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The New Transparency of War and Lethality of Hatred
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert Wright says that if you had asked him a few days ago — before news broke that American soldiers had urinated on Taliban corpses — if such a thing were possible, he would have said 'probably.' After all if you send 'young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, ... the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface — and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.' War, presumably, has always been like this, but something has changed that amounts to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place. First, there's the new transparency of war as battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details, so 'it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral — pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan,' that will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever. The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. 'New information technologies make it easier for people who share a hatred to organize around it,' writes Wright. 'And once hateful groups are organized, they stand a better chance than a few decades ago of getting their hands on massively lethal technologies.' It used to be that national security consisted of making sure all foreign governments either liked you or feared you; now it requires that as few people as possible hate you. 'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'"
morality is evolution from barbarism.
if you profess and implement humanly genuene marolity than greed, wars will not be fought.
Please be sarcasm...
It sounds like you've been playing a bit too much Tropico 4. Only in video games and movies does your suggestion of ruling by fear actually work. If you look at real life history, you'd realize that what you said was really silly.
I don't respond to AC's.
Indeed. The whole idea hinges on the idea that the U.S. does something to cause our enemies to hate us in the first place. By extension, 9/11 "never" would have happened if the U.S. wasn't involved in the Middle East AT ALL. (Which is IMPOSSIBLE due to global trade, unless someone has a 100% alternative to Middle Eastern oil)
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us.
So we're supposed to terrorize our enemies... Who are we? Al Qaeda?
Your premise is equally as bogus. You're assuming that all our enemies could be made to fear us. If your living conditions suck enough it becomes hard to fear anything. What do you have to be afraid of? You likely have nothing of material value and little to no family to be held over you. Death / torture is the only thing they could be afraid of and so what? They are likely in a position where death is always a possibility anyways. How do you make someone with little or nothing to lose fear you?
Fear and hatred are not mutually exclusive. I'm sure that the Taliban rank and file have jolts of pure fear when they see an American patrol (and vice versa). They can well hate us for various reasons, including instilling the fear in the first place.
War is a horrible mix of the best and worst in human kind. Be nice if we could figure out how to get around it, but I rather doubt that's going to happen short of some uber powerful alien race coming down and telling us to grow up.
But the big flap over urinating over the Taliban corpses is just that - a flap. I think it just reflects on the total inanity of the general media these days. You don't want to talk about big, complex issues so you make little stupid things go nuclear.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...when I was studying history in college, I read some WW2 memiors about the fighting on the island of Peleliu, and some parts very disturbing. The only difference between then and now is that then, they didn't film it and post it to YouTube.
'Humans who learn history learn that humans learn nothing from history'
It sounds like you've been playing a bit too much Tropico 4. Only in video games and movies does your suggestion of ruling by fear actually work. If you look at real life history, you'd realize that what you said was really silly.
Obviously not a fan of Machiavelli.
There is no honor in being a mercenary for corporations and a corrupt government.
I fully believe if soldiers were fighting against a foreign invasion they would not have the same mindset as Xi/Blackwater.
US Marines routinely sent home Japanese skulls (they were photographed in LIFE). Someone sent Roosevelt a cigarette holder made from a Japanese femur. The Russians did crazy, unspeakable things to civilians on a large scale in Prussia and the Nazis were more than happy (desperate) to tell the world through even representatives of the Allied press.
And, oh yeah, the Nazis... no real need to go there.
And why stop with WWII? Vlad Dracul (yeah, that guy) made damn sure everyone knew why he was called "Vlad the Impaler" and he didn't even have a Facebook account.
So, in short, no, nothing new here.
Some cannot be made to fear.
I don't see a problem with it. Where was the outrage when they did far worse to our fallen troops?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People today seem to think that this is something new. The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect of transmitting information. These types of acts have been perpetrated in other wars since man picked up his first sticks and stones. To be amazed that this actual happened is nothing more than the true disconnect that people; in general, have with reality as a whole.
I thought /. was about tech material!
So is the right of US to not only invade the country, put their own government, kill a lot of people, send their childrens to guantanamo, but also to shit over the dead bodies of the ones that tried to resist and even joke over it? Put it in the other direction, what if US get successfully invaded, the government replaced, the resistence obliterated, people sent to be tortured in concentration camps and the invaders shit over the corpse of your fathers/friends/whatever, would you be a little outraged? Would be their right to do so? At least the disclosing is not as bad as what was done in Irak.
Bombing never works. When the routine bombing of civilian areas started in WW2, both sides thought it would demoralize the enemy. Both sides were wrong. Bombing only hardens their resolve. For example, look at 9-11. Did it demoralize the US? No, it hardened their resolve - to the point of changing the very nature of their society - for it not to happen again. Does bombing in Afghanistan fix things? No. Did bombing by Khaddafi stop the revolution? No. Did it stop the Lybian army? No. Long story short - bombing is only good for blowing stuff up. Anyone who talks about its effect on morale is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The problem is surely that you're making enemies. Not of governments, but of people. Why is it that US soldiers are so unpopular in Afghanistan? They weren't too popular in Iraq either. Why have they not been welcomed as liberators?
How can you tell a kid it is ok to kill the guy pointing a gun at you. But you need to respect the body of the guy who wanted you dead? While it is disgusting, i find the killing far more disgusting then the pissing on the body.
Preferably they shouldn't fear us, but should fear fucking with us.
It works if they do not hate you. If they hate you, it doesn't actually work. No matter how feared a dictator is, as soon as a significant percentage of people know that they find him intolerable, and know that a significant number of others share their belief, that dictator has huge problems. All the fear in the world will just make them more determined.
Machiavelli wrote in an environment where there were many competing factions of approximately equal power, none of whom were significantly different from any of the others.
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We have always known of disrespect for the enemy; it is part and parcel of the mindset that allows most people to kill other people in the face of the knowledge that they are otherwise people just like them, with families, etc. History is rife with reports of disrespect on the battlefield. Spitting, pissing, dismemberment, burial of Muslims in pigskin, burial of Christians with no marker or no blessing, rape of surviving family members, etc., etc., etc.
The fact that these things happen with mind-numbing regularity has never served to prevent anyone from going to war. Religion is insufficient (and in fact serves quite commonly as cause.) Pacifism is plowed under in the face of those comfortable with violence.
What we can say is that the least likely occurrence of war has been when the parties (not) involved are strongly connected by trade, common language, and social patterns, and where the society at hand doesn't busy itself with creating, maintaining, or ignoring a growing underclass of people with less privilege, opportunity, and respect than others.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh I dunno. History is full of examples. Rome comes to mind. For that matter, consider more recent history. How much terrorism did the old Soviet Union suffer? Close enough to zero as to be zero. Because everyone KNEW what sort of reaction would result. (The fact they financed the majority of terror organizations probably didn't hurt either, of course that fact is still in the memory hole....) After the breakup they get a lot of it. There was a time when few would have tried such things against the US. Now they do not fear us.
When your enemies neither respect or fear you is when you get the foolishness we currently endure. We wouldn't have to crucify ten thousand of em anytime they disrespect us or anything, just create the sure knowledge that any attack against us would ensure such a totally disproportionate response that it would be a losing game.
Democrat delenda est
Dehumanization of the enemy explains a lot of the behavior. Normally it would have just happened and few people would know about it. They would know it happens, but not the details of every case. Technology changed that of course.
When one side fights with morals and the other doesn't, that's the problem. Urinating on someone who is dead and won't care is a big outrage, but only due to respect for the dead, even if it's your enemy. Beheading and dragging corpses through the street behind cars seems to be the way things work on the other side.
Technology allows us to share both sides with equality. Having a higher standard puts that side at a big disadvantage. If the US said it would drag corpses thrugh the street in victory and do all kinds of legal but humiliating things to you if you are caught or killed, the enemy would individually fear, not collectively. And individual fear is a lot harder to overcome. I don't want my body desecrated, I'm not joining your war unless I have to, and even then I'll do a half-hearted job.
Either play nice, or play dirty, but don't expect your enemy to do the same. And when you make a promise like 'no torture', either stick by it or throw it out the window. The worst propaganda you can have is a country that says one thing and does another (collectively). At least the jihadis are consistent. They have completely dehumanized the enemy, and do not seem concerned with the same things.
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us. We obsess and worry about whether our enemies like us. We allow our enemies to put propaganda in our legacy media. They don't.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do. Do ya think they would behead our people, desecrate their corpses, etc. if they feared us? Would they blow up a block of downtown NYC if they feared us? If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity." The answer is obvious.
You are a moron and you can stop spreading your idiocy any time. The world will awaken to peace and universal love/respect whether you decide to join us or remain cold and alone.
The kicker is that the main people who care about middle eastern oil are the europeans. By trying to ensure a supply of oil from that region, we're basically helping out european governments.
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No, you're the guys pretending that "politically corect war" exists.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why does war exist in the first place? No, it isn't because some are rich and some are poor. It isn't because American troops are in X country. It isn't because images of whoever, doing whatever, were broadcast wherever.
War exists because humans evolved to be herd animals with a strong need for hierarchy. At our most basic level humans desire to establish herds with an Alpha on top and an Omega at the bottom. This Facebook amplified, "I love you, you love me" mentality that presumes that we can all "just get along" goes against our very human nature.
Liking one another has nothing to do with hierarchy. There is no correlation between hierarchy and liking one another. Most leaders are respected first, and liked second -- if at all. Liking one another is a quality most appropriate for the followers -- and we all can't be followers.
If you want to end war you need to do one of two things 1) either destroy that which we as humans were evolved to do (perhaps via Terminator-like eradication of humans) or 2) create world-wide stable hierarchies that incorporate human nature.
In the Vietnam war our press corps actually showed the atrocities of war, including burned children, dying soldiers and the execution of civilians. The squeaky-clean "live from the White House" war coverage began to happen after that. If only our major news sources engaged in transparency these days - instead we either get social-oriented pro-government cheerleaders (e.g., MSNBC) or military-oriented pro-government cheerleaders (e.g., FOX), but really nothing that provides insight into the plight of folks outside the power structure.
there's the new transparency of war as battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details
Al Qaeda didn't attack us because we brought middle eastern oil. Al Qaeda didn't attack us because they hated our freedom and democracy.
They attacked us because we stationed troops in their holy land. They attacked us because we supported despotic regimes in the middle east. They attacked us because we are Israel's biggest ally.
That's why we should be like the Waffen SS or better yet, Rome. None of this pussy bullshit of not killing civilians and being civil. War is the most uncivil thing man does!
You want peace? Exterminate the enemy! Kill ever last man, woman, and child - then salt the fucking Earth!
What does the US do? They go in with their pink panties on and escort little old ladies with bombs.
Why don't they just give them Boy Scout uniforms and wooden guns and say, "Go to it, pussy! Bring peace to the Middle East! And make sure not to hurt anyone!"
Wars are dirty.
> now it requires that as few people as possible hate you. 'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'
lots of luck with that, it seems now that we are "pulling out" of Iraq, we're looking to start another war with Iran (OK, so we've been "at war" with them since 1979) but it seems they're (high level govt officials and many Americans) itching for a shooting war with them.
mfwright@batnet.com
Total bullshit. Pick up a history book some day.
In WWII, we carpet bombed cities - entire cities and nations got to feel - first hand - how horrible war was. The result? The citizens would take life and politics seriously. You don't want to elect the wrong leader because YOU could be killed.
Now, war is antiseptic. We can target an insurgent with laser beam precision and take him out. All the other enemies are hiding in the nearby houses. If we leveled the entire neighborhood - men, women, children, babies, and all their pets... there will be no more desire to fight on their behalf, or the citizens would drive the insurgents out of their midst and not permit them to hide like the cowards they are.
Would good and decent people get killed? Yup! Sure will! And it is the fault of the good and decent people that they are being killed. How? Well, if the good and decent people stood up for themselves, they could have put a stop to the bad people - but they don't. Why? Because "those who are cruel to the kind, will be kind to the cruel." If the good & decent spoke up, they would be targeted by the bad people and their lives would be in danger - so they say nothing, do nothing. Well, if the alternative were to have your city carpet bombed, then they would have every incentive to stand up and burn the evil out of their midst.
If you make war so costly to fight - the enemy will surrender. When they surrender, it is done on your terms. They violate the terms? They start losing everything again. If they want to pull their heads out of their collective asses and build up a good & decent society, we will help them. If they don't, we should kill them.
Unfortunately it does work. Pick up Unbroken, a story about a downed WWII flyer who, amongst other fairly horrid episodes, got interred in a Japanese POW camp. He remained there till the end of the war and describes leaving the camp. The area had been carpet bombed previously (and hit with the atomic bomb). The civilian population - which previously had been ready to sacrifice themselves when the Allies invaded were basically shocked into submission.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII. We would have won in Vietnam, would win in Iraq and Afghanistan if we did that (and likely be set up for war crimes). War is really ugly business. We're just playing at low level conflicts for now. (Not that it makes it morally or politically correct). Hopefully we won't get there again, but with humans being the ugly little monsters we are, I wouldn't bet on it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Make love, not war.
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
this song by Rise Against actually says "they pissed in his hands". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DboMAghWcA
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You don't. You put a bullet in their brains. Hitler knew this. Stalin knew this. All great tyrants of the past, and all the little tyrants today (local drug dealers, political bosses etc) know this. But no, shoot a few people and suddenly the word "genocide" is screamed out, because our "civilized" culture is perfectly willing to make people suffer a long drawn out death out of sight through economic sanctions and incarceration, rather than a quick death via purges. So this is the price we pay - a nagging problem that just won't go away because the worst that can happen to these people is an all expenses paid room and board vacation in Cuba.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
My kingdom for a mod point.
The problem is that you have enemies.
And the problem with the Afghanistan and Iraq situations is that the people of these countries are not supposed to be enemies! That's why you don't behave like an animal in their country, because you're allegedly there simply because you love them so damned much.
Yeah, I think they would. In fact, if I feared a country so much that I thought they would 'Bomb our cities, kill our leaders and convert us to their religion.". The answer is that Martyrs are more powerful than your military.
Or is your solution going so far as to cause fear like the Romans did. Because you know how well persecution and absolutely brutal responses worked for them in the Middle East.
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Bombing ended WWII almost immediately.
You must be new here. At least once a day slashdot does a 'slashkos' politicized story. Always from an extreme progressive viewpoint. This is today's.
In a couple of months, as the US election cycle heats up it will get much worse. Especially since the progressive gameplan is basically going to be a scorched earth campaign since they have no positive case to make.
Democrat delenda est
I hope this is what they meant by Osama Bin Laden's "burial at sea" and that is why there are no pictures ;-)
The thing about suicide attacks is that there is zero opportunity for reprisals, rendering fear of reprisals meaningless.
We did not win WWII either so your concept that war is winnable without genocide is laughable.
That's so much worse than living in an area where explosive amputations aren't a strange occurrence, or where having the front of your head blown through the back of your head is a potential outcome of both supporting the local warlord and not supporting him.
Come the fuck on people. Its war. This is just like that Abu Ghraib bullshit. People die horribly all the time in these areas, and yet for some reason the thing that always outrages the moral cowards at home is when someone is humiliated. Its like the civilized mind cannot comprehend the atrocities of war, so they focus in on the level of wrong that they can identify with.
R Kelly never used a orphan as a human bomb, blew the legs off of another rapper, then had to watch him drag his intestines behind him while he bled out. But that fucker did pee on someone. Peeing on someone we can be outraged about. Peeing on someone we can understand.
You know what those guys who got peed on would really be upset about? Getting killed.
"After all if you send 'young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, ... the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface — and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form"
This disrespect for the enemy is embarrassing.
On a related note, is it illegal to spit on an image of Georg W Bush? He is after all no longer the president, but his character and tone lives on among some of the marines.
First we need to stop meddling in the rest of the worlds affairs. We need to worry about us (The USA) and our friends, whoever they may be.
We had a valid right of vengeance to go into Afghanistan since that is where Al Q was and they did attack us. Iraq was a joke. Libya was the right measure for the situation.
Defense needs to focus on defending our country. The reasoning behind the 5th fleet being in Bahrain is to be close in case something comes up. Why should the USA care if something comes up? That is an area that loves to kill to each other, has for centuries. It has only mattered in the last 50 years cause that is where most of the cheap oil comes from. Once that is over, no one is going to really care if they go back/continue to slaughter each other. We can sail a carrier group to anywhere in the world from our shores in few days, IIRC.
We knew where bin Laden was days after 9/11, some camp in Afghanistan. Imagine what the world would be like today if instead of marching in all loud and obvious (giving Al Q a chance to run), we sent half a dozen B2 bombers in and leveled the whole camp. I am talking about a complete annihilation of everything and everyone that was there. So that when someone came to visit the spot all they saw was charred dessert and nothing else. Then the President goes on TV and "can neither confirm nor deny that the USA had anything to do with it". That would have set a tone for the rest of the world to understand our position.
Being pissed on is something all you loserboy nerds have experienced at one time or another. This is a variation on the theme, with the difference that the guys being pissed on are not nerds and happen to be dead.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Sometimes people fight for what is right. And speaking as a US citizen, if we even thought about embarking on what you propose, you would find that some of us would fight for what is right.
We are the US. It's tough, but we are better than that. No one ever said that doing the right thing was easier or cheaper.
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Well you better be able to bomb and kill all of America's enemies at once, because they are going to be arming themselves for war as soon as they see what you've been doing. And America has made a lot of enemies. Don't worry about enlisting to protect your country though, doesn't take much effort to launch a cruise missile half way around the world.
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us.
No, they hate what you stand for. Isn't it quite obvious? Whom would volunteer for a suicide mission if they were not desperate?
The problem is people like you and your thinking about "enemies". All people want to live in their own way. If any group is trying to curtail that freedom, then that makes people unhappy.
Who supports Middle East tyrants with their military? Just look at Saudi Arabia. Or the apartheid in Israel and occupied territories.
