The new Libya: various aspects

[carl]

JMM has it right. 'Idealism' has killed and will kill more people then will unfettered evil. There really are some evil folks in the world but there aren't that many;...

This is just a point of philosophical disagreement. It makes little difference in the real world; if you see a poisonous snake you kill it, it isn't important if you get the genus and species right.

That being said, boy are you wrong. There are a lot of evil people in the world, all around you. You (the rhetorical you) know a lot of them and deal with them daily. Most all are restrained by societal controls, mainly the fear of getting caught, so you don't see the evil that is there, unless you are a police officer or in a similar line of work. Then you see it, because you work with people for whom the societal controls have no meaning or who miscalculated their chances of getting caught.

The other times you will see it is when those societal controls break down or are perverted in some way. Then the evil comes out, the little, cruel, smirking, for the fun of it evil that M-A mentioned. You can go on and on listing those occasions.

Then of course we have the historically significant major killers. It is true there aren't many of those guys because there just aren't that many people who have the manifold genius to pull that off. They aren't primarily motivated by idealism. Their primary motivation is the acquisition and maintenance of personal power, and what I believe is just the plain old simple satisfaction of offing people you dislike.

There is evil. Getting modern Americans to really accept that is a hard thing to do because they can live their whole lives without having to come face to face with it.