Luxury Yacht Company Offers Pirate-Hunting Cruises

[Aramike]

Originally Posted by Letum

I don't see how you get from stage 1. to stage 3. Your conclusion can
not be logically deduced from stage 1. alone.

Your (unspoken) stage 2. might be:

1a. The deathrow inmate isn't in the process of committing a crime
2a. It is wrong to kill people who aren't in the process of committing a crime.
3a. Therefore I object to the sale of the chance to carry out state
executions.

but that makes it an argument against the death penalty altogether and
I assume that is not your intention. (Can you confirm that you are
pro-death penalty?)

You could get round it by saying something like:

1b. The deathrow inmate isn't in the process of committing a crime
2b. It is wrong to pay to kill people who aren't in the process of
committing a crime.
3b. Therefore I object to the sale of the chance to carry out state
executions.

but in this case it isn't clear why 2b. is true and not 2a.; you are obliged
to explain/justify 2b. without justifying 2a. or leave it as an arbitrary
premise.

Okay, now I get where you're coming from, so let me rephrase.

It is wrong to pay to kill someone, unless you are killing someone who is ATTACKING you of their own volition.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Sure, I make a disctinction between unborn children and murderous pirates It doesn't take much effort on my part, either.

A microscopic lump of some dozen cells is not the same like an unborn baby is not the same like a pirate is not the same like a fisherman. The problem in these four is the pirates, the overestimated thing is the lumb of cells. As long as there has not appeared a differentiated cellular structure, that's what it is: a lumb of cells.

Why categories must be messed up here (Letum does) just so to get a moral statement about hunting pirates, escapes me.

We are all omnivores, gentlemen. So let's not forget how to bite. Grazing we still can afterwards.

[AngusJS]

I'd say the odds of these guys attacking legitimate fishermen are pretty high. Adults paying to play "navy" with human targets = bad idea.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by AngusJS

I'd say the odds of these guys attacking legitimate fisherman are pretty high. Adults paying to play "navy" with human targets = bad idea.

Pirates behave like fisherman during the day. It's mimikry.

That'S why boats should be stopped and searched. If there are weapons onboard, sink them.

Unpracticle with that umber of boats you would need to search, and those limited assets. So you either raise the white flag, or you strike and accept to get your hands dirty occasionally.

the problem is that all the evasive actions the pirates take to escape the fate of being targetted - is accepted by the West to function as intended. That way the West has accepted to be left with no really efficient options to delete piracy. what is being done so far is so overregulated and hampered by legal inner problems that it serves as an alibi only, doing nothing to make the problem go away in the future, and assets assigned are too minor in size anyway. In fact, the problem grows.

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Aramike

Okay, now I get where you're coming from, so let me rephrase.

It is wrong to pay to kill someone, unless you are killing someone who is ATTACKING you of their own volition.

OK, then you must explain why it is wrong to pay to kill someone who isn't
attacking you, but not wrong to be paid to kill someone who isn't attacking
you.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Letum

OK, then you must explain why it is wrong to pay to kill someone who isn't
attacking you, but not wrong to be paid to kill someone who isn't attacking
you.

Nonsense, he must not, because these are not the options.

Paying people to kill those attacking our assets and people, and letting people pay to kill those attacking our assets (and people) - that are the two options here.

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Nonsense, he must not, because these are not the options.

Paying people to kill those attacking our assets and people, and letting people pay to kill those attacking our assets (and people) - that are the two options here.

I don't know how closely you have been following the discussion. My self
and Aramike where contrasting the sale of the chance to carry out state
executions with the sale of the chance to kill pirates.

Aramike thinks that the former is a bad thing to do and the latter is a good
thing to do because "It is wrong to pay to kill someone, unless you are
killing someone who is ATTACKING you of their own volition."
However, he (presumably) simultaneously thinks that it is not wrong to
be paid to kill someone who isn't attacking you because if he did not, he
would not be able to support the death sentence at all.

That is why there is an obligation for him to explain why it is wrong to
pay to kill someone who isn't attacking you (i.e. it is wrong to pay for
the chance to carry out state executions), but not wrong to be paid to
kill someone who isn't attacking you (i.e. it is not wrong to be employed
as a state executioner).

Unless, of course, he bites the bullet of leaving it as an arbitrary distinction.

[Skybird]

You are too much in philosophers heaven, and to little in earthly reality. There is no abstractness in the situation - as long as you do not invest sentimentalism into it. You said I am a moral void. You got it wrong in your conceptions, for I am not even that. And while you are doing abstract mind gymnastics, I point finger at an unpleasant reality: that your "investements for anti-piracy-fonds" would add cash to the warlords in place, ignores that the West already has capitulated in one Somali engagement in the 90s, and that despite all your philosophising you have nothing, absolutely nothing to offer in realistic answers on how to tackle pirates. Bloodtourism I did not defend on a moral basis. I said that while everything else has failed, mostly due to western weakness, one could make pragmatic use of it. That does not enoble it, nor does it declare it holy. Bloodtourism would deliver several messages to pirate villages. First, pirates would not return home. Second, they would learn that they are so low now that even tourists may hunt them for fun. Third, it makes piracy a business of more uncalculatable risks for pirates. Fourth, it reduces numbers of pirates. Fifth, states must not even accept responsibility for them if they get into trouble, for they voluntarily saught war action, and if it happens to kill them, so what - nobody forced them to pay for and go oin that trip. So if there are idiots willing to pay money for going on such a trip, let them (you may even call them immoral, if you like) - we can lose nothing from their decision, but eventually win something from it.