Let's put this in another way, maybe in words you can understand,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
Why did the riots happen?? Because "the blacks" didn't fear the rest of the society enough?? Did it happen because 1 person was beaten up?? Surely, the answer is NO to both questions! They occurred due to PREEXISTING GRIEVANCES AND INJUSTICES. The same thing applies to the original statements. And if your solution is to terrorize people into submission, like Israel tries to do in Gaza and West Bank, all you are doing is passing the buck down the road when few years from now they will have to deal with a much worse mess than there already is.
Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity.
I think some of the extremists on BOTH sides are hoping this this scenario. Some don't learn anything from history, and hence will end up writing it once more.
How is fear going to dissuade a suicide bomber? If you piss people off to that extent, then anything menacing you do is just going to convince them even more that you need to be taken down. And they would be right. Just look at yourself. Did 9/11 make you fear Al Qaida, did it make you want your politicians to bow down to Al Qaida, or did it make you want to take down Al Qaida whatever the cost? Did it make you 100% sure that whatever happened, Al Qaida needs to go? That works exactly the same way with everyone else in the world too.
Since when is that the case? Everyone feared the Axis in WW2. That didn't mean that everyone backed down and stopped fighting.
If anything, fearing your opponent makes you fight stronger.
The problem comes mainly from the differences between real war and what government sells you/media shows you. War doesn't mean bringing peace with happy soldiers, impressive fireworks and no civil casualties. Yeah war is hating and killing, mutilating. People often forget that. So when an image of real war just gets out, it shocks the people who though we fought with an ethic of war. I guess this video is actually quite mild.
That also explains why there was no French or Polish resistance.
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C'mon, you're not writing for Al Jazeera.
They attacked us because they're poor, poorly educated people that have been steeped in hateful rhetoric and finger-pointing for generations. That shit just festers.
If they'd stopped sending mortars into Israel and focused on things like schools, sanitation and some kind of meaningful commerce, their current generations wouldn't be looking for someone to blame (and murder).
urinating on enemy soldiers / pow is unprofessional.
terrorism do not occur when all people are given a house, have food to eat, and free education to walk into their future. you need little repression on top of that to keep everything in line. thats why there was no terrorism in ussr. your future is guaranteed in every way - why bomb here and there ...
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Transparency can also lead to the good. The Arab Spring started because of the same transparency. Information technology helped overthrow tyrants. What you do with the information makes all the difference. If you are predisposed to hate, hate will be your response.
War... war never changes.
yes, 9/11 would never happened if u.s.w as not involved in middle east since mid 1930s, totally taking over the empire building policy of britain by nurturing and using radical islamist clans or organizations as a tool of power.
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Yeah and? Palestinians stationed troops in the Jewish/Israeli holy land. Should we grant Israel permission to attack civilians indiscriminately?
It almost seems that these conversations seem to point out the errors of the "Good Guy's" ways more than the errors of the "Asshole's" ways.
I will be honest, I do not feel sorry if a bully is over punished for their transgressions. A person/nation/business/organization that is willing to allow wrong doing in their pursuits deserves every bit the shit kicking it gets when the tax collector comes to call.
This does not excuse anyone for horrific acts during war, but it should neither prevent a nation from visiting the necessary devastation in the defeat of their enemies. Raping and torture is never acceptable in any setting, but shooting first and asking questions later sometimes is!
what happened ? world war ii. you think the entire world will just stand by, watching you 'put bullets into everyone's brains' ?
fucktards are you the first people that need bullets into their brains. because people like you usher in world wars. since noone wants to go back to poking around with wooden spears again, i suggest you put a bullet into your head, and get it over with for yourself.
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No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us. We obsess and worry about whether our enemies like us. We allow our enemies to put propaganda in our legacy media. They don't.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do. Do ya think they would behead our people, desecrate their corpses, etc. if they feared us? Would they blow up a block of downtown NYC if they feared us? If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity." The answer is obvious.
Fear is not a Boolean. It is granular and fine-tuned. I fear sharks. But, that would not stop me from eating shark meat in a restaurant. To have a fear stop any rebellious activity, you are going to have to have already conquered all your enemies and created a 1984ish sort of world. Without such an environment, even an individual can become an effective terrorist fairly easily. If they are willing to die in the process, then it is even easier for them.
There is a reason that we don't (intentionally) bomb civilian targets any more. It is not because we are a bunch of hippies. It is because that strategy gets in the way of accomplishing the mission. If you want people to surrender and stop fighting you, the last thing you want to do is keep harming innocent civilians. That just makes winning a 1000 times harder.
Terrorists would certainly still blow stuff up (including New York) even if they feared us. They are willing to give their lives for their mission, just like our military is. The main difference being we place a higher value on our soldiers lives and try to avoid suicide missions when possible.
Trying to forcibly convert everyone to Christianity would most likely result in the US either collapsing, or losing its position in the world as a world leader. For one thing, I would expect that we would have a really hard time getting oil. For another thing, almost all of our allies would abandon us. I would expect the UN to more or less collapse. Quite likely, world war 3 would result. We don't even have the capability to fight a war on two major fronts right now, nonetheless 100.
Machiavelli actually says that you should be a good ruler so that you have support from the populace. Especially if you are a foreign ruler...
The other side of your example is that the population of British cities were not shocked into submission despite almost constant bombing (the London blitz) and entire cities levelled (Coventry)...
Germany fought to the bitter end despite acts such as the fire bombings of Dresden and other examples of wholesale destruction.
The Soviet Union fought to victory despite the complete destruction of Leningrad and Moscow.
To put it another way, they attacked us because it is easy for a person to grab and hold power if they create or leverage an enemy that their potential followers can be made to hate. For example, suppose the Saudi government wants to keep all the money for itself and keep a tight grip on power in their country. So, they quash anyone who points that out to the public. And at the same time, they do not stomp down on anyone who suggests that the reason the conditions are bad for "the people" are because the US is meddling. Keep doing that for a generation or two, and you have a significant population who believes that the US is the reason the regular folks in Saudi Arabia are downtrodden.
Or, you insinuate yourself into a fledgling cable news operation and start spinning all the news to hint that all the problems are caused by a certain political party. You do it subtly, so that each story, taken on its own, can be judged as mostly fair, and then you maybe balance that out by having some news stories that call out members of your favored political party. But you don't criticize them based on their stupid ideas or behavior, but on their lack of allegiance to your values. That subtle bias is hard enough to pierce through, but then you let that stew for a couple-10 years, when your end-game really starts to happen. You've trained significant portions of the population to view "the other" as "the enemy", and even better, from them comes a class of new sources, experts and analysts who share your view without ever being told anything.
The slower you work the plan, the less likely it is to backfire.
The civilian population - which previously had been ready to sacrifice themselves when the Allies invaded were basically shocked into submission.
so it is not because by the end of the war, atrocities japanese had committed had become something common, and now very well known, but, because they were carped bombed into submission, they surrendered.
really. get a fucking clue. a world war ii downed FLYER says carpet bombing works, and you believe it. you could as well listen to marshall harris.
what did carpet bombing do in europe ? NOTHING. nothing. nothing other than razing entire cities and killing irrelevant civilians, whereas slave labor continued manufacturing tanks, warplanes in underground bunkers.
people who dont know enough about military history, should not talk about it.
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When I have military supremacy, I shall station my troops throughout the US and support all the regimes which have tried to undermine your freedom.
When you try to retaliate, I'll say it's because you're poor, poorly educated people steeped in hateful rhetoric and finger-pointing. It's all already true, except that debt doesn't count as poverty these days.
If the US stopped with more military action around the world than any other country for the past half century and instead focused on things like schools, health and some kind of separation between government and corporation...
At its root, war is about an individual soldier surviving to return home to their family. If these soldiers are alive (and hopefully home), then this was part of their survival
strategy. How is their behaviour any different than defending themselves in combat? People who haven't been think combat begins when the shooting starts. Not so,
they are always under the stress of iminiate combat or danger. This BS of respect for a dead enemy's sensitivities is hollywood nonsense and inappropriate in a War setting.
How do we know the enemy hadn't just killed one of their friends? It is not a disgrace for a soldier to behave like a soldier; the only mistake I see is that the video
was posted because all of the virgins out there will cry foul!. The enemy was dead; it's not like they tortured them to death - that would be a problem.
Anything that get these guys home safely is fine; that's all I care about.
If pissing on the enemy allows then to focus on their next offensive, or survive the next attack, then so be it!
We did not win WWII either so your concept that war is winnable without genocide is laughable.
Obviously you can win a war if you kill everyone on the other side.
The problem with Afghanistan is that no-one has ever been able to tell me what 'winning' there would mean. If you can't tell whether you've won, how can a war ever end?
Dresden was carpet bombed and more civilians were killed than in either nuclear attack, yet the population was not demoralised by it. The Japanese were stunned by the nuclear bombing because it was a massive amount of damage done by a single plane and the US propaganda made it seem that there was a fleet of nuclear-armed aircraft ready to take off and completely destroy all life in Japan. Even if the USA had had that capability, the result would have been making a large area near Japan (probably including big chunks of of Australia and China) uninhabitable due to clouds of fallout being blown by the wind.
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I disagree, fear works quite well. Or at least it used to. Part of the problem is that it worked a lot better when you were dealing primarily with pitched battle. Marching through a forest of bodies impaled upon stakes was almost certainly going to cause a certain amount of soldiers to abandon the proceedings and flee in terror.
But in this day and age, where one can't just flee when things get to be too hairy, I don't think that it really has the same effect. You're better off going for confusion. At any rate the things you used to be able to do to scare the enemy are mostly war crimes.
Counter example, IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. They didn't/don't kill a large number of personnel, but they greatly add to the stress level and at least in theory make it harder to conduct operations.
In the first invasion of Iraq that the US participated in, they were greeted in the streets as liberators. They then marched almost all of the way to the capital, before turning around and going home. The people who greeted them on the streets then had a long chat with Saddam's security forces. It's not hard to understand why they were a little reluctant the second time around...
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With the advance of the Internet it is impossible to hide the truth - existing human civilization is misguided. Near absolute power is given to the wrong people, and these wrong people are then getting absolutely corrupted by the power. Be it Government., be it Business, be it Religion - ANYWHERE where power is given to few "chosen" - it is abused.
Who would win? The FARE future or CORRUPT yesterday?
That is the issue of human race existence now-days.
Vassili Leonov
My grandfather fought in the Pacific theater in WWII. He had a kind of photo album full of pictures from the various islands where the battles were fought. This was a professionally printed and bound volume that I assumed was handed out to most of those who served in his division. It was filled with gruesome pictures of dead Japanese soldiers, many surrounded by posing American soldiers. This type of thing is just part of war. Soldiers have been posing with the dead enemy since the civil war and taking trophies long before that. Dehumanizing the enemy is just part of the psychological process of killing other people on a large scale.
Interesting premise you have. Your 'superior' morality gets people killed. I propose creating peace through clarity. If they know attacking us is a dumb idea they don't attack us so none of our people die, we don't have to kill them so none of them die. Nobody dies. On the other hand, we are following your theory now and fighting a politically correct limited war and there are thousands of dead and wounded on both sides. But I'm evil in your worldview. And you are both stupid AND evil in mine.
Democrat delenda est
Agree. It's like cornering a smaller animal. It knows you have the power to stomp it, but that doesn't stop it from trying. Fear becomes fuel for the fight.
I can probably find and single out "reports" on anything on any topic if I'm am specifically looking for them.
Nothing justifies murdering more than 3000 people by flying planes into skyscrapers. I was just stating Al Qaeda's twisted motives for their twisted attacks.
No major embarrassments (at least any more so than being too chicken to fight in person), and no complaints from your civilian population about too many casualties, I think those poorly dubbed aliens may have been on to something.
Who?
1) People who have been heavily propagandized with religious fanaticism. To them, things like the Mohammed cartoons really are killing offenses. They have a concept of tribal honor that is alien to us; don't make the mistake of thinking "I would never blow myself up for that, so they must not really be blowing themselves up for that either". We have met the enemy and they are not us.
2) People who have no choice but to obey the local terrorists in charge and get told "if you don't become a suicide bomber, your family is toast. This is also related to honor; that's how they recruit female suicide bombers--you were raped and this dishonors your family, but if you suicide bomb some Americans that will restore your family's honor.
You might want to look at how long those countries lasted (specifically, compared to countries that did NOT follow that "logic").
No. The "little tyrants" are VERY specific in their killings. One informer dies and other people are reluctant to become informers.
I don't think you understand the word "genocide".
Well at least you got that part right. If we could capture the correct people and take them out of the general population then we'd have less of a problem. That would be the WORST thing that could happen to those people.
But we don't. We capture INNOCENT people along with the them and that just spreads the hate.
And that is IF we bother to capture them as opposed to blowing up the building where they live (and killing other people who live in that building as well). Which, again, just spreads the hate.
Think about how YOU would react if the foreign invaders killed your brother and his family (who you KNOW was innocent) just because they happened to live in a building where someone fighting the invaders lived.
Look up the word "Quisling".
Good idea. History has shown us that people who are afraid always act completely rationally and cooperate with the person that they are afraid of...
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Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, ....
-- Machiavelli, The Prince
May the Maths Be with you!
> all kinds of legal but humiliating things
I don't know about the U.S. (though in theory they once signed the human rights carta...) but these things are most certainly _illegal_ in a lot of countries. Germany is one I am completely sure about.
The entire world DID stand by. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and the whole world stood by doing nothing. Hitler purged the Brown Shirts and the whole world stood by doing nothing. Hitler evicted and forced the Jews into ghettos/internment camps and the whole world stood by doing nothing.
People like you are exactly why genocide continues to be perpetuated around the world to this very day.
We are the US. It's tough, but we are better than that. No one ever said that doing the right thing was easier or cheaper.
get your head out of your ass. The US is the biggest terrorist in the world you don't kill hundred of thousands of Japanese even after they tried to surrender and call your self the army of rightness. Everything you go to war for ends up being a lie but because you have bought into to all the propaganda your still cheering "america fuck yeah". Take an objective point of view, forget everything about the enemy being evil baby eaters, and look at all the actions of the worlds governments, forget all the excuses as to why the events happened and weigh up all the blood on every bodies hands and you'll see you are no where near what is 'right'.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html
.... sorry, sopa to fix that problem. not that things like fox news channels et al were not around to allow people to stupefy themselves into the mindset of 50 years ago either ...... but they will fix everything - dont worry. they even fixed habeas corpus recently !!!
do NOT support atrocity-committing dictators into power in other countries for the sake of a few corporations' self-interests, dont get hated. simple. VERY simple.
it only becomes complex when you are allowed yourself to be brainwashed by the propaganda arms of those corporations (Called media). and america has been doing it for around a century, only to be disrupted by the thing we call internet, which allows real information to be accessible.
but hey - they are fixing that too ! they are giving you soap
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They are doing it already without waiting for any kind of permission.
This is an outgrowth of political correctness. Keep it up and the USA will become a conquered country.
The rare instances of abuse by the USA exist in contrast to enormous abuse by the Taliban.
Where did GP ever mention ruling? He was discussing a desired mental state for enemies not a desired mental state for citizens (or subjects). Disagree with that suggestion if you like, but don't confuse the two very different things.
like 'if pissing on enemy will allow them to go on next offensive so be it' or, 'carpet bombing worked' .......
im wondering, how many of these idiots, have actually done real military service ? do they think they know shit about war, military, and how it unfolds ?
no.
people who are comfortable behind armchairs, doing nothing but blabber.
i'd advise you to take at least one tour of duty to support a war that is started to further corporate interests, and lose an arm or a leg, and THEN talk.
what ?!?! you dont want to do that ?!! but why !?!
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Keeping a modicum of peace by use of terror, violence and fear?
I'd say we're supposed to be Batman.
I was not a fan of Cowen's arguments in two episodes of Econtalk, but there was a lot about his TED talk Be suspicious of stories that I really liked.
The first was that overuse of the good vs evil story mode lowers your IQ by ten points.
The second was that over-reliance on the story "we need to get tough with ..." is nearly as bad.
Here's Cowen being an idiot:
Cowen on the Great Stagnation
And here's the rebuttal, fresh off the press:
Ion Proton sequencer decodes DNA fast and on the cheap
The space program is big and impressive and you can pick up chicks by sneaking them into the JPL and letting them steer the Mars rovers. However, the entirety of the space program, IMHO, is bupkis in significance compared with sequencing the human genome and the era of proteomics now unfolding. Stagnation my ass.
In a terrorist society, only psychopaths commit crimes, of which there are plenty, as the society conspires to drive them to it.
What drives me nuts about this story is the tacit concession to escalationism. If you shoot at someone and later they stumble over your corpse, you can't say you didn't have it coming.
Urination = Disrespect
Bullets = Terminal Contempt
The urine perps should be disciplined, no question, but it's hardly legitimate fodder to order another cargo ship of Chinese machetes.
I think you underestimate the power of hatred. Hatred unreasonably over-powers fear by a wide margin. We do need to worry about whether they hate us. We wouldn't be as hated if the things we did were reasonable and not essentially imperialistic. The excuses for war we use are lame and transparent. People in the US are easily convinced. "It's for freedom! They hate our freedom!" Only the most stupid people would buy that as a premise for war and yet, here we are... buying it.
It is well established that hatred is the weapon they seek to use the most. Make no mistake -- this is what they want. It's a "double-edged sword" of course, because the hatred exists on both sides. But the leaders behind all of this mess are untouchable and they get to sit in their arm chairs without fear of it reaching them.
The problem is that we have enemies.
This premise only (mostly) works against state actors. As soon as a non-state actor, e.g. a 30-person terrorist cell, decides that it hates you and wants to bomb one of your major cities, they don't give a rats ass about whether you bomb their country back to the stone age afterwards. There goes your deterrence...
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
London and the Soviet Union fought against foreign invaders (the Germans). Even in the countries that Germany conquered, there were active resistance groups. Even in Germany there were people who helped save/hide Jews.
Not to mention a few attempts by the German military to assassinate Hitler on their own so they could end the war.
