And indeed, I do believe that government-orchestrated assassination plots against a head of a foreign state were indeed considered a wholly separate category of wrongdoing back then, and one that was a particular taboo. You just can’t put other sorts of assassinations in the same reference class.
Ah lovely, so now we’re down to playing reference-class tennis.
‘Well, assassinations against heads of state are special, it’s perfectly reasonable to think they were just utterly beyond the pale, even if the Brits were happy to assassinate inconvenient political types like some Irish.’
If you insist that things like the assassinations during the sectarian struggles in Ireland fall into the same reference class, then the inferential distances may really be too large for us to have a productive discussion here.
Indeed. Go discuss your complicated justifications of what is transparently unthinking nationalism with someone else.
Assume there wasn’t anything Vladimir_M said that a believer in unthinking nationalism wouldn’t have said. Such a person would rationalize the belief that according to some objective moral metric, one’s own English nation is superior, other nations are different from England and each other but overall even the best of them are not as good, and vassal races such as the Irish are most inferior of all.
If enough Englishmen believe that, it becomes true that one can deduce from the English assassinating foreign politicians that they would assassinate Irish ones, but not from their assassination of Irish politicians that they would assassinate foreign ones.
The belief Vladimir_M advocated greatly resembles the raw nationalist one, but could instead be interpreted as a second order belief about what military types of a country, people generally holding such right-wing beliefs, would be more and less likely to do. That’s how I interpreted it.
Ah lovely, so now we’re down to playing reference-class tennis.
‘Well, assassinations against heads of state are special, it’s perfectly reasonable to think they were just utterly beyond the pale, even if the Brits were happy to assassinate inconvenient political types like some Irish.’
Indeed. Go discuss your complicated justifications of what is transparently unthinking nationalism with someone else.
Assume there wasn’t anything Vladimir_M said that a believer in unthinking nationalism wouldn’t have said. Such a person would rationalize the belief that according to some objective moral metric, one’s own English nation is superior, other nations are different from England and each other but overall even the best of them are not as good, and vassal races such as the Irish are most inferior of all.
If enough Englishmen believe that, it becomes true that one can deduce from the English assassinating foreign politicians that they would assassinate Irish ones, but not from their assassination of Irish politicians that they would assassinate foreign ones.
The belief Vladimir_M advocated greatly resembles the raw nationalist one, but could instead be interpreted as a second order belief about what military types of a country, people generally holding such right-wing beliefs, would be more and less likely to do. That’s how I interpreted it.