That's the deal the geneva conventions give you. You get to be neutral, as a civilian. You don't have to, but if you're not neutral, you've given up any and all protection.
But there are, of course, conditions :
Any neutral party has to fight any action by BOTH warring parties (and if this is not possible, they are supposed to immediately evacuate ANY location used by either side, in return, those sides are supposed to give the civilians time to evacuate. Anyone who remains behind, willingly or not, is fair game). Those parties, in return, promise not to attack the neutral civilians. Of course, if the enemy is firing from within your building, the other party is perfectly at liberty to return fire, no matter how many civilians are hit.
And let's not kid ourselves here, the very large majority of "civilians" in southern lebanon are not neutral civilians, but combatants in disguise.
Here's how the geneva convention warfare is supposed to work (also known as "canon warfare"). 2 parties seriously disagree about something, and decide to fight it out.
At this point, both parties dispatch a messenger to the other party, handing over a direct and very clear document declaring war (as Israel had delivered to the Lebanese parliament, where Hezbollah has loads of representatives. Hezbollah, of course, violated the agreement and attacked without warning).
Then a line is drawn near the border. Civilians are informed and given ample time to evacuate the area (and any who fail to evacuate for any reason become fair game). The two parties send in armies to those locations and fight it out.
Of course, you'd be entirely correct that if Hezbollah or Iran did this, they'd be blown up before you can say "islam is a lie". Which is, of course, how the war should have gone in the first place.
After defeat, the losing party is supposed to accept orders from the winning party. Including the order to totally disarm, and let the winning party install any force it wants to.
Again, both parties send a declaration to eachother that's unambiguous (a cease-fire).
That's Geneva convention warfare. If this scheme is violated there are consequences, according to the conventions. Specifically if both sides don't fight in the open, all protections for the civilians on their side are forfeited.
So yes, blowing up an apartment building because there are enemy fighters inside is perfectly allowed, even if there are also children inside.
The only people with a choice in the matter are Hezbollah. If they fight in the open, in an empty space, no civilians will be hurt. If Hezbollah chooses to fight like a coward in the night, they, and their families and friends, and all civilians in the area, are fair game.
And, btw, Israel DID keep to the Geneva convention's rules in the war. Tell me, did Hezbollah do all that's possible to avoid hitting Israeli civilians ?
As I said, I wonder why it's always Jews that have to endure getting shot at. Why does every "peace-lover" cheer for the party shooting at the weak ? Unless, of course, you're a lowly coward.
The reason they can sue is that the government (that would be you, in case you don't know this) demanded they'd build a huge telecom infrastructure for free, and signed a contract with these companies.
Of course, now that you have the infrastructure, you don't want to hold up your end of the bargain. That's called theft, of course. Or fraud, if you deny it.
Actually both AT&T and Comcast have offers where they do not try to limit you. They're just a bit more expensive (in the comcast case, not even that much more expensive).
How about... paying them for the service you're demanding ?
Do you guys seriously think google doesn't use QoS for their own services ?
We're talking about guys who are voice service providers here. Do you know of any one company that delivers voice service without using QoS over their own network ?
Google violates network neutrality in exactly the same way as AT&T and Comcast do : google's own services are massively preffed above any external site.
I don't think it makes much sense to allow anyone to dig all the lines they want. To the extreme, it just wouldn't work as it would become an unmanageable mess, and to the norm,
Actually since "digging a line" in all but the most central locations will quickly cross the $50000 price, I doubt that. And I wouldn't worry about the more central locations : they're already far beyond what a normal person would call a mere mess.
It should be a common community asset leased to service providers, much like the airwaves.
The problem, again, is technology. Most isps (all but the very largest) would like nothing better. But installing the necessary technology for this is prohibitively expensive.
The only real solution is to have a "meta" isp, that does all the last mile connections anywhere. But of course, such an isp would be a government monopoly, and would behave a lot worse than Comcast and AT&T combined. Besides, such an isp would have long decided to cap download speeds (not having to worry about competition, or simply not caring) and we'd be worse off than we are today.
neither of which is very desirable
This is the theme of all "network neutrality" idiocy. The whole argument comes down to "other people need to pay for my free stuff, because I'm entitled". I'm all for cutting AT&T down to size, but I thoroughly hate how it will affect small isps. And in fact I fear it will do the exact opposite.
But that something will destroy a market, or will destroy smaller companies just isn't an argument for the democrat party. Of course, it will mostly force smaller isps to just violate the law, for being "network neutral" is close to lunacy from a network engineering standpoint.