As long as we accept the existence of private mercenary companies, I see no moral argument against bloodtourism as well. Mercenaries will not like it, but I insist on both being essentially the same. Just that the one gets payed - while the others pays. The better for some of us.

While the West accepts to not act with determination over claimed moral arguments, he nevertheless by his inactivity accepts an industry based on violance and blackmailing to foster, he accepts by his inactivity the financial funding of barbaric militias engaged in civil wars, he accepts by his inactivity the growing of a militant criminal network to whom private enterprise, and shipcrews terrorised for weeks and months, must fall victim (always with the risk of being killed), he accepts by his inactivity the robbing of free enterprise - all that on the basis of moral scruples by the West.

I give not even what I leave in the toilet for this kind of "moral", for it is highly hypocritical, absolutely inhumane and ignorrant to reality and fate of the victims and their families at home, and simply cowardish, and weak. Weakness never is morally valuable - it simply is weakness, and meaning it well does not chnage that a bit: even if you mean it well, you have to be strong to reach something. Strength and determination is only immoral where one does not see and accept the responsibility that comes with being strong and determined. but the way the West reacts to the problem right now: what kind of superior, glorious "morals" should that be?

Scorn, mockery and disgust from me for that.

[Letum]

SB:
I can't make any moral argument with some who claims to be "not even
that [a moral void]".

I can't make any rational argument with someone who claims rational
arguments are "abstract mind gymnastics".

The only open doors to your mind appear to be those of utter pragmatism
and your mysticism; neither of which I have any inclination of appealing to.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Letum

SB:
I can't make any rational argument with someone who claims rational
arguments are "abstract mind gymnastics".

That comparison I did not make. I expressed that your arguments are abstract mind gymnastics.

Rationality and reality are somewhat linked. And you do not care for reality quite regularly when it does not match your abstract ideas about what it should be.

Your remind me of a cat in a tree at times, that does not come down without help, that high it climbed. Or maybe I should say a hill with a high tower on top of it, which has a huge spear pointing upwards from the tower's roof, with a needle on that speer's head, and a hair on that needle's pointy edge, and you sitting on the tip of that hair, splitting it.

Morals that are having no fundament in reality, are no morals of any value, Letum. They are ficton only. Either you have functioning ways to adress the challenges of the reality we live in, or you have not. That simple. and that is simply the basic of what you call "my mysticism". Don't see spooky things where there are none. don't make things more complicated than they are. Don'T judge things and dream how it would be if only they would be something different, but take things as what they are. Then you must not just dream of solving them, but you actually can solve them indeed. Because else you do not adress the world, but your desire of what you think the world already should be. Ypour efforts aim at nothing, then, or better: a fiction.

Or in the words of Zen: don'T make a long analysis of who shot that poisened arrow at you, and why, and from where and at what distance and with what type of bow - but pull it out of your wound immediately, else you die from the poison while still asking all those clever questions.

Possible that that kind of healthy pragmatism appears as mysticism to a sometimes hair-raisingly abstract thinker like you indeed.

[geetrue]

[quote=SUBMAN1;1126711]Leave it to the Russians. They will fix things. I'm beginning to think Russian has the only common sense left[\quote]

Reminds me of what it must have been like in the twenties and thirties ... You know like when the rich people would pay for tiger hunts on top of elephants wearing pith helmets and sniffing whatever they sniffed in those days.

The thrill of the hunt I think they call it.

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Morals that are having no fundament in reality, are no morals of any value, Letum. They are ficton only.

I don't claim that morality has any ontological existence, but then neither
does math or subjective experience. Lack of ontological existence isn't
enough of a reason to question the relevance of subjective experience,
math or morality.


No one claims to ask the trivial arrow related questions; "who shot that
poisoned arrow?", "why?" or "from where?". Instead, one claims to ask the
non-trivial questions: "did the arrow hit me?", "might it have been
poisoned?" and "will pulling it out do more damage than the poison
might?".

In broader cases that you might chose to make the Arrow story appear
analogous to, the non-trivial questions are rarely so simple to answer as
"did the arrow hit me?", "might it have been poisoned?" and "will pulling it
out do more damage than the poison might?". No wider argument
can be deconstructed to a state where it becomes directly analogous to
the poisoned arrow.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Letum

INo wider argument
can be deconstructed to a state where it becomes directly analogous to
the poisoned arrow.

Oh my, Letum...

There is no argument that is to be deconstructed, and heaven knows why you do that so obsessively nevertheless. It's just a small story with a point. That is all. No indepth explanation of the universe. No onthologic mysteries. No abstract mind puzzles. No start for a mental voyage into the inner middle of abstractness itself. Just a simple story with a single simple point, just that, not more, not less. Take it as what it is, or don't.

Sometimes a stone - is simply just that, a stone.


Just stop to make all things always so complicated that are not complicated at all!

[Aramike]

Morals that are having no fundament in reality, are no morals of any value, Letum. They are ficton only. Either you have functioning ways to adress the challenges of the reality we live in, or you have not. That simple. and that is simply the basic of what you call "my mysticism". Don't see spooky things where there are none. don't make things more complicated than they are.

This sums it up quite nicely, I think.

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Sometimes a stone - is simply just that, a stone.

Just stop to make all things always so complicated that are not complicated at all!

The world is far more complex than I, or anyone else, could ever make it appear.
Telling a former geologist that a stone is "simply just a stone" may be the ideal case in point.

If your world is simple, it is the reflection of an internal, not external, simplicity.