[Amnell]

I'm not lying. I knew the moment I read your assertion about DU that you were incorrect. I did check wikipedia to make sure I wasn't also mistaken, but I knew that your information was wrong without having to look. In fact, I would not have even checked at all were it not for your military experience.

And just so you know, I would not waste my time trying to impress you.

Master and Commander is not different. It was a lesser of evils. You were saying that "becoming" the lesser of evils is still evil. Well, yeah, that's why it's "two" evils. The point was simply that you don't always have the luxury of having your cake and eating it, too. As I remember it, the mast and the kid who went with it were swept away from the ship about as fast as the crew cut the ropes. They all knew that there was no rescuing the other kid. They didn't have the little floaties you see on cruise ships these days, and sending someone out after him would have been a pointless waste of another life.

I don't know what world you live in, but in the real world, shit just doesn't happen in way you can deal with one-hundred percent of the time. Shit happens, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Back to the example of Japan, we could have pressed a conventional war, used the atomics, or just pushed for a stalemate where we were and called it even, or we could have just dropped the war all together in July and it would have been good--no little kids bombed, no pregnant women shot... Except that the Japanese would have just attacked us again. No matter what you say, Tenchu, you just can't always take the clean way out of everything.

In King Kong, from a logical point of view, those guys shouldn't have gone in after her. It's amazing how passion rules reason, though :P .

In any battle, what is the goal of the commander? To attrit his enemy while maintaining his own force. Coming from this, it's clear why the US military would use things like cruise missiles when they could have sent in two brigades of Marines and accomplished the same thing. Call it cowardice if you like. You're not going to change that that's how military logistics work.

For the record, Fallujah did have our people there on the ground getting shot, and you're still complaining.

I haven't said anything about ideals, yet.... Actually, I rather dislike ideals, idealism, and idealists. They're irrational, they start fights, they're often misguided... They just aren't worth it. There are too damn many idealists in this world, and most of them seem to be living in Washington, DC and San Francisco. So I won't have a problem with having to die for some "fucking ideal".

Tenchu, you are an idealist. You cling to this idea that the world is somehow yours to manipulate because you have a heart of stone or some such thing. You think that you can survive this world without ever having to compromise something. The nature of this world IS COMPROMISE. It doesn't matter if you're haggling over price or fighting a war.

I'm sure you're going to try to tell me that I'm an idealist for trying to defend my country's honour -_- . Don't bother. I have an affinity for my country and I believe that it's a great nation, in spite of its faults. Nothing is perfect, and I'm not going to waste my time fixating on everything that's wrong.

You should try it sometime, maybe you'll be a happier person *_* .