Morality/Murder

alex, God have mercy on your soul

If it was necessary I could.
On the question of morality it would depend entirely on the person being killed. There are a few people in my own family that I would say deserve to die by whatever means because the harm they have caused others around them (combined) exceeds that of taking a life. Otherwise I see no justification for killing anything that is causing no harm and, as all living things do, has the desire to survive.
As for prison, I would never willingly be incarcerated.

Once, when discussing a military draft in school, I reasoned that the only way I could every go into the military via a draft and not go AWOL,

i couldn't do military service either - not because i'd have moral objections to being an attacker so much as having much more serious moral objections to the very idea that you should have to fight, or worse, die, for your country. wilfred owen had it right:

wilfrid owen wrote:My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Alex Foster wrote:[Isn't everything in Britain in crisis?

pretty much!

I don't know, but it must bee really cool to press the "red button" in the Pentagon/Whitehouse and nuke a whole country.

Gogol wrote:alex, God have mercy on your soul

I don't believe in god. Would god really condemn a person who has done nothing wrong? Wow. That's harsh. Simply thinking can get you in to hell? ... That explains a lot, actually.

i will pray for you. i hope that you one day can see the light and that jesus will wash away all this nasty nihilism and rid your american soul from any foreign ideas. because, because jesus is no johnny foreigner. you're slipping, alex, you're on your way to eternal damnation and it breaks my heart to see it.

One cannot with absolute resolve answer "no" to this question until one's life has been on the verge of cessation at the hands of another and then only if one still has not the slightest carnal inclination to defend oneself.

One cannot with absolute resolve answer "yes" to this question until one has already killed another.

kookiemaster wrote:I have killed animals, out of necessity when the vet couldn't help anymore and thei pain needed to be stopped right then an now, when the trip to the vet would only have been further pain. Once with my bare hands. I did it because it needed to be done, it was my last duty as their owner.

When they take their last breath, when their little bodies shiver and then go still, when I listen to their heart and hear nothing, silence, it's just about one of the worse experience I have ever had to go through.

For all the rational bs I try to live by, to cause death is more than to end life, even if it's to alleviate suffering. Something of me dies with each and every one of them

So yes, I could do it, I can muster the self control not to chicken out but it's not something I would want to do. I wouldn't want to do it for purely selfish reasons.

I've often fantasised about jail, life between four walls in solitary confinement. Ironically, when I though of ways to get there, one of the problem was to try and find a crime that wouldn't cause harm to others. I have no desire to hurt others, even the worse ones on the planet because to me it would be giving them more attention than they deserve.

yeesh, did you strangle them? I don't think I could do that. Asphyxiation is one way I really don't want to die, carbon dioxide poisoning panic is horrible.

Alex Foster wrote:Could you kill someone?

I hope never to have to find out.

It's a tricky one though. The quick answer is almost certainly not.
But it depends on the circumstance. If someone pointed to a random harmless person walking along a road, then no I could not kill them. No way. I disagree with people killing the wasp that stung them.
If I'd happened to catch some bastard raping my sister, then I have no idea what I would do other than that it would be agressive, and probably violent. I'm almost certain I would stop before it got fatal.

Alex Foster wrote:Do you have a moral sense about it being wrong?

Yes I do. Yes it's wrong.

My problem comes when someone says "Why is it wrong?" because I have no reason further than "I wouldn't want someone to do it to me". Which isn't a particularly strong argument, really. I mean, I may not want to spend time with other people because I wouldn't want them to spend time with me. However other people do actually want to spend time with me because they like it when people spend time with them.

Murder is still wrong though. In my opinion.

bobalobugle wrote:yeesh, did you strangle them? I don't think I could do that. Asphyxiation is one way I really don't want to die, carbon dioxide poisoning panic is horrible.

No. I did a cervical dislocation ... because the rat was in the last stage of a nasty mycoplasma flareup turned pneumonia and was panicking because he couldn't breath and was turning blue. He was beyond saving and I did not want it to panic for an hour before I could get it to the vet.

It's basically breaking their neck but at the same time making sure that the spinal cord gets severed. It is a relatively easy procedure but there is zero room for error and is generally only recommended on smaller rodents because you really have to yank hard. It's quick though, quicker than the anesthetics but far less calm.

That being said, strangulation looks worse than it is. How do I know? I have been nearly killed by strangulation to the point where very basic muscles were shut down.

When the blood flow to your brain is cut off, you panic for maybe a second or two and then your body goes into emergency mode and shuts down everything that is not necessary. In a way it feels a bit like being put under for an operation but slower. Your extremities go numb and limp and you basically feel nothing. Then you start to hear this buzzing sound and then your vision becomes narrower and narrower and it all goes dark and you're gone.

However, I suppose having your windpipe crushed might be far scarier than having your arteries constricted.