Quote:
Originally posted by transplant99@Apr 20 2005, 11:25 AM
To my point however, the grand daddy of em all...Al-Queda.
They went from suicide bombing various small spots/targets, to opening training camps for their members, to trying to blow up the WTC, to bombing embassies in Africa to finally flying airplanes into the WTC.
See the escalation?
Why wouldnt this guy and the group he is affiliated with...escalate their targets? Hopefully harsh sentences are a deterrent to these numbskulls, though i have my doubts.
Is this guy on par with McVeigh? Nope...he didnt kill innocent people, though he easily could have and that's the bigger point IMO. Not what he actually did, but what he could of done as a result of his actions.
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Al Qaeda is very poor evidence to support your claims. I'd argue that inflicting the most damage possible to the American Imperial Regime has always been their MO and that their smaller targets were only as a result of insufficient means or training, or other logisitical whatevers. If you offered them some way to detonate the entire arsenal of American nuclear weapons, they'd take it, they wouldn't say, "oh, no, that's a little too extreme for us at this time. Talk to us after we've experimented a bit more and fallen down the philosophical slippery slope." They do what is possible for them because their goal has always been extreme.
As such, there's no "escalation".
Furthermore, the slippery slope argument is one of the worst there are and is a logical fallacy. Your argument "he easily could have and that's the bigger point" is frightening. We're convicting people on what
might have happened? Excuse me? I thought people are convicted for like, you know, what they
actually did?
"Son, we're sentencing you to eternal damnation, because it's actually possible that your firebombs could have knocked the earth off its rotational axis and sent it into a death spiral towards the sun, killing everything imaginable. Sorry."
(Since you've been parrotting out the slippery slope, I get the argument ad absurdum.)
What he did is a crime. You might call it terrorism depending on your definition, that's your perogative. But condemning him for what might have happened or what he might do is a distortion of justice. What's important is that he
didn't kill people, not that he might have. I can claim with just as much justification that the reason he didn't kill people is due to careful planning as you can that the reason he didn't is simply an accident.
I think there's fascism in the air down there. Don't inhale tranny and get back to Canada asap.