Finally, during the ground invasion of Germany, Hitler killed himself and the German people surrendered to the Allies. And there was not any active anti-Allied resistance movement. They'd fight against their own government when it was run by Hitler, but they accepted the Allied control while it lasted.
Al Qaeda attacked us because we stood in the way of resurrecting the caliphate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate#Views_of_al-Qaeda
The error is with people who see something like Al Qaeda and only see a reflection of what the West does. This is an incredibly blind and egocentric way to think about the world and what motivates people outside the West. Hate does not need a valid premise to exist. Hate is its own creation, and not anyone else's fault except the person filled with hate.
If all of the USA and Europe disappeared into the ocean tomorrow, Al Qaeda would not celebrate and become pastoral goat herders, content their work was done. Because their work has just started. They would go right on with their murderous rampage, killing innocents, as they already have. Until they get their caliphate back.
Incidentally, the greatest number of victims of Al Qaeda are Muslims, not Westerners, by orders if magnitude. We in the West only see glimmers of a much greater struggle going on in the Middle East. And yet, in the blind egocentrism of so many in the West, such as you see in some comments here, and in the story summary, you think the struggle is all about the West! Why this colossal egocentric blindness?
This obnoxious ignorant egocentrism that can only understand and think about Al Qaeda in terms of motivations and interests that only center upon what the West does is a failure of analysis. As if Al Qaeda were born of Western actions and only exists as a reflection of Western actions. If you believe that, if you cannot think about Al Qaeda as its own entity, devoid of anything having to do with the West, you lack the cognitive abilities to comment intelligently on the subject.
You cannot stop the creation and continued existence of something like Al Qaeda by modifying your own actions or correcting past mistakes. Because its not about you. Because something like Al Qaeda will always exist, hate requires any premise, real or imagined, to justify what it does in transgression of simple human decency. And so you must fight something like Al Qaeda, not placate it. That is a fool's errand that does understand how hate works psychologically.
Al Qaeda is its own creation, inspired by its own beliefs, that would still exist no matter what the USA or the West ever did. If you don't understand that, stop talking about Al Qaeda, you don't understand it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
entire world stood by UNTIL some point.
all the rationalizations and justifications for the invasions of germany were based on pre- ww1 and ww1 griveances. politically, it was hard to counter.
even while invading poland, germany was using the german minority in danzig area (gdansk) as an excuse. (not too much a minority actually, 200k or so people).
and, leave aside the international community, germans even didnt know what was being done to jews in internment camps. actually, germans even didnt know what was being done to GERMANS, despite nazi govt. have been rounding up and killing disabled, 'undesired', mentally ill etc in rural 'hospitals' since mid 1930s already.
noone stood by. world war ii started. and more than 45 million people died, most of which is unaccounted for.
however, putting a bullet to his brain would fix problems for both the grandparent poster, and the world. if all such people put bullets to their brains, we wouldnt have neither terrorism, nor war, nor corporate greed - none of the problems on this planet in the first place, with a little exaggeration.
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History is full of examples. Rome comes to mind.
Bad example. Rome was actually VERY tolerant. All a conquered country had to do was pay taxes and accept some god equivalency: Jupiter=Zeus=Taranis=... Only two fought the religious equivalency principle: the Jews, which got splattered all over Europe for their efforts, and the Christians which managed to undermine the Roman State enough to finally conquer it from within. And then eliminate all the others. Politics at its finest. Yeah, it always make me laugh (kinda) when I hear that Christianity is 'tolerant'.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
So if an American soldier does something bad, gets recorded, the thing goes viral and cause an outrage it's transparency's fault for "sharing hatred" ? Holding soldiers to a standard is a bad thing?
It's all but impossible to invoke fear in a guerrilla, because if you could hit on them you would and plain old kill them. The only way you could invoke fear is through the civilian population like your "bomb their cities" suggestion. That is assuming (1) they care about the civilians and (2) that you can keep it up longer and be uglier than they can.
I don't think the first condition is true, they're crazy religious fanatics and anyone that isn't one of them isn't worth much. They've not had any problems going into markets and blowing up their own civilian populations, why should they be intimidated by the US doing the same? In fact, it's likely to aid recruitment as people feel they must pick a side or get blown to bits.
I don't think the second part is true either, the last time the US tried it was soaking Vietnam in napalm and I think we all know how that worked out. You want to be nastier than a terror group that cuts off people's nose and ears for voting? I doubt even the "kill one of our soldiers, we execute ten civilians" threat would be sufficient. You'd have to hit genocide proportions before they'd be discouraged and by then the public opinion both at home and among the allies and all the surrounding countries would have gone to hell.
Finally, what the hell would do after you've blown them to bits? Go in and occupy the country? And don't think any puppet government you put in place is going to have any legitimacy at all. Not after that, any good you do will drown in the evil. Or you can just leave the country a big crater, which is so going to improve everything. You don't need a whole country full of resentment and ready to do terror to deal with.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oderint dum metuant, as Caligula is reported to have said. Of course, the concept is as old as history.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
If they know attacking us is a dumb idea they don't attack us so none of our people die, we don't have to kill them so none of them die.
Non-sequitur. How will they know that attacking us is a dumb idea? Only by our prior display of power, typically resulting in many death. Your warped philosophy boils down to "Might makes right". You're evil. You're stupid.
Are you retarded? I don't mean that as an insult, I just honestly feel that you may have some sort of mental deficiency to be spouting nonsense like that. We need to make them fear us more? When they have shown that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and strap bombs to their chests? You are talking about people for whom death is not an obstacle -- dying by our hand will only send them back to Allah. While we might be big and scary, we are never going to be bigger and scarier than Allah is to them. Unfortunately, there is really no simple answer as to what needs to be done in the Middle East. Even without our intervention, it would likely still be a big shitty mess, but we have done our best over the last half century or so to make it as shitty as possible for everyone involved. The animosity we have created will not go away any time soon, so just trying to be nice now will (understandably) ring quite hollow to these people. There may be some things that we can do to help them out, but at the end of the day, I think that the best we are going to be able to do is to board the windows and wait for the people to decide that they are sick of all the bullshit and create a free Middle East. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeing the beginning stages of it now, but it is still far too early to tell. Either way, trying to make them fear us will only make everything much, much worse.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The US doesn't fight very often for morality. Usually, it's for oil, control over nearby or foreign resources, or rattle sabres in the back yards of its enemies.
We once ascribed to "ethical" war, via various conventions we signed, but we don't do that anymore. That's because we found a trump card, called the War on Terrorism, which justifies about anything, including draconian domestic surveilence, travel restrictions, no-fly lists, and a wealth of boot heels on civil liberties. Morality only happens once in a while, almost by accident-- as in gosh, look at all of those Muslim Serbs in those mass graves!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"prosecute war"
Yea, Emmanuel Goldstein has a lot to answer for.
I agree, but it all hinges on this false "if you stop the hatred, you stop the war" mentality.
Its true that stationing troops in the region and being caught on camera urinating on enemy corpses, but so what? If all U.S. troops, all U.S. funding and all U.S. political support is withdrawn from the region RIGHT NOW, will the violence stop (at least against Americans)? Of course not.
If people want to hate you, they will either find a reason or make up a reason. Why do you think Middle Eastern politicians love to cite the Crusades when talking about Western aggression? The U.S. didn't even exist when it happened but the U.S. still gets lumped together with the Crusaders. (And yes, I know George Bush didn't help things by citing it, but Middle Eastern leaders have cited jihad against the West too. Should the West attack in retaliation for the jihad conquests of Spain and Portugal?)
Really? Ask Russians how it worked for them in Afghanistan.
You might want to read these things called "newspapers".
"They" already KNOW that attacking us will result in their deaths. That is why they wear suicide vests.
They WANT us to attack them to justify their extremist views (similar to yours).
That doesn't make any sense.
You admit that their people are dying in the current situation.
Yet you had previously claimed that if we killed their people then they wouldn't attack any more.
So killing their people when they attack us results in them not attacking us any more (except when they continue to attack us).
Of course. Because you are an extremist who cannot see how the "logic" of his position is invalidated by his own claims.
How would YOU react if foreign invaders killed your brother and his innocent family just because they lived in the same apartment building as someone fighting against those foreign invaders?
"It used to be that national security consisted of making sure all foreign governments either liked you or feared you; now it requires that as few people as possible hate you."
A lot of people, like presumable the non-sarcastic GP, don't get that.
I write about this in my essay here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Within twenty years (if not sooner), I'd expect any disgruntled alienated teenager will be able to download plagues off the internet, tinker with them, and produce them at home. We need to build a society that works a lot better for everyone before then. One only needs to think about teens making computer viruses (which have had real costs to so many people) over the last twenty years and imagine the same happening in the biological realm. Why should it not?
Consider this slashdot article from earlier today as just one example of dropping biotech costs:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/13/2353220/a-dna-sequencer-cheap-enough-for-some-doctors-offices
Nanotech, robotics, computer software, and other advanced technologies pose similar problems in their own way.
A "basic income" (Social Security and Medicare for all from birth) is part of building a world of advanced technology more likely to flourish in the 21st century, as would be improving the gift economy, as is better planning, and making improved subsistence technologies widely accessible (a double-edged sword, true).
Our technologies have become too powerful to allow a global society to have so much inequality, suffering, disease, poverty, ignorance, hatred, and cruelty. We need to move to a new socioeconomic paradigm ASAP. We will still have problems, but they will be more manageable.
There is a lot more on my website about this.
It is ridiculous, for example, to worry about Iran developing a nuclear bomb when they could easily develop plagues. The USA was very lucky that blowback from invading Iraq did not include tens of millions of US Americans dying from ethnically-targeted plagues (whatever the costs to the country being invaded). The USA may not be so lucky next time. And the same goes for attacking smaller and smaller organizations as time goes by. We need to completely rethink our security posture to emphasize intrinsic security and mutual security.
The Foresight Institute also has some good thinking on this in the past, in terms of empowering everyone to deal with emerging threats. It's like the playing fields has totally changed, but the USA still is still preparing to win at Major League baseball when everyone else is now playing pickup games of soccer everywhere.
A big problem is that the USA has so much military equipment (especially nukes and probably other stuff), that if it falls apart politically and economically (which is how it has been heading), it may well take the rest of the world with it. And it is completely ironic, because so much of our energy goes into competition and guarding, that we could
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You've obviously never read Machiavelli yourself, either.
The Prince advocates getting as much local support as possible and avoid being hated at all costs. Fear=/hate
No sig for the moment.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do.
So you don't think American soldiers are scared when they go into combat? Trust me, we are. What makes war possible is that people can overcome their fear to do what they have to do, for whatever reason -- and this is true no matter how good or evil their cause may be.
If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity."
So what would your reaction be if you really thought al-Qaeda and the Taliban had the potential to "bomb our cities, kill our leaders, and convert us to Islam?" I'm guessing you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well, that sounds really scary, guess we'd better do what they tell us." Or maybe you would, if you're the typical right-wing chickenhawk coward that your .sig makes you sound like, but fortunately, most of your fellow Americans are made of sterner stuff.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The subject in self-reply says it all.
Praesent non lectus magna, a sagittis nunc. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nulla egestas purus in leo vestibulum in tempor ligula pulvinar. Etiam eros ante, congue a faucibus et, tincidunt sit amet metus. Phasellus eu quam malesuada arcu molestie posuere in malesuada elit. Pellentesque odio nibh, tincidunt at pulvinar nec, congue in risus. Nullam ac orci eros, a convallis risus.
Do ya think they would behead our people, desecrate their corpses, etc. if they feared us? Would they blow up a block of downtown NYC if they feared us?
Yes. Because what else do they have to lose? They can't fight back any other way. Yes, because we are doing it back to them.
They have learned what fear is, and are trying to instill fear back in us.
And it worked. It has worked more beautifully than almost anything else they could have done. Look at what the TSA (Forcing us to voluntarily giving up on the fourth amendment), the NDAA (effectively, if abused, dissolving the sixth amendment), increased monitoring through GPS units illegally placed on cars or tracking online (can be seen against the Fifth Amendment), and the frantic tightening of our borders.
All of this because of maybe 30 men in one successful and a few failed attack attempts on this country. Because we fear it may happen again. Because of the fear of it happening again we have invaded two countries in undeclared wars, expended several times over the lives taken in lives wasted in war. Undeclared wars because our politicians in Congress were afraid to make the point (except, sadly, Ron Paul). We are using what could count as warfare in Pakistan through drones and elsewhere. We have army bases scattered over the world in the former battlegrounds of wars past. Initially left there because of fear.
How many "witches" were killed in this country due to fear. Fear of gays destroying marriages. How many black people lynched because a crime was committed and they were not "us"?
I say again, yes. I think they would do such things because of fear. I'm not saying we don't need to have a back bone, but making people fear us isn't going to grow us a spine.
They are fearful and have nothing to lose. If they had something to lose (homes, a better standard of living, etc.) they wouldn't be so apt to lash out.
To make people fear you without simultaneously hating you, well, I don't know how you achieve that, but I can't see the US has succeeded noticeably at it in a long time.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Who is this imbecile and why should anyone care? There are several articles linked, which is pertinent if any?
just create the sure knowledge that any attack against us would ensure such a totally disproportionate response that it would be a losing game
Our strategy after 9/11 was a totally disproportionate response and it essentially was a losing game... for us.
For each of the "enemies" you're thinking of, you should go back to history and take a look at they reasons they have to hate us. I'll give you a hint: they have better reasons than just religious, economic and cultural differences.
History is full of examples. Rome comes to mind. For that matter, consider more recent history. How much terrorism did the old Soviet Union suffer?
We should of course point out that the Soviet Union lasted less than a century. Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue. These are not exactly shining examples of thriving cultures and effective governmental policies.
For my part, war is simply a more violent period of a larger geopolitical conflict - be it struggle for resources, religion, misunderstandings, oppression (the attempt to impose or be free from), or simply bruised egos. Going forward we should be thinking about these underlying conflicts and better ways to address them. I think we will find that violence of all sorts is the decreasingly pragmatic choice much as it is already a poor humanitarian choice.
I agree with you. The problem is that your strategy as a policy leads to escalation or oppression. But what's the source in the first place? Hatred and violence festers on the competition for resources.
I would say they don't have much to fear anyway. Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas etc. resort to suicide bombing to kill as many as they can. They will not only target Americans and Westerns but they their own people and other Muslims. If we carpet bomb or nuke their cities, they would just keep coming. They don't fear death! Moreover, they won't care what we do to their country men or kinsmen. If fact, they would prefer if we were as brutal as they are to feed their narrative of us. Iran would love to use that as justification for gaining a nuclear weapon.We (good Muslims and good Americans) need to organize around good to combat the extremism in both our societies.
i dont think i am part of this 'we' you are talking about. the only terrorist bombing ive ever seen was done by a buzz-cut army vet with blond hair and blue eyes.
Machiavelli said a lot of stuff about what an autocratic ruler should do to keep power. But he intended it at least in part as an argument against autocratic rulers. He favored a Roman-style republic with power shared between the social classes (still pretty damn oppressive judging by our standards, but better than "The Prince").
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
No, apparently you're the new SS, and he's suggesting you let loose a group of Einsatzgruppen. Clearly you'll never be bothered by partis^W"terreists" again.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and OMG who pulled the IQ-plug on /.? Lately it's been summit for drooling idiots.
if you havent been shot at by the taliban than your opinion is moot. war is fucked up fucked up things happen.
You may actually be the dumbest person I've ever seen post here. Please take you fanatic, jingoistic hatred for any political stance that you disagree with and post it to Fox News. They welcome loud mouth bigots with open arms...you may even get you own talk show out of it!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
What would you have us do? Sit on our hands? Or rather, are you really one of those people that believe diplomacy can solve any problem? The world is a very unstable place, and as a result both norms and governments fall short of the great ideas we have in the west: "liberty" and "freedom." When you have random tribes who have been vying for power for hundreds of years, sometimes it takes a dictator to consolidate power to sustain peace. Take a look at an European or Chinese history book and you'll see what I mean. This is not excuse to support a dictator who brutally murders and cracks down upon their citizens, but it's better than the alternative: Somalia. Last, I'm sure many people are grateful to have US/UN troops stationed in their countries to not only impose order, but also to stabilize their economies. Stop focusing on the one or two bad apples and think about the larger picture...
my mom posts on slashdot.
we now live in a world where 8 people who are dedicated an unafraid to die can kill thousands and send an entire country on a ten year pyhhric spending spree to attempt to guarantee their own safety. Most soldiers on the planet already meet this definition and religious fanatics add millions more.
You can never, ever cow a population so completely as to avoid that possibility now. the small cells are far more empowered in today's age than ever before. Your 1940's tactics are quite simply no guarantee of safety these days. If you conquer and rule an area you might be able to cow that population, but you cannot do it to the whole world, and unlike the old days that educated the men of the 1940's and to an even larger degree than was true IN the 40's a global war can be waged almost trivially easily by small groups of people in a way that was never true in the past.
and at some point you will sacrifice so much in your quest to root out the enemy, that you'll lose out in the end anyway. you will spend yourself into oblivion trying.
That, incidentally, was Osama Bin Laden's own stated strategy for fighting superpowers. I'd say he did a pretty damn good job. We've adapted and appear to now be focusing on killing the controllers of the terrorist networks but they have gone cellular before and can do so again. Sabotauge and individually placed explosives can do so much more interested things these days than back in Hitler's day, don't you think?
Yeah, so it was like that long ago. It's really sad to see that your highly professional elite soldiers are no better than soldiers were in the first half of the last century.
You're just admitting that al-Qaeda's motivation is butthurt.
"our government invited foreigners to our patch of dirt, this effrontery demands the deaths of civilians"
Really now... look at you trying to justify it.
The family of my best friend as a teenager came from Germany in the immediate post-war years. I remember one time, quite out of the blue, his grandfather (who had been a young man during the war) came up to and told us "If you ever hear a German tell you that we did not know what the Nazis were doing, he is lying." (these were his exact words). He went on to tell us how families would disappear, many Jewish but also others as well, and that while no one could be quite sure where they were taken, everyone knew that it was to their dooms.
