Philosophical Vegan Forum

teo123 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:25 am So, you think Croatian government is very corrupt, right? Then, what would be, according to you, a way to fix that?

It's usually a pretty slow road, corruption has a lot of causes and tends only to be corrected by a huge shift in the popular opinion and election of reformers -- but that's not always better, since many reformers are also driven by bad ideologies. There aren't always easy fixes for things.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2020 12:52 pm

teo123 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 9:25 am So, you think Croatian government is very corrupt, right? Then, what would be, according to you, a way to fix that?

It's usually a pretty slow road, corruption has a lot of causes and tends only to be corrected by a huge shift in the popular opinion and election of reformers -- but that's not always better, since many reformers are also driven by bad ideologies. There aren't always easy fixes for things.

By the way, what exactly did you mean when you said that, because Croatian government is very corrupt, it's not inconceivable that another Vukovar Massacre happens here? What does government being corrupt have to do with the likelihood of something like Vukovar Massacre happening? What about all those statistics that show that Croatia is one of the safest countries in the world today, way safer than the USA? Don't they strongly suggest another Vukovar is more likely to happen in the USA than here in Croatia?

@brimstoneSalad, I think this is a very important question, why did you say it's not inconceivable that another large massacre (such as Vukovar Massacre) happens in Croatia now because Croatian government is supposedly corrupt, when the statistics show Croatia is way safer than most countries in Europe, yet alone USA? Isn't then a major massacre today much more likely to happen in the USA than in Croatia?

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countr ... the-world/

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_b ... title=2019

Also, what do you think, @brimstoneSalad, was it painful to die in Vukovar Massacre? Can I make myself happy by believing that the victims of the Vukovar Massacre died relatively painlessly?

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 29, 2020 1:01 pm Also, what do you think, @brimstoneSalad, was it painful to die in Vukovar Massacre? Can I make myself happy by believing that the victims of the Vukovar Massacre died relatively painlessly?

It wasn't necessarily a clean execution. There were probably people running around and panicking while being shot, and plenty of people who died slowly from blood loss, vs. a clean execution where multiple shots to the heart result in almost instant loss of consciousness.

Kind of irrelevant though, since a quick death isn't much better than a slow one when people strongly prefer to not die at all (or at least not for as long a time as possible).

teo123 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 18, 2020 4:19 am By the way, what exactly did you mean when you said that, because Croatian government is very corrupt, it's not inconceivable that another Vukovar Massacre happens here?

A corrupt government is less predictable and can act more against the public interest and even its own stated ideologies and attempt to hide its actions. There's more accountability in a non-corrupt government, so things like that are less likely unless it's made legal. A far right regime could commit a legal massacre without an ounce of corruption, but such governments are usually uncommon.

For example, arguably widescale Japanese internment in the U.S. was a product of corruption, whereby rich whites influenced policy to take the land from very productive Japanese owned farms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... b11077135/

Anson unabashedly admitted as much to Taylor in the Saturday Evening Post: "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over."

You could also argue that it wasn't political corruption, but the racist ideology of the politicians. Corruption, however, also facilitates the rise into power of evil people who can better navigate that system. Good people are pushed out of those political environments. Kind of goes both ways, the correlations there are very strong (you can also look at corruption in Nazi Germany).

That doesn't mean a non-corrupt government won't commit massacres, but when you follow the money it very often goes hand in hand and provides the motivation to do evil that might not have otherwise been there. Corruption may not cause massacres, but it seems to facilitate them.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Kind of irrelevant though, since a quick death isn't much better than a slow one when people strongly prefer to not die at all (or at least not for as long a time as possible).

And how would you deal with the thought that there was a large massacre where you live recently? I don't know what to say, it seems both hard to believe and hard to emotionally accept.
The idea that there is no afterlife is neither particularly hard to believe nor hard to accept for me. The existence of a soul makes it hard to explain obvious things such as that people who have been unconscious for a longer period of time can't tell how long it's passed, it seems like a moment to them. If souls existed, we would expect people who have been unconscious for a long time to remember facing silent darkness or leaving their own bodies, and nothing of that happens. And you can comfort yourself with saying that it's a good thing there is no afterlife because an eternity in heaven would be hell for people.
But there recently having been a massacre where I live... it's so hard to believe. I mean, I have never seen a gun here where I live. And it's so hard to believe a whole bunch of people would turn crazy enough to actually commit a massacre. And it's emotionally so hard to accept.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Corruption may not cause massacres, but it seems to facilitate them.

But, again, don't all those statistics showing that Croatia is one of the safest country in the world today suggest a large massacre is much more likely to occur in the US today than in Croatia?