Lonan said:
The Quarians probably thought that the Geth would kill them all, and initiated a pre-emptive strike. If they wanted to dominate the Geth, why would they try to kill them all? You can?t dominate someone who?s dead (except in certain FPS?s).
Play Mass Effect 1 again and listen to Tali's dialogue.
They wanted to exterminate the Geth because they assumed they would resent being used for manual labour and rebel. They weren't killing them in response to a genuine threat or danger, but because they weren't acting like mindless slaves, the only justification being 'lol.. the geth are synthetics, of
course they want to kill organics when they became sentient!' Only they don't. Until the heresy, there has been no galaxy wide crusade to exterminate organic life. While it's clear the Geth don't believe in co-existence, can you blame them? They got a pretty good lesson in how not to coexist with organics.
You know what gets to me about the Quarians though, it's that they're not even sorry. Even Admiral vas Quib Quib was clearly meant to be read as some kind of defeatist quisling figure judging by his role in the storyline.. and Rael'Zorah's big plan? The reason he was experimenting on captured enemies. "Waaahh.. we want our slaves back! Let's make a virus which makes sentient creatures docile and subservient!"
I think the Quarians are living proof that people are so attuned to story structure that they'll overlook collossal degrees of dickery as long as the people doing it aren't presented through a traditional bad guy formula. I'm not sure I'd call them 'evil', but thus far they've presented themselves as an entire race of colossal dicks, and stupid dicks as that.
Lonan said:
Obviously the Palestinian people have attempted to re-claim their homeland, and Israel has defended itself utterly. Many of the complaints against Israel?s conduct appear to be not about how it defends itself, but that it defends itself at all. If rockets were raining down where you live, what would you do? And remember, someone who hasn?t had rockets exploding around him or her cannot possibly understand what that truly means.
So.. we can't judge the deliberate use of children as human shields, the deliberate sniping of aid workers and foreign protesters, the use of WP over civilian areas with demonstrable and indiscriminate casualties, the mass stockpiling of WMDs without international regulation, the complicity in massacres and genocide, the air-raid threats against other countries, the deliberate invasion of other countries, the militiary support of genocidal regimes or the deliberate assassination of civilians because we 'don't understand how it feels'?
I condemn my own government for less.
Most Israelis, let alone Israel supporters have never had a rocket explode within fifty miles of them.
By your own logic, every attack against Israel in recent history has been justified by Israel's shockingly atrocious invasion of Lebanon. Israel as a state has made no secret of its utter contempt for Paelstinian and wider Muslim life in the region, has launched numerous aggressive campaigns in violation of its borders, and has expanded considerably from its initial territorial mandate as passed down by the United Nations.
However distasteful it might be, Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinian state. If the elected government of Israel has the right to aggressive self defence when attacked by rockets, then Hamas also has the right to aggressive self defence when airstrikes land in Gaza or when Israel's allies are allowed to massacre Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
Britain did not 'give Palestine to the Jews'. The United Nations proposed a two state solution in the face of mass migration of Jews to Israel and impending British withdrawal from the territory. Britain itself actually abstained from the vote and expressed the belief that a two state solution would not be workable. The borders laid down in that two state solution do not correspond to those of current day Israel. The Palestinian state has shrunk, no longer incorporates any of Jerusalem, and has seen hundreds of thousands of its citizens expelled or forced to flee. Israel would actually be far larger were it not for the United Nations. It has not passively defended itself, it has expanded consistently and aggressively.
I'm not saying you don't have a point. We don't necessarily have the full story, but it is clear the story is too nuanced for blanket justification or simple division into 'goodies' and 'baddies'. Everything either of us knows comes from the media, neither of us is equipped to offer an overarching moral appraisal of the situation. That said, I'm not convinced the people who are equipped are doing a terribly good job of it either.