It still stands as one of the most profoundly disturbing experiences of my life, to have this old man so brutally and honestly reveal a truth to me in such a fashion, to brush away all the standard excuses that German's of the wartime generation invoked to get out of any sense of responsibility for what had happened. To this day I actually have no idea why the old man came up to my friend and I, but he permanently altered my view of humanity, and how easy it is to rationalize any action, and even in many cases inaction. Europeans from Paris to Danzig stood by and let their countrymen be marched off to their deaths, and while there were heroes here and there (just as there were collaborators), all in all they just stood there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
is exactly wrong. precisely 180 degrees from reality. terrorism is the weapon of the weak, who believe they have no other means to fight.
If they know attacking us is a dumb idea they don't attack us so none of our people die, we don't have to kill them so none of them die. Nobody dies.
Yeah, that's probably what Osama bin Laden said as well.
It's a very human thing, to think that punishment will work differently on others than it will work on you. It's also incredibly stupid. Can't you just turn off the computer and go home now?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
People would make considerably less noise about it if they read up on what the Mujahideen did to captured Soviet soldiers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd say it does work. The bombing of German industrial areas severely hamstrung Germany's ability to sustain its war effort, and the bombing of Dresden was heavily demoralizing.
But Hiroshima and Nagasaki are probably the best examples. They stopped the War in the Pacific dead in its tracks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Al Qaeda didn't attack us because we brought middle eastern oil. Al Qaeda didn't attack us because they hated our freedom and democracy.
They attacked us because we stationed troops in their holy land. They attacked us because we supported despotic regimes in the middle east. They attacked us because we are Israel's biggest ally.
If they were concerned about our troops stationed, they could have attacked those troops, which they had previously done when they attacked the USS Cole.
Saying they attacked us because we're Israel's ally directly contradicts your claim that they didn't act out of hate for our freedom and democracy. You've got three secular countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel. They see the secularism of Turkey and Lebanon as part of an infectious influence that originated in Israel; a very similar view to the one many Westerners have of Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosques.
You'll also note that in Iraq, the Islamists have worked assiduously to make sure that Sharia is the basis of the new Iraqi constitution. There are constant calls in the Muslim world to go back to Sharia to avoid what they see as the corrupting influence of the West. And, frankly, it's not just democracy and freedom that they consider corrupting, but Judaism. Our singular support of Israel is most notable in the voting record in the UN. The UN is routinely used as a platform to mount virulently anti-semitic attacks against Israel, and the US and Israel are often alone in voting against them. What's notable about those anti-semitic attacks, beyond Europe's silent accession to them, is that they are routinely voiced by the most odious dictators, people who really do hate freedom and democracy.
The rest of the Middle East is despotic regimes, so why didn't Al Qaeda attack countries all over the world, or the regimes themselves? In fact, other terrorist groups have done that, and corrupt kleptocrats are constantly looking over their shoulder. I don't think AQ are the most reasonable bunch, but they seem to be perfectly cognizant of world affairs, and the reality that there's no one else for us to deal with.
While they have various motives and grievances behind their jihad, those are naturally hard to nail down. What's straightforward are their strategic calculations. The core reason Al Qaeda attacked us was that they thought they could escalate their jihad and by attacking us, and they certainly succeeded in that initial goal. But, being a strategic calculation, they attacked because they thought they could win. Given the administration that was in office while they were planning the attacks, they thought that our response would be weak or appeasing, which would have shown the world that Allah was with them on their holy crusade. They were probably quite surprised that Bush would buck world opinion and six years of protests to hunt them down and kill them.
The 19 men who committed the attacks on 9/11/2001 were college-educated individuals who came from professional two-parent middle-class homes. They had plenty of options, if they weren't so filled with hate.
I am rather sick and tired of this ignorant and completely invalid idea you see in so many people's thinking in the West that what motivates something like Al Qaeda is just simple poverty, or broken homes, or whatever empty tropes that a lot of people clumsily use in their minds to try to make sense of the hate that exists in our world.
In thinking about what creates hate, in your words above, you only demonstrate a colossal ignorance of how vicious hate can really be. And most importantly, that hate is its own entity, its own source of injustice, an original sin that is not excused by some action perpetrated on the hater.
Example: can you examine anything in the upbringing of Timothy McVeigh that justifies what he did in Oklahoma City? Then why do you buy the lame excuses so many make for why what the 19 9/11 hijakcers did is justified in some insane loopy attempt at rationalization? Killing innocents is the original vile act, it is the not the product of anything other than the hate filled mind who commit the atrocity.
Hate is not a PRODUCT of some other source of injustice, that you can focus your analysis on instead and thereby push off a painful reckoning in your mind. Reckon with this, and know the reality of the world you live in: some people really are just incredibly vile evil and hate filled. Nothing they do can be explained away, you need to find the ability to condemn them base don their actions, regardless of race, or nationality or ideological goal.
You need to come to grips with how much hate there is in this world, and learn to condemn the hate itself, not buy into the convenient lame excuses of the hatemongers, whom so many in the West buy into! "They killed innocents because of action {xyz} that happened in the Cold War 50 years ago, so they are excused and its all understandable." Bullshit.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know how you achieve that
Ask yer daddy, assuming he whipped you as a kid. That's the real problem these days, nobody understands authority anymore, thus they have no respect for it.
We now know that this significant percentage must be larger then 99%
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But the big flap over urinating over the Taliban corpses is just that - a flap. I think it just reflects on the total inanity of the general media these days. You don't want to talk about big, complex issues so you make little stupid things go nuclear.
Nothing to see here, move along.
But it wasn't the media that flipped out over it, it was our incompetent Secretary of State. She was put there so that she wouldn't run against the Pres in the coming election. We have a President that puts people in cabinet positions based on little more than political calculations, and we're surprised that they act like amateurs?
I seem to remember a young man named Osama bin Laden committed terrorist acts in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out of it. So the Soviet Union did suffer terrorism.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
There's also some interesting emails that leaked years ago where Bin Laden is complaining about the UN. He hated the list of human rights because it treated all religions as equal - this was insulting because he 'knew' that Islam was the one true religion and it required a status superior to all other religions.
April 11, 2001
From: Osama bin Laden
To: Mullah Omar
In the first century BC, Mithradates and his allies killed every single Roman citizen in Anatolia within a month's time. Historical estimates offer that somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 Romans were killed across the Aegaen islands and Anatolia. This happened in a world without the Internet, without mass media, without high tech weapons, without gunpowder.
Mithradates and his lieutenants were able to spread hatred of Rome entirely through word of mouth. They were able to coordinate their slaughter without the Internet. They were able to kills tens, if not hundreds of thousands, in practically the blink of an eye.
It doesn't seem to me that much has changed with regards human capacity to spread hatred.
Total bullshit. Pick up a history book some day.
I would have agreed with you. Hey, just look at the seventy years of soviet dictatorship. And Arabs have never had a democratic government, ever. Brutal dictatorship, much as I hated to say it, just seemed to work. Then Prague Spring, Solidarity, the Berlin Wall's destruction, the end of Ceaucescu, the Tunisian Revolution, the Egyptian Revolution, and the panic among the other Arab powers stunned me. Contrary cases, disproving your point. Eventually, popular hatred of a government proved to be bad for the government.
I don't have a reason why dictatorships succeed until, suddenly, they don't. The best clue I found was in a Michael Moorcock novel, _The War in the Air_. A character tells Karl Marx that he's wrong, that oppression is not enough to lead to revolution. It requires a combination of oppression and hope.
-Gareth
So you are saying that if a foreign force invaded your home, all that it would take to make you less likely to fight back would be to tell you that your DEAD body will be dragged around?
I am not capable of understanding that "logic".
Meanwhile, the "bad guys" strap on suicide vests and blow their own bodies all over the landscape. As long as they can take down one American.
I, for one, have great trouble believing there has ever been a war for morality.
FCKGW 09F9 42
Except that the only reason that people in Al Qaeda were not considered overly dangerous nutcases and turned in by their neighbors (or otherwise were pressed to reform by their wives and cousins etc.) is that there is a lot of anti-Western sympathy based on the USA having supporting various oppressors in the region.
You don't get a storm without the heat dynamics behind it... Seeds of evil may exist in the hearts of all people, along with good (see Thich Nhat Hahn's writings), but what emerges has a lot to do with circumstances (as well as culture and individual upbringing). That is part of what is meant by winning "hearts and minds" overseas, a battle the USA has been losing (to the extent it is even trying).
The USA also has had a lot of anti-whatever hate groups, as has Europe. The difference is that those societies in the past have generally been functional enough in various ways that people don't let them grow that much, and also in decades in the past it was a lot harder to project power internationally (like with the KKK). But sometimes the social forces have been there to let hate groups rise (like the Nazis). It is better to prevent fires than to have to fight them. And when you do fight fire, it is generally best to fight it with water (not more fire).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ruling successfully by fear is the bogus premise.
Always has been, always will be.
This is due to human nature: eventually any society which is ruled by fear will revolt or become so weakened by the fears of its own population that it becomes relatively easy for another society to overcome it.
People can only be pushed so far.
Respect is another matter entirely. A nation that is respected due to its strength, military, political AND socio-economic is far less likely to be attacked than one which is just feared.
And while this is a far more accurate paradigm than that of the "Rule by Fear" crap, it is also flawed:
Just as human nature means that human beings will NOT accept living in fear forever, there will always be those people who are willing to fight and kill the innocent in order to further their own desires to gain personal political power and/or money.
A successful leader rules by example and RESPECT, not through fear.
Dictators rule by fear- and eventually fail, every time.
The ultimate in political correctness. I say piss on 'em.
Yes, there was radioactive fallout, and no, not all the fuel was burned. I will agree with you if you had said the fallout wouldn't reach Australia (it wouldn't, at least not in quantities that would have been dangerous). But there was fallout. People in the vicinity and downwind did suffer radiation sickness, although many survived.
The Hiroshima bomb was ridiculously inefficient, it probably burned only 5% of its fuel. That's why it's the only nuclear weapon ever made of that design. It was easy to make, but very heavy and extremely inefficient. It was however an exceedingly simple design (gun-type weapon) which was pretty much guaranteed to work, so they didn't even bother testing the design. The Nagasaki bomb on the other hand was basically the precursor to the fission part of all modern nuclear weapons, an implosion design. This was a lot more efficient and a lot more complex (they tested it first to make sure it would work, see the Trinity test), but it still didn't burn all its fuel (probably about 40% efficient). Probably the biggest overall difference between the Nagasaki bomb and the fission part of a modern bomb is that the Nagasaki bomb had a polonium-210 initiator, and modern bombs have electronic initiators (Po210 has a very short half life).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It's not that hard to find examples of terrorism in the Soviet Union and considering the likelyhood of media blackouts and a western lack of interest (or support in the case of 'freedom fighters') leading to fewer widely publicised reports I see little reason to think Soviet methods were exceptionally good at preventing it. And they certainly got their fair share in places like Afghanistan.
Fear of disproportionate responses is only useful if the enemy has something they value more than their desire to retaliate against the object of their hatred. And as any disproportionate response is likely to create more enemies who have nothing they value more than that the disproportionate response ends up being counter productive.
>No, they hate what you stand for. Isn't it quite obvious?
You just described the US governments view of its people.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
you're right, global conspiracy among all germans alive in the 1930s-1940s to pretend they didn't know what was really going on. A grand and perfect conspiracy only spoiled by your one friend. Yup. That seems likely.
'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'" We? Really? We flew our own planes into the World Trade Center? We attacked the Cole? We shot our own Blackhawks down in Somalia? Get a friggin' grip. We didn't start this war, we're just finishing it.
It's worth observing that Machiavelli's ideas didn't really work for him, either.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wow. Sheeple (betas)... and their armchair analysis... Gotta love them...
Dude, not all people are cattle. Not all back down when you hurt them.
Some will fight back more, the more you hurt them. No matter the cost.
I know, because among my brothers, I was the one who was like that. And over time I found a lot of people to be like that. *Especially* Arabs, Greeks, sometimes Italians, many people in Latin America, etc. (Interestingly not Iranians though [except when it's about women], which is the reason they are oppressed so much.)
Also, if you push people into a corner, and they got nothing to lose, they *will* attack, no matter what, because they got nothing to lose. Sun Tsu knew this, thousands of years ago.
Even dogs... You know those tiny dogs that bark like crazy and try to bite you? That's not because they think you are non-threatening, but exactly *because* they fear you.
You can bet your ass, that the more you threaten them, the MORE they will try crazy stuff.
Do the shit you suggested, and 9/11 will look like a childs' birthday in comparison.
The worst thing is, that the number 1 terrorist today... the very dude who led the Pakistani nuclear weapon program... (and like Gaddafi a "good friend" of the CIA...) suggested in an interview, that when the Americans continue to threaten (*hint* *hint*) them, he will "just" put some warheads on passenger planes, and fly over to the USA.
NOT. A. FUCKIN. GOOD. IDEA. TO. EXCHANGE. THREATS. WITH. CRAZY. PEOPLE!
Cause they will always go that step across the line that you would never cross.
My suggestion is: Be nice to others, offer them education, and they can't forever be angry at you. Learn from the Chinese in the 13th century. They came with a overwhelmingly gigantic fleet of ships, and brought gifts and advantages by the shipload for joining. Nobody says no there. (Well, except when the new leader actually still is a dick, a la 300. ;) And nobody did. Especially when their old leader continues to treat them like crap. And when he doesn't, and is forced to become nice too, you accomplished your mission anyway. :)
If you can't tell whether you've won, how can a war ever end?
War doesn't end because one side wins, war ends when everyone who thinks war is a good idea is dead.
If you want world peace, kill everyone who says you should go to war.
when you REALLY understand your only choice is fight or die you fight, Though people tend to get it wrong and hold on to hope even when thereis none.
Also an 'enemy who is allready 'dead' normally takes you with him,
I think it is more for specific values of "know". Hang on for a moment.
It certainly wasn't because Hitler wanted them to have an all expense paid vacation in New York City.
And that's where the "know" comes in.
Were they being taken to prison?
Were they being taken to an internment camp?
Were they being taken to a work camp?
Were they being taken to prison/work camp to face execution?
Were they being taken to a concentration camp?
Without that certainty, lots of "patriotic" (my country, right or wrong!!!) Germans could "believe" that they were just going to prison or an internment camp (like we did with our Japanese citizens).
Look at the reactions to our own Guantanamo Bay detention camp from our own people. And look at their justifications for it.
People are people. They're just born under different political / religious systems. But their reactions and biases are usually the same.
Because we won WWII, we write the history. We frame the discussions.
If Germany had won, there would be a different dialog.
As it is today. As it will be tomorrow.
Again, as long as there can be some question about what, specifically, is happening to the prisoners ... most people will try to believe whatever is easiest for them to live with.
So that they can live their lives the same way they lived them yesterday. And the day before. And how they want to live them tomorrow.
We have it easy, here in the USofA. Yet we still have only a small fraction of our population turning out to vote.
It's as funny as someone pissing on the dead body of someone you love, as in: not at all. Oh, and Afghans are not Arabs. You perverted fuck.
That's a fact. If stated to put some pigs blood on every bomb and bullet they would very soon stop the crap they are pulling.
AFAIAC pissing on a few dead enemy is nothing. F them.
Pot, meet kettle.
I agree with the AC GGP.
NON-geek Linux user since 1998
Terrorism is not an act, but a motive. Fighting an army is not terrorism.
So, Cheap, Fast or Good - pick any two - still holds.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It doesn't take a conspiracy to try to convince yourself that nothing's wrong. All it takes is an uncomfortable fact that you don't want to acknowledge, and that's enough for most people to try to pretend it's not true.
Hatred goes both ways. A culture where rape victims are routinely jailed or stoned to death is utterly abhorred in most western civilizations. And that's just ONE example where soldiers fighting in Afghanistan can clearly see where "we" have completely different set of moral standards as "they" do. Peeing on a corpse is disrespectful, but on the good-bad scale the mistreatment, abuse, disfigurement, and murder of young Afghani women is a million times worse.
But the media downplays western reaction to these daily atrocities, while playing up how justified "they" are in getting so bent out of shape by a few jerks peeing on dead people. I guess it's ok to be a rapist and murderer "over there" but don't dare be disrespectful to those same rapists. Hey rapist sympathizers - get bent. Better yet, come over here so I can piss on you and show the proper amount of disrespect towards a culture of hatred and violence that deserves little respect.
Good thing we've restrained our soldiers from acting according to how they REALLY feel. It's strange how the guys with the really big guns aren't allowed to be disgusted by truly disgusting behavior. That's something new in history, the guys with the guns exercising restraint. But don't dare show any respect to the soldiers who haven't gone beserk and killed everyone in the entire country, even though their enemy has the stated desire of commiting mass murder and genocide, and has also acted to further that goal. Nope, we're insisting on respect and restraint against an enemy that shows neither trait in return. Weird. Are we just all retarded that we think this is normal?
Why the fuck would they fear you?
Deleted
oh they have. In europe we fear the stupidity of the united states government (and what various branches of it will get up to next) but we don't hate the usa. only select people...
Bring on the glass parking lot.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
How has the US proportion to anything been proportionate? Ever?
Iraq was proportionate to what attack?
Afghanistan was proportionate to what attack?
It is disproportionate enough, and your theory of using fear to insure security is overrated. A suicide bomber is by definition fearless.
News flash, we already do terrorize "our enemies."
* Iran hasn't started a war in centuries.
* Iran used to have a democratically elected government.
* US staged coup to overthrow democratically elected government, installed bloody dictator who terrorized the population on our behalf.
*Population rose up against US dictator and US. Now we have the current crap of idiot religious folks running the place with an iron fist. 100% result of US terrorism.
*Guatamala used to have a democratically elected government.