After all, if democrats have proven one thing it's that they think that giving everyone substandard service in a "fair" (decided by politicians instead of by reality) manner is infinitely more preferable than improving service for everyone. That such notions' logical end is obviously everyone except politicians starving to death... just doesn't matter it seems. (and all the way implementing these extreme short-term free-stuff policies democrats scream about how companies "just don't care about the long term". I don't think these people would enjoy the diagnosis of a psychiatrist)
But since the average slashdotter wants 100 mbit for $5 a month, and Obambi promises them network neutrality will achieve that... *sigh*. In reality network neutrality will be another weapon for the large telcos to use against everyone else. In reality network neutrality will mean lower quality connections for higher price.
But going against "free stuff*" promises with "reality doesn't work that way" arguments is not a very productive thing to do.
You should read the article (unorthodox, I know). It involved a puzzle lasting about 15 minutes in the worst case.
I think that money can motive even a drugged-up hippie for 15 minutes. And yes, intrest, cameras and stimulating conversation would probably motivate better and perhaps a bit longer. I doubt it would work for any realistic job-like length of time though (say, a month).
Add to that the simple fact that using money is not to motivate people that are currently doing the job, that, as the article says, does not work. It motivates other people to vie for the job (especially true for wall-street ceo jobs before Obambi made it an absolute certainty that politicians get the job). The competition and the threat of getting fired (and actually firing incompetent people) ensure the job is carried out by capable people.
But imho, the article is right, giving a raise to an individual will not increase motivation. Except perhaps when it's a raise like in "a christmas carol".
Of course, if too many ceo's think like this jobhopping is going to become a national passtime (although if my colleagues are any indication jobhopping is THE way to get payraises already).
And at least in the case of wall street, before the "too big to fail" nonsense and they became de-facto public sector banks, they had a bit of a case that they were actually useful.
And frankly, in case anyone missed it... Obama is a lawyer. A lawyer who went into politics. With all that goes with it. You'd think slashdot would support the candidate that cares about issues they'd consider important (not that I have too many illusions about McCain being different, but hey if there's a choice between someone in big content's bed versus someone merely flirting with them, I know what to choose. At least the next set of shitty laws would take longer in coming. Besides democrats voted in the dmca, if anyone's going to vote it back out it'll be the other party).
<by some time in the future> , we can expect solar-panel technology to have advanced *considerably* from the present state of the art.
That's also something I wonder about. If we install large installations today, we can't even use today's state-of-the-art technology.
And since just about everyone agrees that today's state of the art solar is, well, not good enough, why are we doing more than experimenting with solar ? (yes and off-grid applications, but of course that's not what politicians are sinking our tax money into).
Won't our current result in a large installed base of not just inferior technology, but actually inadequate technology that cannot be changed when the state of the art becomes viable due to the problem that the loans and leases on them aren't yet paid in full ?
The VAST majority of energy on Earth is re-radiated into space at night. Capturing a tiny fraction of that, which is all we need, would have zero effect on anything. This argument is utterly bogus.
And if we change that, won't that result in the mother of all greenhouse effects ?
The problem with Thorium is not that there isn't enough of it, so far I'm with you. Unfortunately it's "stored" in seawater.
That makes mining it prohibitively difficult. And that makes it doubtful it can be mined + used for an EREOI > 1. (and we certainly need an EREOI of 10 or more)
There's also the tiny issue that any viable energy source we have except theoretical fusion processes will run out in less than 100 years time (200 years tops for nuclear power, but that actually an assessment it will last 189 years, assuming energy use doesn't rise and mining costs don't go up, both of which seem to me trivially wrong...).
And by "viable" I mean anything with an EROI (in energy terms) of > 10 (solar cells, in realistic scenarios are starting to get to a factor of 2 or 3 harvested energy at 50 degrees north production energy, however this is ignoring transport and maintenance, and this only goes if you measure the power output at the solar cell itself, not useful work performed at 50 kilometers distance after 2 transformation cycles on the electric grid).
One thing I don't understand is what illusions we seem to have about the energy cycle : sun -> plants -> animals -> geological transformation -> oil -> pumping -> human consumption (apparently this kills nature) sun -> human consumption
This "new" energy cycle, while more efficient, also puts us in direct competition with plants, and therefore with animals. The only way to increase energy output it to take more energy away from nature. Now nature might be able to adapt to strange new chemicals (a fact frequently denied by greenies, just because this is not instantaneous), but one thing is absolutely sure : nature is not capable of adapting to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die. This is as certain as that stones will still fall downward tomorrow.
So why do people have illusions about directly "stealing" energy from nature ? Of course, there's some low-hanging fruit, like parts of deserts that can be harvested (relatively) harmless (although it will still affect winds, which will have unintended consequences just the same). But oil also had lots of low-hanging fruit. We never stopped when the low-hanging fruit was used up. But by the time we move to harvest solar energy over the oceans, we will have no choice but to eradicate the basis of the food chain : the plankton.
Furthermore, for obvious reasons solar energy production, if it ever becomes usable, will compete with food production (like biofuels), esp. in places like africa, further exacerbating an already bad situation.
