing liberal Christianity provides rhetorical cover to fundamentalists.[58
I’ve got more of you saying things about Christians here that’d get you hit with the banhammer (and might still get this thread memory-holed) if you said it about any other religious group.
So you’re going with the “powerful” side of the “all powerful, powerless enemy” rhetoric against Christians this time?
I could elaborate on how the death toll for religious (including antireligious) extremism in the US isn’t dominated by Christianity, how Jan 6th was political not religious, or politician Ilhan Omar and Sharia Law, or your strawman of Christian history in Zimbabwe, or how people in the mostly-Christian US have more rights and freedoms than those in atheist-dominated China…
Remind me how many non-Christian extremists have actually shot up gay bars or events vs Christian extremists? Or driven vehicles through crowds? Or blown stuff up?
I’ve seen enough Bible burnings (or shredding) to balance out book vandalism. You can even get t-shirt graphics of people throwing a Bible in a bin, but if someone made that graphic with any other holy book…
I never said Harris didn’t oppose Christianity and you know it. I said he considered Christian Fundamentalism less bad than radical Islam.
The first I stand by and the second is commentary about a Diablo expansion,so not germane to the discussion at hand.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t live in China. I live in these United States of America, so maybe if you can process that, you might understand why I consider American Fundmentalists and the politicians they back a much more immediate threat to me and mine.
Please do. Trump and the GOP are quite fond of invoking God and the Bible in their hate stumping so it’s applicable. Zimbabwe isn’t a strawman because again, American Christians have much to do with what’s going on so that points as an example of what they would try to pull here if they could.
Since most people, including myself aren’t familliar with Harris, until I did some looking up, quoting his opposition to Islam out of context makes it appear that Islam is the only religion he has issues with. That’s on you.
And you totally ignored my points are centered on U.S. political developments including the stripping woman’s bodily rights in the overthrow of Roe Vs. Wade and how the draconian Christian Fundamentalist laws being imposed are leading to serious brain drain in several states, There are now regions of the United States where it’s freaking dangerous to give birth because of the lack of medical people trained in the neccessary disciplines. Many have simply chosen to leave rather than risk arrest for practising their craft.
Other forms of brain drain are occurring because of the dumbing down of higher education to please the prejudices of your Fundie friends. This will have serious repercussions in the long-term. But politicians don’t care because they’re only thinking of the next primary.
You can argue til your blue in the face about Islamic violence abroad or Chinese repression. Those are NOT relevant here as my concerns in this thread are only about the United States.
Out of fairness, what was even the right decision to make concerning the Stratholme situation. What could Arthas have done that might’ve saved the day?There simply was no solution to this problem that wouldn’t have resulted in Stratholme’s downfall. His “first heroic test” was an impossible scenario. Arthas realized this and it broke him.
It doesn’t help that we now know that the Jailer intentionally set Arthas up to fail, becoming his pawn.
Lol no? He had at his disposals the Silverhand paladins and resources, the dalaran mages and army of lordaeron at his back, if he just took a step back and did a proper battleplan ( to deal with the scourge) and a contigency plan ( to deal with those infected but not yet turned and to those who are not infected) he would have get a much better result of that situation.
He could have not save every soul in that city but first he would give them a choice, to die before turning or to be locked up while the transformation is ongoing.
The city guards and population were no match for the remaining forces arthas had, if he worked with the 3 major orders to find how to properly deal with the new facts they had, things could have been very diferently.
We are talking with ppl that can use arcane magic to lock ppl in stasis, portals, sumoned elementals, paladins with the holy light strong enough to face mal ganis, and you are telling me that arthas only got the option to exterminate the entire city?
That was one of the options but not the only one, even with the information and resources he had at the moment.
He had time, resources, manpower and political guarantees to do everything right. He just went they easiest way.
Murder everything that moves. It was his choice, his, all his.
What battleplan? Let Malganis get an undead army and wipe out the rest of the population and beyond Eastweald? It was a lose lose situation.