*US staged coup to overthrow democratically elected government, installed bloody dictator who terrorized the population on our behalf.
*Population fled north. This is our Central American "immigrant problem." 100% result of US terrorism.
ditto Brazil
ditto Chile
ditto Argentina
All the above had democratically elected governments BEFORE the US fucked them over.
Add another 50+ countries the US has invaded / destabilized / supported coupes.
The US is the greatest purveyor of violence and terror in the world today and for the last 100 years.
Time for its people to grow up, and take the responsibility of educating themselves, and changing things at home. The retard who suggested folks don't fear the US enough obviously is a typical ignorant American fuck tard. He should put down his video games, and go read some history/current events.
disclaimer: by accident of location of birth, I carry a US passport.
Ummm.... actually, OBL stated that there were very specific reasons (support of the Saudi royals and Israel) for attacking the US. And offered an ultimatum. Talk of the Caliphate was likely more of a rallying cry.
You may want to actually read his speeches/writings/interviews. How on earth did you get modded insightful??
Read the fine summary.
New information technologies make it easier for people who share a hatred to organize around it...
The impact of technology on society is just as newsworthy here as the next incremental improvement in graphics engines.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
A list of people whose grave I'm going to piss on one day. I started making this list many many years ago, probably after I first heard the phrase "I'M GONNA PISS ON YOUR GRAVE" in some action movie. Just because Jack Nicholson said "I'M GONNA PISS IN YOUR SKULL" once in a movie probably just added to my resolve.
This bothers you? The fact that bad things happen every day bothers you? You should talk to your therapist about this, not us. What happened to "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters"?
Now if this is just some rant based on your own particular slant of politics that's another matter. Why inject something as ugly and divisive as politics here. Here where, Me Myself and I, come to escape from those sort of discussions.
Dude, most of your readers are just laughing at you.
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us. We obsess and worry about whether our enemies like us. We allow our enemies to put propaganda in our legacy media. They don't.
If they truly feared us they wouldn't do the crap they do. Do ya think they would behead our people, desecrate their corpses, etc. if they feared us? Would they blow up a block of downtown NYC if they feared us? If they really though we would get seriously pissed off and go Add Coulter on their primitive asses and "Bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity." The answer is obvious.
Jmorris is right to some respect. The problem is that we try to fit WAR into the PC society. Warfare is not politically correct, it is not cute and fuzzy. Gunshot wounds are not licked on by kittens. It is a sad fact that we blame our troops when these things go wrong.
The fact is they are not wrong. If you look back at the posters for WWI an WWII you will see blatant acts by both sides to make the other out as sub-human not only to their soldiers but also to the general public.
You take this basic gruesome psychology of warfare and you add to it a society which in all honesty goes much further than urinating on corpses when they desecrate our bodies. I don't see this video as anything other than War, not at it's worst but at it's norm. The thing that bothers me is that it was filmed.
Our government is trying to win a war without offending anyone. They have it wrong. Win the war, then worry about repairing the relationships and rebuilding the country. It would be much cheaper to build schools if we waited until they stopped blowing them up.
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." ~Ozzy Osborne
The first thing most people have to do to cope with killing as a matter of business, even for a just cause is to stop thinking of the enemy as people. War is just that its business. We are not talking about defending some property, yourself, or someone you have a personal attachment to; its killing in support of some abstract set of principles and because someone from the government told you to it.
That is simply not the sort of motivation most decent people need to take a life. I do think war is often necessary and all of us back at home need to keep in mind what the military is really for and that is to kill people and break things.
Its no surprise to me so many of our boys and girls are coming home with major damage to their mental state. We keep telling them to think of the people shooting at them as well 'people', who probably are in many ways like them with families back home, hobbies, hopes and dreams. We think we are being humane doing that but what we are doing is fatal to the humanity of our own troops. You can't kill 'people' like you and feel okay about it at the end of the day. Well I don't know personally but I don't think I could. What I think I could do is kill 'they enemy'.
I think I could do that in a dispassionate professional way and not feel like I had to get revenge. I could view them like a dangerous animal or a hazardous machine to work around and just get the job done. Once the threat was removed I could be okay with it. Now if you make them 'people', and tell me I am there trying to help them, I expect I'd find it really allot harder not to take their shooting at me personally.
Really we need to recognize that nation building does not work. We can't just go into a place with a completely different culture and liberate them. We need to choose our missions better. 'Take out Saddam and his government who we think are building weapons of mass destruction that could be used against us or our allies' is (if supported by real evidence) an example of a legitmate mission for America's army. 'Turn IRAQ and Afghanistan into democratic republics' is not.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The 30 person terrorist cell still need logistical (hiding places, food, transportation) support from sympathizers to carry out big operations. This kind of deterrance would not discourage the 30 members but it would discourage the sympathizers.
Great. Someone has a different view than yours so they're "spinning" it.
I can tell that this is going to be a GREAT conversation.
I said "end the war".
I did NOT say "surrender".
Hitler's own people were trying to kill him so they could end the war.
Actually, it does.
Again, Hitler's own military people were trying to kill him.
Once Germany surrendered, there wasn't an active anti-Allied resistance in Germany.
Prior to that, there WERE Germans who protected Jews in NAZI Germany. Because being the AGGRESSOR is different. Nazi Germany was the aggressor. The German people knew that.
Nice use of Wikipedia.
The problem is that nothing you just copied invalidates my statement that Hitler killed himself and Germany surrendered to the Allies.
No. It was "non-existent".
Your Bruchsal example happened PRIOR to the war being over (on 1 March 1945). The Allies took it on 2 Apr 1945. Which, as you were so hot to point out, is PRIOR to Berlin's surrender on 2 May 1945.
So it is kind of difficult to have anti-Allied resistance PRIOR to the Allies taking control of the town.
Well, you're just sitting on your ass bitching about SOPA and PIPA while the Congress is passing the infinite detention bill. But it's OK because it doesn't concern US citizens, only foreigners. After all,every single right is a privilege granted through citizenship.
The lead poster was referring to Machiavelli's life work "Discourses on Titus Livius's History of Rome." "The Prince was a six week effort aimed at gaining favor with the de' Medici family. Machiavelli wrote a number of other things as well including comedies.
So how do you explain dehumanizing your own? Because the last time I looked the taliban lops off fingers, and hands, and throws acid in the face of women to stop them from trying to claw their way out of the 7th century islamic thinking that they believe in. That they're chattel. Our enemy has never played nice, the jihadi's, yeah they are consistent. They dehumanize everyone, the same goes anywhere that type of thinking becomes prevalent. See egypt recently.
To be frank, we should never have played nice in the first place. The west didn't win WWII by being nice either, nice came when we rebuilt their societies and civilizations. And every time we go the 'nice' route, we lose, simply to save face. War is neither pretty, nor nice. It hasn't changed in the last 2000 years when it was stone throwers using slings, 800 years ago when it was bows and arrows, and mounted mail, and it hasn't changed today.
Om, nomnomnom...
Are you sure about that claim you make? Here is what you can see in Wikipedia (with references), showing that the long term effects are actually very significant:
According to the U.S. Department of Energy the immediate effects of the blast killed approximately 70,000 people in Hiroshima.[74] Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical resources, range from 90,000 to 166,000.[1][75] Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects.[76][77] Another study states that from 1950 to 2000, 46% of leukemia deaths and 11% of solid cancer deaths among bomb survivors were due to radiation from the bombs, the statistical excess being estimated to 94 leukemia and 848 solid cancers.[78] At least eleven known prisoners of war died from the bombing.[79]
learn history first. of course there occurs dissent when you have famine, war, shit. what you call 'stalin' is a period in between the late stages of the revolution chaos and late stages of world war ii. THE most horrible period that ussr has had passed through.
stalin died before 1950. where was dissent in 1960 ? where was dissent in 1970 ?
let me tell you where it was - because there were now apartments, food, education, universities, the dissent had stopped.
not to mention most of the dissent was pertaining to ethnicity - in world war ii, they relaxed nationalism, and allowed nationalism to have some space, and all those dissenters united against the common enemy - nazis. and chechen ? are you aware that its another ETHNIC problem ? where are the russian terrorists ? where are ukrainian terrorists ? hell, where are sibir terrorists or ancestral finnish terrorists ?
very wise of you - and short sighted - you know about gulag, you know about GERMAN speaking population in byelorussia, but your mind did not wander from there, asking 'why', and how. it just stopped there. basically, you know bits about history, but not enough to create a continuing timeline in your head and see what happened at what point, why, and led to what point.
Read radical news here
Criminals always plead ignorance. From the joint in their pocket to mass grave nearby: they don't know how it got there!
But what caused him to bomb the Cole, and attack the WTC twice (among other things) was the U.S. stepping between him and Saddam Hussein. He was okay with working with the Saudi Royals while he tried to convince them to let him and his mujahideen take Saddam out. But when the Saudis allowed the US to attack Saddam *from Saudi soil*, that was the last straw.
I believe this was one of the real reasons the US went into Iraq. To demonstrate that any successful 9/11 type of attack would have the opposite of the desired effect.
US national debt is over 100% of GDP. It's banana republic time from this point on. Well into PIIGS territory.
Deleted
what you are speaking of, is different - you are saying that people in occupied countries stood by. the grandparent was saying that the world stands by.
whereas, there was a world war going on, because world did not stand by continued invasions.
Read radical news here
How is forming a religious government "hate"? Does the Saudi Monarchy="love"? Or is just Jesus=love, Mohammed=hate?
The trouble is we focus on the wrong people. If we don't want to be attacked the place to focus is on the dictators. They are not stupid, they are the rules of their own private hell because they have a little more on the ball than most. They understand world politics. They would be capable of understanding that the pissing of the USA is a good way to lose their cushy situation.
That is why I view Libya as mistake. Gadaffi "got it". He was a son of bitch, but he was our son of a bitch. Sure he was doing terrible things to his people but he was not going to be part of an attack on us. Why because he liked being 'king' of Libya, and after witnessing what Saddam's petulance toward us got him, he knew not to step over the line on bother American interests. By being part of the action against him we sent the message that it really is our way or the highway and their is nothing you can do save yourself. Had we settled for leave us alone and we will leave you alone I suspect we'd get it.
Iraq, we should have gotten out of there when Bush flew the mission accomplished banner, called it the success it was and gone home. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Syria we should have conduced target hits on the government, and religious leaders advocating attacks on us, used the Army and Air power on larger groups with stated goals of attacking us and left everyone else alone. Let it dawn on these strong men the best way to stay on top is to simply avoid the USA. Don't talk to us, don't threaten us, don't threaten our interests and we will leave you to abuse and torture you population to your hearts content .
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Timothy McVeigh had his reasons too. Do you honestly believe that satisfying anything Timothy McVeigh wanted would have stopped his hate? Then why do you think ANYTHING the USA did is somehow the source of Osama Bin Laden's hate?
Hate is its own original transgression. Nothing that comes before an act of hate justifies it. Nothing can be done to stop its creation.
All that can be done in a rational world is to oppose the hate when it makes itself manifest by its vile actions. Mollifying the hate, buying into the hater's justifications: this is a fool's errand that bears no fruit.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are 2 wars fought by the United States that could reasonably considered to be moral wars:
1. The American Civil War, if you were on the Union side, assuming you believe freeing slaves is a morally good act.
2. World War II. Even if the US didn't know about the Holocaust, they definitely knew about Japanese atrocities in China.
Even then, there were definitely evil acts committed by the US side.
I am officially gone from
the fact that america has its mouth firmly affixed to jewish cock has nothing to do with it amirite?
It doesn't matter what you believe about any religion. What matters is what you are willing to do to achieve a theocratic or ideological goal. And if you are happy to murder innocents, including hundreds of thousands of Muslim innocents, then this is enough to label you as someone filled with hate.
But you change the subject. You start with this bullshit notion that this is an argument between Christianity and Islam. Facts for you to consider, idiot: Al Qaeda kills vast numbers of Muslims, orders of magnitude more than Westerners, in pursuit of their hate filled goal. And Al Qaeda does not speak for what the vast majority of what Muslims believe. So you simply do not understand the topic you are commenting on.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You'll never be able to do that, however. Our leaders would gladly destroy all life on earth than let another military set foot on our soil. It is therefore academic. A stronger army matters not when you can blow up the entire planet many times over.
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
In the 80's Middle East, did anyone ever notice that the Russians didn't have the legions of kidnap victims like the U.S. did?
Here's why (and don't ask for a cite. It was before all the internet tubes and shit)
A Russian diplomat was kidnapped by some radical Islamic group (there were/are many) and held hostage. The Russians kidnapped one of that group's higher ups and then started sending him back, one piece at a time. The Russian diplomat was release before they got to any important pieces.
The fact is that war is the end result of the breakdown of the diplomatic process. All the talking and reasoning is done, all the peaceful protesting is over, the hunger strikes finished, the occupy camps empty, etc. and all that's left is to kill each other.
And like it or not, the best way to conduct a war is to visit horrible violence on the enemy as quickly and massively as possible. Half measures, warning strikes, etc., are useless and only prolong the suffering on both sides.
And the only way to truly end a conflict is the utter and total defeat of the enemy. They need to be cowering in a corner, wondering what the fuck was that just hit them and absolutely wanting no part of any more. Anything less and they will rebuild and come back at you. Just witness what happens every time Hamas pushed Israel too far and they get into a serious dustup. If Israel were to just ignore all the bullshit from the U.N. and deal with the problem, there wouldn't be any future problems.
And when you enemy knows that you are willing to do just this, that you will come in and totally fuck them up, they will leave you alone. It is how things have been and always will be. Peace through Strength is not just a political slogan, it is reality.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII.
You must have missed the "shock and awe" campaign in the first days of the Iraq War, which was all about bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age as a way of trying to convince them to not fight for Saddam Hussein.
I am officially gone from
The outrage seems to be about them getting pissed on, not about them being killed. Not that they deserve that outrage either. They belong to an organization that beheads people, and films it for propaganda. Where was your outrage then?
This is a war, and if you didn't know what it did to people, then it's on you to educate yourselves.
We once ascribed to "ethical" war, via various conventions we signed, but we don't do that anymore.
Which wars are these that have been fought, not over money, or over territory, or over power, but over ethics? Please name one.
Certainly not the Revolutionary, or Civil, or WWI, or WW2. In fact if memory serves we werent all that keen to stop Hitler for a good part of the war.
I think Libya and similar smallish interventions might be the closest you could get, though those too can have ulterior motives ascribed to them.
Did you just issue a vote of confidence for political purges?
Please tell me Im reading that wrong, or remind me never to vote you for Benevolent Dictator.
Both sides funded terrorism during the cold war, and both labeled their side as freedom fighters.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I never quite understood why it is so abhorrent (by comparison) to do things to dead bodies (which cannot feel or be affected by such acts) while the actual act of killing those people (which obviously affects those people quite a bit...) doesn't get much mention. We don't care that these men were killed, we care that they were peed on afterward. Why the differing standards?
Given that christians are basically jews 2.0, and muslims 3.0 for that matter, the romans was basically fighting the same enemy. But one that had changed tactics.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
If you believe that defending your friends can be an ethical motivator, then WW1 (the French, mostly), and WW2 (French, Brits, Poles, & "Benelux") were being warred on. The problems faced by Jews, Romanian Gypsy, homosexuals, and others were low on the list of defense, but motivated various factions in the US.
The Spanish-American War, The Mexican-American War, the SE Asian War, the proxy war against Indonesian Communists, and numerous other incursions, including the War in Iraq, were about power and influence and oil, and ostensibly, ideology (the "Domino Theory" for Viet Nam).
Was it good to remove Gadafi? Probably, but aiding in democracy storms seems Pyrrhic when the US Legislature is bought and paid for, and no longer represents a democracy itself.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You have the bogus premise. Perhaps Iran wouldn't be as radical if we hadn't overthrown it's democratically elected, relatively progressive leader in 1953. Perhaps, many muslim radicals wouldn't resent us if we had not trampled over their holy lands. Muslim radicals are invigorated when they see their children, wives, and family blown to bits by drones.
If you can't acknowledge that we stepped in a snake's nest, and repeatedly upset them, you're willfully ignorant.
Most of the OWS people still feel the government can be reformed. They don't consider the government itself intolerable, just some of its actions and a situation that has been created.
I think they will eventually come to the conclusion (which I think is the correct conclusion) that the problem is systemic and a major house-cleaning is in order.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Al Qaeda did not attack us because we stood in the way of the formation of a caliphate. They attacked us, in the final analysis, as a PR maneuver to further their recruitment needs in the war against Saudi Arabia's government. This happened in the greater context of a Saudi-Iranian geopolitical struggle for regional domination. The United States is the one symbol that, regardless of which side you fall in this war, everyone can get behind wanting to take down a peg. It was Al Qaeda's attempt to rewrite the rules of that struggle, and put themselves in a stronger position to negotiate with the local powers and whatever form popular discontent took inside their borders.
There is more to it than that. For example, I think most Chinese people think their government is tolerable. The government successfully represses or minimizes the evils it causes. That, anti-western rhetoric and rising economic prospects keep the people in line. They are complicit in their own oppression. Much like the 99%ers here.
But that will eventually cease to be.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
There is a reason why USA and others have held a policy of home ownership over the last century or so. The more a person has to loose, the less he or she wants to rock the boat. And then there is the issue that your not sure if you have supporters. It is damned hard to face down a group on your own. A death wish and no material or social ties likely helps a lot.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Germany has to SURRENDER before there can be anti-Allied RESISTANCE.
Otherwise it would be known as "war".
Because, otherwise, it would be "war" and "resistance".
Again, it was non-existent. Your Bruschal example has been shown to be incorrect.
Now all you are doing it trying to confuse post-surrender RESISTANCE movements with war-time operations.
Nor did I ever say they were.
Which means that you have resorted to a "straw man" argument based off of your extreme claims.
Members of Hitler's military command DID attempt to assassinate him (multiple times) WITHOUT " the *entirety* of the German population" being against Hitler.
Again with the extremes.