So why do I get the nagging feeling that solar power (and wind power, for similar reasons) may be popular now, but as soon as they're implemented on non-trivial scales, we will see their effects on nature, they'll become a new green bogey man ?
Actually both are interested in conquering it. Both would prefer to have Afghanistan first though.
Of course it's a near-certainty that China will attack at some point, the real question is when. But both are very interested in keeping any kind of capable troops out of Iran.
As such, they don't mind the islamic idiots (who can't even keep their planes in the air WITHOUT anyone shooting at them) that currently occupy Iran.
Since you clearly have made up your mind, I stop this discussion. Hezbollah does indeed use schools, UN marked vehicles (and real UN vehicles) and civilian shelters to launch missiles.
At that point, what choice does the IDF have ?
If you seriously think Hezbollah is more peaceful than the IDF (and presumably America), I suggest you move to southern Lebanon.
Why is it always Jews that must endure constant rocket strikes ? I mean, suppose the worst is true, and the civilians of southern lebanon had to endure a few rocket strikes. Israel's been constant rocket strikes for over 20 years now, and apparently you demand they don't do anything about it ? I seriously suggest they tell you, and any civilians to go fuck yourself, while they're firing rockets at you.
Apparently the only thing that can make one "peaceful" in minds like the abomination that sits on your head is a willingness to kill progressives. I would pray, if I were you, that people don't start realizing this.
In order for such a blockade to work, you'd need the cooperation of China and Russia, though (it's very hard for progressives to count borders it seems. Or at least no-one ever blames Egypt for a certain very unpopular blockade). This is probably a lot harder to get than you seem to think.
when a country is having the shit bombed out of it, right?
When "the shit is bombed out of it", I'd agree with you.
Of course, Israel (unlike Hezbollah) limited itself to launch sites, and clear military targets, which was designed no to impede people movement (a specific goal was not to disturb food distribution), and which left all Hezbollah infrastructure except rocket launchers intact.
Hezbollah, of course, did nothing of the sort. And frankly, given that the Geneva convention is a sort of international law version of a canon law principle, it seems very logical muslims don't follow it. They have different rules of engagement. They have a slightly more forgiving attitude to enemy combatants, but treat everyone and everything as an enemy combatant. Everyone gets ONE chance to totally submit to muslim authority, anyone who doesn't immediately takes that option gets killed, or tortured and killed if they can do it (the actually "preferred way" to do it is crucifixion in sharia).
Of course, everyone seems to agree that a muslim is someone who follows "the islamic way" and everyone truly hates everyone who wants sharia.
Wouldn't it be very inconvenient indeed if "the islamic way" were to be the translation of the arabic word "sharia" ?
The real question is "up to what point do we really have a choice" ? There is a breaking point.
E.g. WWII was considered by the united states sufficient reason to suspend civil liberties, and treat the Japanese on American soil as enemies. I doubt anyone seriously disagreed with that tactic back then.
Actually during 99.99% of history that fear was more than just a little justified. Just because you live in both a geographical area and time where that isn't true anymore doesn't make telling people about "baddies" a conspiracy, it merely makes you a narrow-minded egoist.
Furthermore you're assuming countries like Iran would even be interested in protecting their civilian population in the first place (they certainly displayed NO concern whatsoever for Lebanese lives in 2006, using them as human shields).
Furthermore if Iran started a war because their conventional resources are running out, they could make the case that the only way to protect their civilian population is to win the war (this is why some people say Iran is at least as likely to attack Saudi Arabia as it is to attack Israel). In most wars, if the attacking party would have done nothing, that would have had results as bad as losing the war they started (historically most wars were started to conquer resources that were economically necessary).
And then there's the "issue" that this is a war crime. Camouflaging military equipment as civilian. But wait, how many Iranians are in jail for doing just that in 2006 ? How many muslims are in jail for that ? Oh wait... none. The more liberal media don't even mind the use of human shields anymore.
Of course, the only way to adapt to that attitude is to start firing on civilians as a matter of policy.
You never, ever, ever camouflage your military systems to look like civilian infrastructure.
What, pray tell, was the main tactic employed by Iran against Israel in 2006 ? It wouldn't by any chance be... camouflaging weapons as civilian housing blocks ?
We're talking here about people who use kindergartens to camouflage launch sites. Is there really any serious doubt that they'll use container ships ? Especially knowing that western media have for dozens of years always blamed the people taking out the missile launch site, and not the bastards using human shields ?
I keep wondering why this isn't exploited more. An American carrier battle group (and any other for that matter) can defend against, maybe 10-20 cruise missiles. If 100 are fired at the carrier group, there's no way it would survive (and yes 100 cruise missiles is a hell of a lot cheaper than a carrier battle group). One phalanx, if it's extremely lucky, can take out 5-6 missiles, no more. More modern systems can take out 10 missiles.
