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Unless the USA stops doing things that make other people want to kill innocent americans

Evil people, or people with evil intentions, exist. Period. Full stop. There will always be people who want to kill innocent Americans. Period. Full stop. Just as there will always be people who want to kill innocent $CITIZENS_OF_COUNTRY_NAME.

Blaming an entire country for the evil actions and intentions of people who kill innocents is a copout of fantastic proportions. The existence of evil (killing innocents) does not excuse more evil (the government of the United States committing unmitigated mass-scale Orwellian spying on the citizens of the United States).



Very true that evil exists and there will always be people with bad intentions. But you just can't dismiss that hatred saying it will always be at the scale it is no matter what you do.

No blame is put on an entire country but on the actions of its military and whoever/whatever drives those actions.

I also agree the existence of evil should not excuse more evil. Unfortunately, it seems it does in many people's mind.


I would expect people on this site to have a slightly more sophisticated understanding than that. There are these things called numbers. It's not a binary question of whether or not the actions of the USA are to blame for reactions against the USA, it's a question of whether the USA's actions cause more frequent aggressive reactions.


That logic is flawed. Those numbers indicate correlation, not causation.


That logic is flawed. Some subset of instances of correlation reflect causation. A huge portion of scientific enquiry is based around establishing correlation because prior mechanistic, theoretic and empirical study deems a causative link plausible. Would you wish to do away with the collection of data on correlation? My comment was made in a context in which a causative link is clearly plausible (that American foreign policy makes people angry). Therefore quantitative study of American foreign policy actions and instances of angry foreigners would be a perfectly valid exercise. "Correlation is not causation" is a gentle reminder not to make facile inferences found in undergraduate textbooks -- you appear to be under the impression that it's some sort of death blow to scientific epistemology.




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