Why?
I have stated (and demonstrated) that your position on THIS issue is incorrect and now you resort to attempting to re-phrase my position in extreme terms that I have not used.
Is it just so you can beat a "straw man"?
I'm not sure if you're referring to Toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or not, but Saddam's security forces had long killed or tortured most vocal dissenters long before the invasion of Iraq. Yes, certainly, some who saw the US as a liberator who saw the US marching in finally took the initiative to speak out, but I think most people knew the truth: the US was only invested in its own interests, not the interests of the Iraqi people. That they should coincide for a time did not mean Saddam or his forces would be destroyed before the US left nor that when the US left another dictator, like one of Saddam's sons, wouldn't seize power and engage in another round of executions.
But, more generally, I just don't think most Iraqis cared. People live out their lives as best they can in the environment that exists. Few people spend their energy to try to change that environment because so many entrenched elements work to stabilize back to that environment that even without the fear of punishment, it seems to be wasted effort. This holds true in the US as much as Iraq and is a major reason there is such political dissatisfaction and yet so little political movement for change. Of course, by the same token, most people don't have a fully realized idea of what would be a better system and so couldn't advocate for that change anyways--I'd have to include myself in that camp as well, since I recognize how many gaps in my understanding of the government world there is. At best, I can only think in terms of moving from one form of democracy to another; I imagine most Iraqis thought in the same terms.
I think the real question is given that the US imposed democracy on Iraqis, how do they now feel about the current system vs the old one. And the truth is, many people liked the old system because it offered things like more stability for things like infrastructure, concerns about personal safety, etc. I only imagine that will change for the better as more infrastructure is built, more political groups settle for non-violent solutions to their troubles, etc. But, that's the optimism of a belief that the free market will solve supply issues, government won't be so deadlocked to not act to the needs of the people, and eventually even the most ardent supporter of a cause will become tired of the killing and seek more peaceful means. The cycle can, of course, begin again given enough motive. And another dictatorship could arise.
In the end, the US's involvement is wishy-washy enough that as much as it might have had a positive impact on Iraq today, it seems more an accidental side-effect than anything.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
U.S. can't come even close to blowing up the entire planet "many times over". There isn't enough nuclear arsenal in the U.S. Look at some numbers. Some major population centers we could destroy on a global scale, but nothing else
If you look at 20 most populous cities in the world, only two are in the U.S., and you're not below 10 million population per city yet on that list. If you're looking at 100 most populous cities that are not in the U.S., they are all over 3 million. The next 100 is still above 2 million. All of those need multiple warheads, the most populous ones need a dozen or two for total destruction. There's about 8,000 warheads available in the U.S. to launch on short notice. That's enough to obliterate the world's most populous 200-300 cities and that's it. That's less than 2 billion people out of 6.8 billion. End of your fairy tale right there.
Here is a scenario for you jmorris42. What If the Soviet union had been able to defeat the armed forces of the United States in an invasion of North America. Suppose also, they had done away with the existing laws and government imposing their form of communism on the populace from the local government in the smallest town to the national level. Would you resist?
Most people, in my opinion, would keep their heads down and just try to get on with their lives, however, many would resist. They may not be actively taking up arms to kill the invader, but they'd help those that were in whatever small ways they could.
So you have people who have had their form of government removed, their laws revoked and their religion marginalized (and worse), why do you suppose they'd hate the invaders? What if we in the United States were those invaders?
You say instill fear, fear is so short-term and short-sighted, scare me once and I might back off for a minute to re-evaluate the situation, then I'll shoot you - in the back - at night - then I would probably piss on your still warm corpse.
If I couldn't do it myself, I'd sure look for someone that could do it for me.
even after they tried to surrender
Revisionist bullshit.
Who the fuck are you to question anything anyone did in the war against Japan back then? You stupid, mother's basement, mouth breathing dwelling troll. You have no idea what it was like, no idea what was going on and no idea what it all meant.
In the first invasion of Iraq that the US participated in, they were greeted in the streets as liberators. They then marched almost all of the way to the capital, before turning around and going home. The people who greeted them on the streets then had a long chat with Saddam's security forces. It's not hard to understand why they were a little reluctant the second time around...
[[Citation Needed]]
No sig for the moment.
If preventing war is impossible, and it is inevitable that "hate" grops will gain acccess to WMD, the only logical conslusion is to eradicate our enimies.
LOL, touché... have a cookie.
No sig for the moment.
Terrorism was made for TV/media 40 years ago. A PR war. Backing off because of fear of bad PR concedes this fight to those who want to look bad. It is how they intimidate others, enforce their will. More media/more attention already has enabled more bad actors, so common now as to be unremarkable. Beheading? Acid bath? Nothing new, never mind. Piss story is man bites dog, plays to western insecurities and fear. Pure fear underlies this entire piece. What will the neighbors say?
And now they will be IMMORTALIZED in history.
And when our military leaves Afghanistan (and it will) they will be remembered by the new Taliban-based government (and probably taught in schools).
"Terrorism" is a tactic.
The problem we have (and I believe that you implied such) is that we keep grouping people into the "terrorist" category based their CHOICE to CHOOSE "terrorism" as a tactic.
And then we try to find the commonality of that GROUP that "made" them CHOOSE the tactic of "terrorism".
The only commonality is that THEIR PERCEPTION of the situation was such that "terrorism" appeared to them to be their best option to attempt to achieve their goal(s).
It's not about the goal. The goals vary.
It's not about the emotion. The emotions vary.
It's not about the background. The backgrounds vary.
Everything varies EXCEPT that they chose "terrorism" as their tactic.
"If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers." So saying, he ordered the leaders of the two companies to be beheaded. Now the king of Wu was watching the scene from the top of a raised pavilion; and when he saw that his favorite concubines were about to be executed, he was greatly alarmed and hurriedly sent down the following message: "We are now quite satisfied as to our general's ability to handle troops. If We are bereft of these two concubines, our meat and drink will lose their savor. It is our wish that they shall not be beheaded." Sun Tzu replied: "Having once received His Majesty's commission to be the general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept." Accordingly, he had the two leaders beheaded, and straightway installed the pair next in order as leaders in their place. When this had been done, the drum was sounded for the drill once more; and the girls went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound. Then Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King saying: "Your soldiers, Sire, are now properly drilled and disciplined, and ready for your majesty's inspection. They can be put to any use that their sovereign may desire; bid them go through fire and water, and they will not disobey."
Sun Tzu understood this well. Fear is a powerful motivator. War is not about being 'nice'. To think it is like in the movies where the hero sweeps in and saves the village from the bad guys is just make believe. It is about killing and getting your way.
Or to put it from an old saying "dead men tell no tales". You win you get your way. You loose your enemy gets their way. Now that being said there are *new* forms of war. Propaganda is a major component of that. The ideas are still the same though.
and if you can't refrain from being so patronizing and condescending as to think that what the people do in the middle east is nothing more than the sum of what the west does to them, then you are nothing but a perpetrator of the problem you complain about
who owns the destiny of the middle east?
i think the people of the middle east own it
you think the west owns it. because in your thinking, middle easterners are nothing but empty reflective mirrors of what westerners do. that everything they do begins and ends as a simple reading of the what the west does. as if nothing else is going on in iran except western meddling in your example!
your thinking is insulting to middle easterners; you don't think of them as individuals with their own desires and goals. you think of them as helpless pawns only able to react to what the west does. because you are ignorant and ethnocentric: everything that happens in the world starts in the west. in YOUR thinking, not mine
so congratulations, your mentality is the main contributing factor to the problem you complain about
in your thinking, the middle east will never be the masters of their own destiny. because in your thinking nothing happens in the middle east without the west involved. you are a blind ignorant egocentric fool, and you have nothing intelligent to say on the subject matter
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
thank you for analyzing two pieces of a puzzle with four hundred pieces. please note the present condition of al qaeda's health, and contribute the remaining 398 pieces of thought to arrive at an intelligent commentary
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm always surprised when countries are criticized for a disproportionate response. All responses in war should be disproportionate. This is the way to win wars.
We were Al Qaeda...terrorizing our enemies...until the 90s when they started to turn against us. Who do you think trained them and armed them? How do you think that Bin Laden's family is buddy buddy with the US government?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It's war. We tell our soldiers they are fighting for the survival of our country, or way of life. Go put a bullet through your enemies, head, the stomach, their back. Empty your clip. If they engage at close range, put a knife through their eye. Disembowel them. Waterboard the if you need information. Throw a grenade between them and blow them to bits. Push their bodies into a ravine so they won't be see along the trail. Piss on them, wait, no, definitely don't do that. This is morally wrong!! Once you kill them, leave them there to rot. This is the right thing to do.
BULLSHIT.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
But I'm evil in your worldview. And you are both stupid AND evil in mine.
Not really, I think he's just worried that this is the same as the way animals in a pack interrelate and he likes to think the human race has risen above that.
The US is the biggest terrorist in the world you don't kill hundred of thousands of Japanese even after they tried to surrender and call your self the army of rightness.
When did that happen? As I recall, after ther first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the emperor of Japan brought together his cabinet to decide whether to continue fighting or surrender. The result was a 3 to 3 split. And this was AFTER the first atomic bomb. Once the emperor of Japan decided to surrender, several members of his cabinet seriously considered a coup so that they could continue fighting. At least if you're going to attack the US, get your facts straight. It's awfully hard not to be the bad guy when you are operating on fictional versions of history.
Correcting your false statements is "pedantic"?
The GOVERNMENT needs to surrender.
Otherwise it is Germans fighting against the Allies, in a German city, in Germany, while the German government of Germany is at war with the Allies.
Otherwise known as "war".
By your "logic", the entire war was "resistance". Just by different peoples in different locations at different times.
No. I stated how you were wrong. And I've just re-stated it here.
Feel free to beat those straw men, though.
The bombing of Bruchsal was a POSSIBLE Allied retaliation for the killing of a downed pilot PRIOR to Bruchsal falling to the Allies.
Here, I'll time-line it for you:
War with Germany.
Allies invade Germany.
Downed pilot killed by people of Bruchsal.
Allied bombing of Bruchsal.
Allies take Bruchsal.
No Allied casualties in Bruchsal from war operations or resistance forces.
Hitler kills himself.
Berlin falls.
Germany surrenders.
Feel free to argue with the facts. :D
What will cease to be is people using the phrase 99%ers as if it has any definition other than Marxist propaganda.
"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearableâ"and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanonâ"I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followedâ"when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women."
---Osama bin Laden, 2004
National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States - this talks about the reasons.
You can't handle the truth.
Example: can you examine anything in the upbringing of Timothy McVeigh that justifies what he did in Oklahoma City?
Not a great example, because the final straw that put McVeigh on his destructive path was the murder of innocent civilians by our government at Waco. Hate doesn't just magically appear out of nothingness. It always has a cause.
Then why do you buy the lame excuses so many make for why what the 19 9/11 hijakcers did is justified in some insane loopy attempt at rationalization?
It isn't an attempt at rationalization. It's an attempt to understand. When you truly understand a situation, you can control it. And when you understand that it's your own actions that is making a situation worse and worse, you can STOP DIGGING.
Killing innocents is the original vile act, it is the not the product of anything other than the hate filled mind who commit the atrocity.
And the hate filled minds which commit atrocities? All too often this hate can be traced directly back to us and our actions. Our heavy handed tyranny across the globe is directly responsible for both McVeigh AND 9/11. We created these monsters.
YOUR argument can be boiled down to basically throwing up your hands and saying there's no way we can get rid of hate in the world, so let's not even try. Let's just keep blowing random mother fuckers up for no good reason, until their sons grow old enough to seek revenge, then we'll blow them up too and let the cycle continue until we're all dead. Great strategy.
The "transparency of War" is BS. The Taliban, the Iranians, the various Jihadis, AQ, and so on do all sorts of things on video (like sawing off Daniel Pearl's head while he was alive, or other captives) and there is no "hatred." Just admiration and sadly, desire.
Everyone knows of the male double standard -- Madonna and Whore. But only those willing to see know of the female double standard: Alpha and Beta male.
As long as a man or group of men are perceived as Alpha males (dominating, powerful, sexy) anything and everything they do is considered OK. No matter what. That's why guys like Scott Peterson even in jail get thousands of love letters. Meanwhile as long as a man or group of men is perceived as a "Beta Male" that is ordinary, average, cooperative, unsexy, boring, etc. they must be PERFECT AT ALL TIMES.
WHERE is the outrage over 9/11? Why is "Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close" all about some emo-kid crying and not the revenge of a son over a father's murder? Why? Because Muslim jihadis are "Alpha" to women and the feminized culture of today. If Muslims had done this in 1935, knocking down the Empire State Building, or killing thousands, there would not have been a Muslim left alive in America by six weeks time. And every Mosque would have been razed to the ground. Today there is a Victory Mosque going up near the former Twin Towers. Why?
Because women and thus society treat Alpha and Beta Males differently. The Taliban throw acid on women's faces for learning to read, and behead schoolgirls, but no one cares. There is no outrage, and no "Hatred." Because, hey Alpha Male.
Beyond the feminized West which craves violent domination and brutality, people fear and respect strength, and despise weakness. Killing the enemy and desecrating their bodies worked VERY well in the Philippines, where Muslim Moro Guerillas were buried with pigfat in the early 1900's. Or scalps were taken (by both sides, extensively) in the Indian Wars. Brutality and domination work.
Every boy in High School knows this -- Football players are not picked on, the small and weak are. Women tend to desire domination and submission, which works out OK for them in the short run (as anyone witnessing this female craving for abusive strength can see). For men it is disaster, hence the split in the West. If you are guy, mostly you don't care about pissing on dead Taliban. Why would you? That just shows you're strong and they are weak. A woman or feminized/gay man? Well you want to submit to the powerful so they'll like you and dominate you but not kill you or damage you.
Wars are always fought for one reason and one reason only.
Power.
If you believe the US civil war or WWII were fought for morality, you're buying into the same propaganda that was used to fuel all conflicts since. Ask yourself this... If the US was fighting the civil war over moral outrage over slavery, why didn't they free all slaves in the Union? Did you realize that most of New York, at the time, was built by slave labor? Or how about all the US concentration camps used for Japanese-American citizens? Don't even get me started on the similarities between HUAC and the Nazi party....
Next time you open a few history texts....read the facts only and gloss over the bias and presentation.
Why have they not been welcomed as liberators?
They were (well, kinda).
The Shiites LOVED the US when they beat the crap out of Saddam and his Sunni friends (both times).
Right up until the US prevented them from taking over the country - and cull the remaining Sunni and Kurds. Then they wanted the US to GFTO.
Also, the Kerds want their own country, which Turkey doesn't like.
And Iran wants to take over.
So even if every Iraqi loved the US, there's enough in-fighting (and imported fighters) to get the US caught in some serious crossfire.
Actually, your premise is pretty bogus.
Most of the world, including the third world, lives in conditions that rival or exceed the wealth and comfort available to kings and queens just a few centuries ago. Bathe daily? Live with more than a few square feet to yourself? (Ever visited Versailles?)
Equally, most of those involved in terrorism (not to mention the Saudis involved in 9/11, who were plain rich) come from families with a reasonable amount of material wealth, if not security. The are not "people on the edge with nothing to loose," as much as you and some of your respondents would like to think.
The causes for terrorism (and let's remember organizations such as Lehi in Israel, shall we) and opposition to the US, are simply much more complex.
This is what people dont get when I tell them that even when the US govt does this (it will begin here within the next few years thanks to the NDAA) that people will not rebel. They will stand there and shit themselves and reassure themselves that "At least it isnt me" even though they know it could be them next. They stand there because if they cry out, they will get taken too, and so will everyone who cries out.
Yeah you can be a hero, until you realize you are going against a system bigger than you and has all the guns and you have none.
Just how before guns, you would be going against a system with all the swords. except now, it's more than just guns, it's bombs, and you can even be legally assassinated.
America's going to get a wake up call here pretty quick, except america is not going to wake up.
I wouldnt put the blame on the german civillians, by the time they realized they had elected a corrupt government in, it was already too late.
After all, Hitler was a strong, trustworthy fellow who was going to bring glory to germany at any cost, and actually did for the first few years of his rule. At least that was the perception the average german citizen had. Then suddenly people start disappearing and secret police groups started terrorizing the minority groups no one would dare to defend unless they wanted to suffer the same fate.
It's the same reason they will create laws that go after some unattractive group, such as pedophiles or copyright infringers, and have jack shit to do with those groups. It's hard to look like a reasonable or sane person when you argue for pedophile rights, you just lumped in with them and you get ignored, or in the case of Nazi Germany, get executed.
Whoever's president next term will remind us who now holds the keys of power here, wont matter which poltical ideology they subscribe to, they will tighten the noose around our throats just like the nazi party did to german citizens, and anyone who isn't "patriotic" will disappear just like people in germany did, and no one will be able to defend them as they will be "enemy combatants". just how the jews, gypsies, mentally ill and challenged, union leaders, and political opponents were the "diseases of the german state" It's real easy to make someone unfavorable, just slap a negative label, say that they're it and process them accordingly, and make sure people know that these people no longer are considered human. It's a good shot across the bow of a populace to keep them in line. The US has done this to our enemies to shake them up, and they will happily apply it to the rest of us.
The politicians are not listening because they no longer have to, they have tested us and found that we will stand by idly now.
With that, I do not give the German people flack for their choices, they were deceived, and in the end, powerless. They couldnt defend themselves or attack people who had some of the most advanced military equipment of the time, and neither can we.
With that sobering thought, have a great weekend.
>You don't. You put a bullet in their brains. Hitler knew this. Stalin knew this.
>All great tyrants of the past, and all the little tyrants today (local drug dealers, political bosses etc) know this.
>But no, shoot a few people and suddenly the word "genocide" is screamed out,
>because our "civilized" culture is perfectly willing to make people suffer a long drawn out death out of sight through economic sanctions and incarceration,
>rather than a quick death via purges.
Wow, that's some ignorant racist BS you're spouting.