The gameplay was pretty clear on how it wanted to portray the situation. If you killed them as living citizens it would be SIGNIFICANTLY easier then killing them once they turned undead.
So while Arthas’ troops could have kill the majority of Citizens and prevent them from turning, if they waited until they turned undead and Mal’ganis gathered them up it would become harder, maybe even impossible.
We had an entire quest chain in Wrath that made it clear being infected was a death sentence. Neither Red Dragon fire, Naaru light magic or Emerald Dream magic could save Brindenbrad.
I guess you could have gone the whole “make a magic shield that destroys undead” route that Dalaran tried but that was still destroyed by the Scourge.
A common standard in anything is nothing more than standards agreed to by one or more parties. So in a sense you’re right. It would be nice to have a shining gold caartouche which would display THE UNARGUABLE RULES OF GOOD.
But unlike our characters, we live in the real world so we have to make do with “popular vote” as you put it. The key is to get the largest number of people participating and invested in the positive aspects of a social contract. Fortunately there are principles we CAN agree upon, the desires not to be robbed, murdered, or taken advantage of. we take those common desires and build on them.
Battleplan? This wasn’t a battle against an invading army. Arthas was fighting a disease and the very people he’s suppose to protect were infected and would potentially become his enemy. How do you come up with a quick and effective plan in that situation while dealing with a magically created plague of undeath that no one has ever dealt with before?
Before he even set foot in the city it was already doomed. Arthas could’ve attempted to quarantine them but how effective or humane would that have been as he would be trapping the sick and healthy alike in the same place and there was hardly enough time to tell who from who before it was too late. How could he risk allowing people who were exposed to the plague leave the city?
And what exactly could the other orders accomplish? The mages maybe could’ve put some of them into stasis but what would be the point? There is no cure for undeath, even to this day no such thing exists. Arthas, Jaina and Uther had arrived too late to stop the spread of the grain so they were out of time. Nor did they possess the medical resources or knowledge to fight the disease.
What Arthas did was monstrous and didn’t really save anyone, but nothing he would’ve done in this situation would’ve saved that city. As I said he was set up to fail.
He was warned by kel’thuzad that Mal’ ganis the “leader” of the undead would be at stratholme, so he would be with the scourge( an invading army) so yeah he had to plan for a battle against mal ganis nevertheless.
And I said a contigency plan not a solution, he had mages to easy the situation, to make it tolerable, and working, it would be not easy, but at least he would given the chance for those that are NOT infected to be saved and those that are infected to be killed in a humanitarian way. It was the best he could get with everything he had available at the moment and it would still be better than just killing everyone on sight.
The problem here is that he had a choice to go by the hard way or the easy way and he always choose the easy way out. The way he thinks is right.
No one is saying he would have saved the city but he would at least fought FOR the ppl of lordaeron and not against it.
If decimation was the only recourse uther and Jaina would never give their backs to arthas, they would knew that it would save more lives down the line but they would do it the best way they could not just killing on sight, so the path and choices were there, he had only to think cold and ask advices from Uther and Jaina. He did not.
So what? That doesn’t change the fact that Mal’ganis’s “army” was made of civilian’s who were in the process of turning. No one was prepared for something like that and by the time Arthas had reunited with Uther and Jaina it was too late to stop anything.
You keep bringing up Arthas’s mages like they would’ve made some sort of significant change. The mages themselves barely know what to do against necromancy because it is outlawed so what could they possibly know unless they themselves were necromancers? Perhaps he could’ve minimized some of the damage, but it wouldn’t have been enough to make a change in the situation.
It’s hard to focus on protecting civilians when they could potentially turn on you and try to take a bite out of you. By purging Stratholme he at least managed to burn out the plague though this was by no means a winning move.
Both Uther and Jaina have expressed regret in not doing more that day. They gave no suggestions or “battle plans” because they were just as baffled and uncertain as Arthas was. No one was prepared for this sort of insidious tactic and neither Uther’s battle experience or Jaina’s magical abilities would have been enough to save the city.
Arthas was the only one who had the will to take action, even if it was one of the worst things imaginable.