Sometimes Biting An Ear Off IS The Civilized Action

Simple-minded liberals seem to have problems understanding the importance of context. They live intellectual lives not unlike an endless series of "Three's Company" episodes, with some minor mistake of negligable importance cascading through a complex structure of contradictions, emotions, and wishes that makes up the intellectual landscape of the liberal mind, causing gigantic errors in the frontline theorems.

When Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear, we all understood that this was barbaric behavior. We were all shocked by it. But it was not the act of biting the ear that was so bad; it was the context in which the act took place.

If I were being attacked on a desolate street, and my attacker's ear were next to my mouth, then I should, as a civilized human being, bite that ear as hard as I can. If that is my best defense against the unwarranted aggression by my attacker, then that is my most civilized defense. In that context, biting the ear is the correct action.

But Mike Tyson was within the realm of the gentlemanly fight, with strict rules. It was a space in which to test certain specific skills with another. Biting was clearly outside of all of the rules, and came across as an out-of-control, barbaric act. Not quite as barbaric as if he had bitten Evander Holyfield's ear off while giving a joint press conference, but not too far off.

In war, we see the same sort of contextual confusion on the part of simple-minded, emotionally-driven liberals. They cannot seem to understand that, what we call "terrorism" is not only the context-free concept of killing civilians, but killing those civilians outside of the context of war - in which killing civilians is perfectly civilized and acceptable.

But then, when we actually have, what any normal person would call a war, liberals refuse to take the context into account and reevaluate their notion of "civilized act". They further refuse to acknowledge any of human history, except to say that they are superior to all who came before them (since they would never stoop to use, say, the same tactics that FDR used in WWII, or that JFK used in his threat to kill every man, woman, and child in the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis).

Morality, if one cares to consider that idiotic, self-righteous notion of superiority, is not dictated by raw action, but by the contexts within which one is willing (or has demonstrated the willingness) to perform said actions.

No. There is no "rule of war" that stipulates that enemy civilians must be spared (beside the fact that the rule of "sovereignty" states that these civilians are of concern to no nation but the one they are citizens of!). There are no "rules of war", period.

However ...

Since liberals love the notion of universal values, there is one true and universal value with regard to war. Throughout all of human history, and concerning all of the great civilizations that have ever existed, the only true and universal war crime is LOSING.