Hitler practiced genocide, the systematic and organized murder of peoples. This did not mean merely killing people politically or otherwise opposed to him, whether in purges or in war. It meant total committment to exterminating the Jewish, Slavic and many, many other peoples from Europe.
To equate US or any other contemporary military or social policy, much less the very small number of prisoners held in Guantanamo, to the rise of German totalitarianism is entirely intellectually vacid. Sanctions against Iraq, Iran or any other country may cause great suffering and loss; they are simply not designed to exterminate the Iranian people and erase them from the Earth.
Whatever one may think of the US' imperial policies, which you oddly seem to be supporting ("you put a bullet in the towel-heads brains, that's all you can do with them") this is a critical difference.
We should of course point out that the Soviet Union lasted less than a century. Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue. These are not exactly shining examples of thriving cultures and effective governmental policies.
That's a ridiculous comment to come out with, half of the world speaks languages directly descended from Latin in one way or the other, no language remains the same for 2000 years it's counter to the very nature of communication. Their culture still resonates today in a multitude of areas from arts to religion and beyond
A suggestion. Learn a bit more about the Second World War, before you post again.
why do you think anything in that quote refutes anything i have said?
is it your assertion that osama bin laden has no capability for independent thought, and merely exists as a mirror of us policy?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
'We had no Nazis here in our village.
They all came from outside.
Perhaps there were some Nazis in the next village, I don't know."
-- Translation, from an interview during the American occupation of Germany
You're missing more than a few points here.
The Jews were scattered not for their religion, but for their revolts (the most famous led to the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD, but there were various uprisings and revolutions from the 1st through the 3rd centuries.)
The only religion the Romans actively sought to exterminate was that of the Celtic druids - the Romans found human sacrifices to gods distasteful (human sacrifices to keep the masses amused were, of course, a different story...)
Germany was NOT peaceable after WWI, because the Dolchstoss theory that it had been stabbed in the back was propagated and not countered.
When their country got burned down around their ears and what the Wehrmacht had fought for was destroyed, German psychology changed greatly.
Beating enemy soldiers with no consequence to enemy civilians (due to pretending the COUNTRY isn't the enemy) doesn't produce lasting victory.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"The US is the biggest terrorist in the world you don't kill hundred of thousands of Japanese even after they tried to surrender and call your self the army of rightness."
Nonsense. The Japs had a chance to surrender and were too slow about it. There was no reason not to nuke them because OWN-side lives have value and enemy lives do not. They were TOLD to surrender and should have done so after Iwo Jima fell.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
France had it easy. Poland didn't, and much of Polish resistance was destroyed including the entire Warsaw Ghetto.
The Soviets fought various Eastern partisan groups for a few years after WWII ended, and because they weren't also fighting the Wehrmacht they had the leisure to destroy them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
War is the deliberate infliction of violence to BREAK the will to resist. It's not "policing" which is which "policing" DOES NOT WORK.
Chivalry only works on the chivalrous.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"Europeans from Paris to Danzig stood by and let their countrymen be marched off to their deaths, and while there were heroes here and there (just as there were collaborators), all in all they just stood there."
A lot of them helped. After all, murdering Communists is rational, and there was enough anti-Jewish and anti-Gypsy irrational prejudice that most of them weren't missed.
Look up the Waffen SS divisions from the occupied countries. Some of them fought superbly.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"Why have they not been welcomed as liberators?"
Because they are not changing things in ways the locals WANT.
Religionist tribal societies don't WANT secular democracy and merely see it as a bridge to theocractic, tribalist governments.
Stupid Americans think others want to be like them. No, they envy our WEALTH, not our society.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"Urinating on someone who is dead and won't care is a big outrage,"
Not compared to being shot, but it gets milked for all it's worth.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Ariel: You ever heard of the Masada? For two years, 900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. The Romans? Where are they now?
Tony Soprano: You're looking at them, asshole.
are you aware that, that massacre occurred right at a time when norway was opposing israel in various important international political issues, and also spearheading pushes about the palestinian problem ?
that is not some natural occurrence. that kind of thing regularly happens when a nation's interests go against israel - especially its neighbors. so far the only immune nation is ireland. when ireland and israel get into some sort of conflict, israel suffers.
Read radical news here
The number of people here trying to justify the actions regarding the Taliban corpses is truly disgusting, there's a difference between collateral damage and wilful contempt and this act goes against the values of Honour that is so often espoused.
Al Qaeda's goal is to terrorize anyone who is not a convert. We're supposed to terrorize tyrants like that. Every tyranny should fear a free people and there are few more just causes than to destroy a tyranny.
criticize them ... on their lack of allegiance to your values
Yes, propaganda means demonizing the 'unwanted' thoughts/actions. But society depends on citizens having homogenous values: safe sex, fair go/use, individual rights, etc. The problem is recognizing which values do not represent reality. Our individual values are learnt ('learn t' is in the /. dictionary) through relationships and society at large.
Trust, the cornerstone of any relationship, even an abusive one, is the assumption of shared values and goals. Those with financial and social power always have something to lose/gain and thus an incentive to abuse the lesser persons. Yet we assume those with power will not abuse us or our trust. One such abuse is the hiding of essential truths required to operate a free society. How many people realise that we are not hearing the essential truths about climate-change?
Ah, you're thinking conventionally. Why target individual cities if the goal is the destruction of all life on the planet?
Those 8000 warheads spread between 2-10 specific locations could easily disrupt tectonic patterns and leverage existing gravitational tensions to cause far more damage than target population centers.
Whether it'd be enough to shift the earth's orbit, drawing in the destructive power of having a Moon collide is doubtful, but extermination of all life would likely need a new orbit that intersects the sun anyway so I guess life will continue. Somehow.
> to brush away all the standard excuses that German's of the wartime generation invoked to get out of any sense of responsibility
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know what Bush was doing, he is lying".
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know what the CIA was doing, he is lying".
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know what Nixon was doing, he is lying".
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know what Hoover was doing, he is lying".
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know what Harding was doing, he is lying".
"If you ever meet an American who says he did not know that WMD was an excuse, he is lying".
I could target other countries just as easily. Now that we've determined that all Germans tried to hide their Nazi past, what's America's excuse? You want me to add waterboarding and Guantanamo to the list too?
AC
PS Fuck you!
We can exclude editors - can we please get an option to exclude regularly accepted submitters?
If Afghanistan became a secure democracy and developed in the way that Japan and Germany did after WWII, that would be a victory.
It will not possibly happen, but it would qualify in roughly the way that the idiots imagined it would when we moved in to occupy Afghanistan rather than just knocking off al Qaeda
thank you for analyzing two pieces of a puzzle with four hundred pieces.
But that is exactly what you did! You took a relatively minor piece of the 400 piece puzzle (al Qaeda's desire to re-establish a caliphate) and proclaimed that it is the only important part of the puzzle, while refusing to acknowledge that in a complex puzzle like this there may be more than one fundamental issue.
So please note this and contribute the remaining 399 pieces of thought to arrive at an intelligent reply to the GP.
They tried to surrender before the bomb was dropped and their only condition was that the emperor stay in charge, america killed all those civilians, then let him stay the emporer any way. I think you'll find america wanted to test there weaponry and flex their mussels to try to terrorise the country so much that they would be too scared to ever fight again (if you don't call killing hundred of thousands of Japanese civilians terrorism, i don't know what your fighting).
Nothing justifies murdering more than 3000 people by flying planes into skyscrapers
Although, the raw artistry involved and the resultant TV pictures do come close.
Admit it, you and 3 billion other people will remember those images until you die. That's got to be worth something.
Anyway.. when civilians are already dying, when there is no parity of military forces, asymmetric warfare is the only option. Military targets have value, but the purpose of war is to impose your will (cf. Clausewitz). Civilian deaths have a far higher impact than military ones and will evoke a far stronger response.
You could argue that the response was an invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the regime there; the counter argument is that this has merely boosted anti-American feeling in the region, thus granting yet greater support for the cause behind the initial attacks.
Certainly the attack on the WTC has led to a massive decline in quality of life for the American people. That by itself could be deemed a major success, and quoted as justification for what was a relatively cheap and easy operation.
All in, the impact from those 3000 deaths is higher than the impact from any one of a dozen nights during WWII in which far more civilians died due to indiscriminate bombing.
That's very much not the case. In WWII partisan attacks against Germany led to entire villages being razed, their inhabitants killed.
Whether the partisans or their families were victims or not, the actions against the general populace were indeed reprisals.
Hell, have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice and tell me that there's zero opportunity for reprisals.
How much terrorism did the old Soviet Union suffer?
Enough to send them broke? - The 'terrorist' the US are fighting now in Afghanistan were initially armed, trained and financed by the CIA to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan. Many have argued that the CIA sponsored 'freedom fighters' of the past were the straw that broke the USSR's back.
When your enemies neither respect or fear you is when you get the foolishness we currently endure.
If respect is what your looking for, you won't get it by simply instilling fear. What you get with fear alone is either an angry hornets nest, or a bunch of 'yes men' waiting for their chance to slit your throat and steal your hat, after all, you have set the contemporary example of how to be the boss, right?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is not my duty to do someone's cognition for them. It is my interest in the name of clarity to point out where someone's cognition fails.
I do not pretend to be able to capture the entirety of understanding in a throwaway comment on Slashdot. But I do know that I can capture in a throwaway comment on Slashdot a common cognitive failure of armchair analysts in the West: that Al Qaeda's motives begin and end with the West. Their quest for a caliphate being ONLY ONE example of a motive that falls outside of anything about the West.
I do not need to build an entire house in order to show where the foundation of someone else's house is rotten. Understand?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Machiavelli actually says a lot of things, most of which contradict each other. He was a genius in that way, providing examples of every possible technique and examples of where it worked or failed. So basically, he says nothing at all other than "do what will work", and provides very little practical insight without contradicting himself later. If people actually read "The Prince", instead of just quoting it, they might know that.
Fighting evil is a noble cause and must be done.
that was how good people were persuaded into wars for profit for the last 2 centuries ... oh - and in roman republic too - every war roman republic has waged, was based on various justifications, and most of the justifications were manufactured through setting up events in volatile zones through the government's own means. just like how u.s. has been pumping up radical islamists for 20 years, and when it was needed, they suddenly appeared as the enemy.
Read radical news here
I agree the MAD doctrine has (so far) worked well to avoid a nuclear holocaust, but threats cannot keep the peace in the everyday "mutually exclusive destruction" scenarios.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Genocides have happened every few years since WWII, and no one did anything to stop them. Yes, the entire world will stand by wand watch.
Totally agreed.
I have seen people who base their actions on an idealised (to them) version of what the world should be. The results are disastrous. This can be seen when someone puts up argument around something that sounds good, such as "you shouldn't use or benefit from something that was made from the suffering of others". They don't even think of what effects the abstract construction that they invented actually has if it is used. It sounds good to them so it MUST be right. These people also tend to be very hypocritical and selective about what these rules apply to.
As for doing something because it is the 'right' thing to do, screw that, give me cause and effect.
Note I am not devaluing the value of human life, dignity, non-suffering or anything of the kind, just saying that certain moralities that appear good can have very negative effects.
Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue.
While Latin itself isn't around, there are around 800 million people that speak one of the languages that descended from it (such as Spanish, Portuguese and French).
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us.
So we're supposed to terrorize our enemies... Who are we? Al Qaeda?
Right, ignore all the previously stated examples of all the different groups that have used fear as a weapon of war and go straight to Al Qaeda as if they were the ones who thought up the concept.
Stick that in your compiler and debug it!
BTW, the "egocentric blindness" you keep referring to has a name. It is called cultural bias. It is a known and unsolved problem.
Stick that in your compiler and debug it!
http://www.good.is/post/urination-at-war-don-t-be-mad-at-the-peeing-be-mad-at-the-killing/
This article has the stance that war needs to end first. Something that probably has a lot of truth to it.
However, being from Germany, I have a somewhat different perspective on the issue. When I was younger there was still a draft which meant that not only a certain subset of the population would serve in the military but a sample that represents the citizenry more accurately. This in itself helps but the draft also helps with avoiding stupid wars. If it is your son or daughter that has to go to war you feel differently. It reduces how removed the military is and how removed the issue of war and peace from the average citizen is.
Another thing is the concept of the 'Citizen in Uniform'. It says that soldiers do have rights in their life inside the military and that they have almost the same rights outside the military as a regular citizen. It is part of the concept of 'Innere Führung'. If anyone is interested in what this entails, read the excerpt on Google Books that I linked to.
http://books.google.de/books?id=4mSeiOoMpvsC&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=staatsb%C3%BCrger+in+uniform+english&source=bl&ots=AFdnB4pm2f&sig=th75ntix6iYVqtRQ9LS0v2Nkc_w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Hl0ST_iSM83HsgbsickN&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=staatsb%C3%BCrger%20in%20uniform%20english&f=false
Sometimes, I have that thought but about Guantanamo. We are just living our life while people are held in an illegal prison where, literally, torture was/is practiced. We know it and we just stand there.
I don't have an account but I had to reply.
If the US was fighting the civil war over moral outrage over slavery, why didn't they free all slaves in the Union?
1. You're right that the north's hands weren't entirely clean here. Up until the 1830's or so, there were slave traders in Rhode Island, for instance. But Lincoln was elected on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery to the American west after decades of agitation (and in some cases violence) by abolitionists who were absolutely motivated by morality and frequently religious belief. That agitation was also why slavery was illegal in most of the north by 1860.
2. They did free all the slaves in the Union, with the Thirteenth Amendment, shortly after the war. The primary reason they didn't during the war is that they didn't want Maryland, Delaware, or Kentucky to secede (Missouri sorta seceded, sorta not), leaving Washington D.C. surrounded.
I am officially gone from
A bit of proof for what you write was done by a Dutch columnist who as a pure racists wrote that HE did note hate the Muslim cashier serving him and therefor there was no need for fear or war... HER opinion was never mentioned as it does not matter to the likes of him. Muslims are not human beings capable of having their own desires and motivations but simple pets to be pitied and coddled unable to be held accountable for their actions any more then a retarded child.
It takes two to tango, it only takes one to start a war. Love is a two way street, hate isn't.
By stating only HIS own lack of hate for that girl he states that what SHE is thinking of him is of no account, the powerfull westerner vs the immigrant (and of course, he simply assumes that a girl with a headscarf is a Muslim (head scarfs are often worn by western women to keep their hair under control, see series like Last of the Summers Wine) and indeed an immigrant).
Their exist pictures on the net in which you see white people partying while two black people are hanging after lynching as some kind of macarbe party decoration. Did those two men hate white people? Those white people in particular? How are the hate lines drawn?
The conflict between Islam and Islam and Islam and the West are extremely complex. It is not just Islam vs the West, in Afghanistan there used to be Buddhist statues of great age until they were destroyed despite the fact that Japan was a great donor of aid to Afghanistan long before the current conflict. For centuries those statues stood, why did they have to be destroyed?
Conflict is a difficult thing and understanding it is not helped by 12 year old boys who want to see the world burn joining the discussion. There is not a single case of a Muslim force treathing western prisoners respectfully. Not one. Yet that is not part of the discussion for most. Why?
To many who protest about some western soldiers loosing it, the Muslim is not a full human being, they don't consider them on an equal level so when countless western prisoners are abused and degraded, they don't see it on the same level. Double standards.
True equality is holding everyone to the same standards. If you think a barely passing school grade is a sign of mediocrity in a white person it is then wrong to celebrate it if a small percentage of immigrants manage it. It re-enforces the idea that "they" are below "us".
See the ancient disuccions about Dresden and the use of nukes on Japan. The protesters never hold the german and japanse people accountable for the countless atrocities committed with their full support (did the mothers who died at Dresden refuse to talk to their SS sons? Did the japanese sisters refuse to acknowledge their child raping brothers?) and thereby make it the norm for Germans and Japanese to be inhuman monsters and only the Allies are held to have any morals to be held to accountable to.
It is dangerous to base your own morals on those of others (if they do it, we can do it) but it is equally dangerous to just accept low moral standards as normal in "them" even if you think that doing so makes you a great humanitarian. One of the most racist thing to say about another groups action that goes against your own morals is to say "oh well, it is cultural".
It was once German culture gas people. it was the american south culture to enslave people. Did we let them do it just because it was their local system? No? then why don't we hold Muslims to the same morals and judge their mistreatment of prisoners and minorities as we would judge ourselves?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The sight of soldiers urinating on dead enemy is a propaganda blow. If we are pinning our hopes on propaganda to "win" Afghanistan for us, we've already lost.
I know that Afghanistan was the staging area for the 9/11 hijackers. I don't want the Taliban to come back. We don't want it to become a failed state, a playground for terrorists. But are we expected to go into every failed state out there and create a functioning state? That policy is doomed to failure. If that's the policy, we need a new one. One that doesn't bleed us of blood and treasure (we don't have), and has a very very low probability of success.
It's like saying, "Mosquitos cause malaria. So we're going to have to drain every swamp in the world, so we can stop the threat of malaria." Here's a crazy thought: how about we stay out of the swamps, unless they're actually IN the US.
When did we do that?
I thought the Islamic, afraid of women and afraid of the modern world, terrorist asshats most recently did that.
The nips wanted a conditional surrender before the bombs. The US demanded an unconditional surrender so they dropped the bombs rather than invade.
Was it good to remove Gadafi? Probably, but aiding in democracy storms seems Pyrrhic when the US Legislature is bought and paid for
Would you trade our system for the one the Libyans just threw out?
Do you think they would?
about the inconsequential things compared to media blackout on Al-Qeada London Bomb civilian victims of Al-Qeada Madrid civilian victims of Al-Qeada http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Business/images-2/afghanistan-war-civilians.jpg ">Afghan civilian victims of Al-Qeada also include women and children http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/11/06/article-0-071BAEFB000005DC-851_964x544.jpg
I would also count Korea and the first Gulf War on that list. In both cases, helping a country defend its soil against foreign aggression.
Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue.
That's kind of a weak argument. Of course you won't have anyone around speaking Latin as a mother tongue, just as you won't find people speaking Old Norse or Saxon or Balto-Slavic. There are plenty of people speaking languages which are almost entirely derived from Latin, though.
Americans were actually quite popular in Iraq early on, especially among the (majority but oppressed) Shia and Kurds. Kurds had the sensibility to establish a de facto independent state, and the rest of them started fighting each other, and it all descended into something worse than when Saddam was in power. I don't think there was anything to do to change this, though, as Iraq is simply not a viable state without a dictatorial regime to keep it all glued together. It was originally cobbled as a country from bits and pieces that didn't really go well together.
As for Afghanistan, that would probably be because there is no meaningful goal there other than "catch the bad guy". Most locals don't want or care about democracy - and, sure enough, soon as they had their "freedom", they have declared an Islamic Republic where Sharia trumps constitution and secular law. Why would they have any love for a bunch of infidels running around their country and shooting at things?
It's interesting to think about people starting to caring about their country's online reputation. The article is right as well that the internet has created classes of online vigilantes.
I don't think it's going to change policy at all. America has the most defense of any country and doesn't worry about vigilantes. Also America has a sense of self rightness as well. Americans believe that the wars are God's work so practical considerations come second.
I'm not an expert on the matter, but there is a serious debate among academics that The Prince was actually meant as satire, i.e. that Machiavelli's goal was to criticize the practices outlined by highlighting them in their full immorality, perhaps even targeted at the general public as an audience. This debate seems to not be fully settled, but it's worth pointing out given your comment. If those commenters are right about Machiavelli's actual intention, it would be deeply sad and ironic how the word "Machiavellian" is used these days.
Bad example. Rome was actually VERY tolerant. All a conquered country had to do was pay taxes and accept some god equivalency: Jupiter=Zeus=Taranis=...
Accepting some "god equivalency" may seem small for an atheist like me. But seriously: Just swap "Allah" for "Javeh", in one direction or the other after a military victory? Get real!
Your question is inane and baits an answer. US government corruption in the legislative branch is bad and getting worse. The government is paranoid, even more than normal.
You misidentify virtuosity.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
All the fresh young things who imagined that the net would become an instrument of freedom got it wrong. The net is and will be a weapon of oppression and control.
'Take out Saddam and his government who we think are building weapons of mass destruction that could be used against us or our allies' is (if supported by real evidence) an example of a legitmate mission for America's army.
I hope I'm not a lone voice. Your justification for pre-emptive war against a sovereign power only requires evidence that they are manufacturing WMDs. That's all. The rest is a 'could' and you can justify anything with a 'could'. Iran are making WMDs (probably true) that 'could' be used against the US and it's Allies? Well of course they 'could'. They could be used, legitimately, in response to a pre-emptive strike from the US or it's Allies! Israel 'could' use it's WMDs against the US or it's Allies too. Not enough reason to invade them though (IMHO). I don't think evidence of manufacture alone is enough to justify attacking another nation. If they threatened to use use them against the US or it's Allies then maybe. Maybe. And that's only if you can make a strong argument that pre-emptive war is justified either at all or in these specific circumstances. But just because they have WMDs? No.
Your strategy will be seen as a sign of weakness and as a proof what they are doing work and will further encourage them to blow themselves up so they can secure their victory over the US. The people that have the biggest reasons to hate the US are the south americans because they were exploited by US corporations. The ones blowing themselves up and driving planes in US skyscrappers do it out of irrational hate.
"Everyone" may have the tools to broadcast details, but if the mainstream media do not bring it to attention of the masses and takedown notices can keep it out of the online limelight, then only the "fringe" will every hear about it - and so no meaningful political consequences. This latest news about urinating on dead Taliban smells like textbook spin to hide even worse news in its shadow. Control of the news re: war is exactly why the government and pro-goverment media is coming down so hard on the foremost US political prisoner of conscience, Bradley Manning and the rouge publishing site Wikileaks. They are successfully influencing the majority public opinion against the first bit of real solid news to escape the lockdown control of public debate since the Vietnam war. Note: Leaking of sensitive information is obviously NOT why he is being persecuted - more sensitive leaks go without investigation all the time. There is some hope however, with some new professional investigative news channels springing up funded by viewer donations... just need to build their audience - if possible.
So urinating is "Disgusting and immoral" but putting a bullet in their heads, bombing the shit out of them, occupying their homeland, forcing democracy down their throats...that's all fine and dandy? I just don't get it.
"Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue."
Vulgar Latin never died out. It evolved into modern Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and several lesser Romance languages. The huge chunk of Europe where Latin-descended languages are spoken to this day (not to mention their alphabet, which was adopted even by people speaking non-Latin languages) stands as a testament to how thoroughly Romanized much of the Empire became.
In a word, no. Dropping precision munitions on specific military targets is not equivalent to what was intended in WW2. Even the the B52s softening up the embedded troops was very restrained compared to what would have been done in WW2 if they had access to the same weapons.
Iran has tentacles into South America, and those forces can freely flow right up into the States through the nonexistant southern border we are so afraid to police.
WOW. 'tentacles'. iran. south america.
hahaha ahahahahah ahahahaa ha ahaa haahahahahahaah
that is the problem with american right. they dont know shit, and therefore scared of everything. let me tell you as a person neighboring iran - iran cant even 'tentacle' its neighbors, leave aside fucking south america.
Read radical news here
he is within the 99% within his country. the pyramid does not change shape in wealthy countries. just, it moves up a bit.
so if an african is in the 99%, the american who is in the 1% compared to the african is in 99% compared to its own 1%.
Read radical news here
a lot of exemplified and referenced propositions, yet it is not modded higher than 2.
Read radical news here
being an uncontested royal douchebag of the lowest order is better than being an ignorant moron of the first order :
Turkey, 1915-20: 1,200,000
this probably pertains to the 'armenian massacre' that happened in world war 1. first, it is not something in between 1915 and fucking 1920, but happened in winter of 1915-1916.
second, entire armenian population of the entire ottoman empire was not more than 1.2 million people, leave aside armenians dead on the winter march in eastern anatolia being 1.2 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Armenian_population
eastern anatolia is not a place that could keep 1.2 million total population in itself, leave aside armenians.
all these ignoring the fact that no armenian anywhere else in the empire was harmed in 1915, and the armenian artisans, bureaucrats, shopkeepers and business owners in istanbul or elsewhere kept about their business as always.
finally, what happened was a forced migration/march in the winter, so that the armenian population would not support russian supplied armenian revolter gangs. purported to be freedom fighters, they were killing anyone who did not supply them with supplies, even if armenians - just like the other 'national' gangs that dotted the anatolian landscape then. 200 to 300,000 people died, because of the winter conditions on the road.
while it is something utterly stupid and brutal to force people to march in winter, one would be hard pressed to call it a genocide considering the fact that in the SAME year, an 30,000 strong ottoman army that comprised of turks, kurds, arabs, armenians, greeks, and a zillion other ethnicities have died out of cold because they were not supplied with winter equipment due to poverty of the empire, in the SAME area.
by the way israel still forces migrations even this day.
so, wherever you got your figures is unreliable.
Read radical news here
Ok, fair enough. Language alone can't be used to establish cultural identify and the continuity of civilization. But the point remains. Roman civilization has not carried forward to the present day the same way that, for example, the Chinese and Indian civilizations have.
I was responding to the assertion that the use of a particular policy by the Romans could be used as an argument for the US to implement the same (or similar) policies today. I submit that the decline of Roman civilization and even culture is reason enough to not blindly adopt arbitrary policies and tactics that they employed. You could certainly assert that the Romans achieved X by doing Y and we can learn from that, but I refuse to accept the OP's argument: "We should do X because the Roman Empire and Soviet Union did X."
"All that can be done in a rational world is to oppose the hate when it makes itself manifest by its vile actions."
It's a little more complex than that. One can ask:
* What dysfunction leads to the hate, and can it be fixed before the hate manifests itself?
* If the hate is there, how can one prevent it from being acted on by the context around the hate?
* If the hate is being acted on, how can one respond to it effectively, given that acts claimed to be justified against those who hate can themselves be hateful and/or cause more hate?
All too often, the response to hate creates more hate. And violence begets violence. Dysfunction spreads like a disease. If one sees hate and violence as like a disease, what is the right response to it? One set of idea:
"Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World"
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-True-Peace-Violence-Community/dp/0743245202
In general, as a society, how can we move beyond black/white thinking, to thinking in color?
http://www.anwot.org/
Still, there remains truth in your point, that there are people who hate, who are damaged, and others need to figure out how to respond to that situation (even if the haters are responding in kind to previous hate). It's a big challenge. And there is often a conflict, that the permissive policies that sometimes might prevent hate might allow existing hate to persist. It's not an easy thing to deal with.
A general field can be seen as Peace Making. Morton Deutsch outlines some ideas here:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audiodisplay/deutsch-m
Dealing with hate and dysfunction is a core theme of some North Eastern Native American culture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadodaho
http://www.amazon.com/Become-Human-Being-Tadodaho-Shenandoah/dp/1571743413
Ultimately, as Mr. Fred Rogers says, it's OK to have negative emotions like anger. The issue is what we do with them...
http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Technology allows us to share both sides with equality. Having a higher standard puts that side at a big disadvantage.
It only puts you at a disadvantage when what you are trying to do isn't what you say you're trying to do.
If the U.S. military was interested in making the countries it invades better by it's citizens standards, it would be easier for it to engage in reasoned discourse, communicate with the populace, send messengers, avoid having enemies spawned by hatred, etc. If it set up and followed some guidelines.
Currently they have no rules, my breath gets caught in my throat when I go through a border checkpoint to the U.S., and I haven't DONE anything.
If you aren't clear about your morality then any attempt to spread your ideology is compromised. Fear leaks into the system, and fear leads not just to anger but to hopelessness and insanity.
The U.S. needs to face the fact that no one will sign a new Geneva convention giving them the powers they seem to think they have. They've been operating outside of international law so long no one trusts them. There have been no efforts to put in place new conventions on warfare though the world DESPERATELY needs them, largely because the rest of the world doesn't trust the U.S. to comply.
Something like Al Qaeda will always exits.. true. But it is acts like dishonoring dead bodies and supporting Israel even when it is wrong (yes.. some time even holocaust survivers can be wrong) that help Al Qaeda to become a multinational organization, by driving moderate but disenchanted youth into believing that they are fighting for a just cause. Don't get me wrong.. I believe 99% percent of US solders are discharging their duties honorably (just like a majority of Muslims do not support terrorism), but it is the 1% retards like those in the video that paint the whole army (heck.. the whole of America) dirty..
yes, and it a terrible dynamic. because by the same token as these pissing assholes, so many in the west see what al qaeda does and thinks that stands for islam. so we have a dynamic here where the stupid and the insane are driving world opinion
so how does the great moderate middle, in islam and the west, see themselves as allies against these idiotic and evil extremes?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What kind of kindergarten view of the world is this?
Wars start for political reasons, usually competition for territory, dominance or resources.
Let's let the adults back in the room now.
Futurist Traditionalism
Why did the author (Robert Wright?) assume that the US has control over whether there will be a war or not? Is he alleging that the Taliban are not or our enemy? Or that the war against Iraq was discretionary?
What happened in this case is nothing new in many ways, except for one ---> They forgot that stupidity has no boundary.
I mean, you can kill those talibans and piss on them but taking video of it and then put it online?
Stupidity to the grandest degree !!
If you remember your Homer, Achilles (effectively one army's commander) kills Hector (basically, an enemy commander). Hector's dying words are that he just wants an honorable burial. Instead, Achilles promises to deface his corpse in any way he can. Achilles abuses and desecrates and drags his corpse around as a nasty insult to the Trojans, as the Trojan leadership begs for days and offers to pay lots of money just to have the corpse back.
And Achilles was a "hero."
The 19 men involved with the 9/11 attacks, the USS Cole attack and even the attacks on US embassies in Africa were motivated by the US having troops stationed in the holy land of Saudi Arabia. The troops in SA were there to enforce the No Fly Zone and disarmament of Iraq after the first Gulf war.
If you think through what happened after 9/11, the US took care of this problem right away...by attacking Iraq and moving our troops out of SA. If you want the real motivation for the second Iraq war, you need to look no further than that. The House of Saud was about to be overthrown by religious zealots who were agitated by foreigners, especially female foreign soldiers, tramping around the same desert that was home to Mecca and Medina. Bush was already making plans to invade Iraq before 9/11 because of the growing Saudi instability.
Of course, the US cannot shout this out the world, as declaring the largest oil producing country in the world, and the de facto leader of OPEC, an unstable monarchy about to be overthrown by religious zealots whom plan on creating a worldwide Caliphate isn't really the best thing to say. But look at how quickly stories about the attacks on foreigners in Saudi Arabia left the news stream once the invasion of Iraq began. The attacks are still on going, but the newsworthiness of these stories has been downgraded.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
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Two problems with declaring those to be "moral":
1. It's hard for the US to claim the moral high ground when it comes to foreign aggression, given that it has regularly invaded other countries or overthrown their governments with covert actions for reasons mostly tied to US corporate interests.
2. In the case of the Gulf War, yes, foreign aggression was involved, but the only reason the US cared was that Kuwait had oil. And in case you were thinking it was a fight against totalitarian dictators, you should note that Kuwait's Emir is an absolute ruler.
I am officially gone from
I was given to understand that the Civil War only became about slavery after Lincoln made it so. As a youngin it was simple; the South wanted slavery, the North wanted abolition. It was explained to me later that the war was really just about land, and the South wanting to secede(sp?) and the North not allowing it. The slavery thing only came up later, as Lincoln used it as a hot issue to rally support.
Europeans from Paris to Danzig stood by and let their countrymen be marched off to their deaths, and while there were heroes here and there (just as there were collaborators), all in all they just stood there.
Instead of doing what? Germans already had beaten their armies and took away their arms. If some of us are going to be killed, most or all of us should die too? That'll show those pesky Germans!
In words of a movie bully : "What are you looking at? You want some?!"
It is so easy to ride tall horse on a separate continent.
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us.
So we're supposed to terrorize our enemies... Who are we? Al Qaeda?
It's better for your enemies to think you rational and fear you than irrational and hate you because the former generally leads to a lower body count. Right now we're doing our darnedest to do the latter, which is bad.
It's hard for the US to claim the moral high ground when it comes to foreign aggression, given that it has regularly invaded other countries or overthrown their governments with covert actions for reasons mostly tied to US corporate interests.
I think that it's more reasonable to take each case in isolation, otherwise you're guaranteed to fall into the trap of proclaiming everyone so utterly evil and despicable that it's a surprise the world is still standing. Sure, U.S. did its own aggression against sovereign countries, but in that particular case, it wasn't - and NK, China and USSR were.
Perhaps more importantly, it's also a question of consequences. In case of Korea, it was also not all that simple (South was dictatorial, too), but you can look at ROK vs DPRK today to compare.
In the case of the Gulf War, yes, foreign aggression was involved, but the only reason the US cared was that Kuwait had oil. And in case you were thinking it was a fight against totalitarian dictators, you should note that Kuwait's Emir is an absolute ruler.
Again, "dictatorial" covers a very broad spectrum. Kuwait is a monarchy, but I didn't hear of their government mass murdering its opponents with poison gas, or their ruler torturing people for personal entertainment.
And you may well be right about the reasons why U.S. got involved, but in the end, what counts are actions. In WW2, Americans were also not very eager to war against Germany in Europe, until Japan's attack (and the latter's treaty with Germany that required it to declare war against the U.S.) practically dragged them into it.
This is BS. There is plenty of coverage of US military actions. There is no likewise coverage of the conduct of US enemies on the battlefield. That is because one side believes in a free press and the other doesn't.
This was no different in Vietnam. The communists killed plenty of civilians, many on purpose and for effect, but these atrocities were hardly reported by the Western press because they didn't have access to NVA/Vietcong areas.
Lies, lies, lies. The Japanese didn't "try to surrender" before the US atomic bombings. They surrendered AFTER the bombings.
Get your facts straight, cherub. It's fine to have a different point of view, but if you can't get basic history correct, then absolutely no one is going to take your opinions seriously.
Yes. There is one World War II power that still plays at war in the old-fashioned style and that is Russia. What they did in Chechnya is straight out of the total war manual: kill everything thing that moves, destroy every building and let everyone know that you have absolutely no compunction about doing any of that again in the future. Entirely brutal and entirely effective. Moral? Not in the least.
You kidding, right? The romans would routinely massacre whatever people stood in their ways. Julius Caesar, for example, boast in "De bello gallico" of killing over 2 millions Gauls. How, and there were two people they could not beat, the Germans and the Parths.
How many reader on *THIS* board have been downrange? Sorry, sipping a latte' at Starbucks just doesn't count, so don't presume to hold a moral high ground over people who've been there and done that. After 3 tours downrange, no, I don't see a problem with it; it's a pile of spoiled meat made up of dead shitheads who were trying to kill them a few minutes earlier; it's counting coup and as old as man has been walking upright.
There is actually solid scientific evidence that whipping your children is a bad idea, and it has been illegal in my country for all of my 30 years and more. "Me daddy" is fortunately not a nutjob.
Even so, the reason a child will keep loving their parents even if hurt by them... is that the child really has no fucking choice in the matter. You only get one set of parents, and there's some serious biological hardwiring into the picture too.
Remember what we're actually speaking of here. How did you propose a government replicate that? Especially with respect to another country's population? This might come as a surprise to you, but Iranians aren't biologically hardwired to love the US. Nor are they utterly emotionally dependent on it. Nor have they been indocrinated with superstitious reverence for it since birth. Seems to me the ways that work with kids aren't going to work with Iranians.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Londoners had the Tube tunnels to take refuge in. The blitz was nothing like Hiroshima - an entire city and its population obliterated in the wink of an eye- if it was Hiroshima Nagasaki first, it could be Tokyo next.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."