It's a matter of time till someone starts taking this approach.
How does that help ? These containers are not meant to explode upon unloading. They are meant to launch missiles. God forbid they're capable of carrying nuclear payloads (if the commercial is realistic in the rocket's sizes, it seems to me the missile is certainly big enough for that). If this is actually used by anyone, America can no longer allow any trading ship within 500 miles (or whatever the range) of any American shore. And America will be forced to use immediate lethal force against any container ship that violates this.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the deal the geneva conventions give you. You get to be neutral, as a civilian. You don't have to, but if you're not neutral, you've given up any and all protection.
But there are, of course, conditions :
Any neutral party has to fight any action by BOTH warring parties (and if this is not possible, they are supposed to immediately evacuate ANY location used by either side, in return, those sides are supposed to give the civilians time to evacuate. Anyone who remains behind, willingly or not, is fair game). Those parties, in return, promise not to attack the neutral civilians. Of course, if the enemy is firing from within your building, the other party is perfectly at liberty to return fire, no matter how many civilians are hit.
And let's not kid ourselves here, the very large majority of "civilians" in southern lebanon are not neutral civilians, but combatants in disguise.
Here's how the geneva convention warfare is supposed to work (also known as "canon warfare"). 2 parties seriously disagree about something, and decide to fight it out.
At this point, both parties dispatch a messenger to the other party, handing over a direct and very clear document declaring war (as Israel had delivered to the Lebanese parliament, where Hezbollah has loads of representatives. Hezbollah, of course, violated the agreement and attacked without warning).
Then a line is drawn near the border. Civilians are informed and given ample time to evacuate the area (and any who fail to evacuate for any reason become fair game). The two parties send in armies to those locations and fight it out.
Of course, you'd be entirely correct that if Hezbollah or Iran did this, they'd be blown up before you can say "islam is a lie". Which is, of course, how the war should have gone in the first place.
After defeat, the losing party is supposed to accept orders from the winning party. Including the order to totally disarm, and let the winning party install any force it wants to.
Again, both parties send a declaration to eachother that's unambiguous (a cease-fire).
That's Geneva convention warfare. If this scheme is violated there are consequences, according to the conventions. Specifically if both sides don't fight in the open, all protections for the civilians on their side are forfeited.
So yes, blowing up an apartment building because there are enemy fighters inside is perfectly allowed, even if there are also children inside.
The only people with a choice in the matter are Hezbollah. If they fight in the open, in an empty space, no civilians will be hurt. If Hezbollah chooses to fight like a coward in the night, they, and their families and friends, and all civilians in the area, are fair game.
And, btw, Israel DID keep to the Geneva convention's rules in the war. Tell me, did Hezbollah do all that's possible to avoid hitting Israeli civilians ?
As I said, I wonder why it's always Jews that have to endure getting shot at. Why does every "peace-lover" cheer for the party shooting at the weak ? Unless, of course, you're a lowly coward.
Heh, you're joking right ?
The reason they can sue is that the government (that would be you, in case you don't know this) demanded they'd build a huge telecom infrastructure for free, and signed a contract with these companies.
Of course, now that you have the infrastructure, you don't want to hold up your end of the bargain. That's called theft, of course. Or fraud, if you deny it.
It's actually coming to the point slashdot users just can't imagine something being done by anything other than the government.
We must have a democrat president again.
You do realize that HSDPA has 20 mbit shared bandwidth for any "cell" on the network, right ?
Obviously your traffic needs to be limited, with 20 bittorrent clients running on it the 3G cell would be filled to the brim.
Actually both AT&T and Comcast have offers where they do not try to limit you. They're just a bit more expensive (in the comcast case, not even that much more expensive).
How about ... paying them for the service you're demanding ?
Do you guys seriously think google doesn't use QoS for their own services ?
We're talking about guys who are voice service providers here. Do you know of any one company that delivers voice service without using QoS over their own network ?
Google violates network neutrality in exactly the same way as AT&T and Comcast do : google's own services are massively preffed above any external site.
I don't think it makes much sense to allow anyone to dig all the lines they want. To the extreme, it just wouldn't work as it would become an unmanageable mess, and to the norm,
Actually since "digging a line" in all but the most central locations will quickly cross the $50000 price, I doubt that. And I wouldn't worry about the more central locations : they're already far beyond what a normal person would call a mere mess.
It should be a common community asset leased to service providers, much like the airwaves.
The problem, again, is technology. Most isps (all but the very largest) would like nothing better. But installing the necessary technology for this is prohibitively expensive.
The only real solution is to have a "meta" isp, that does all the last mile connections anywhere. But of course, such an isp would be a government monopoly, and would behave a lot worse than Comcast and AT&T combined. Besides, such an isp would have long decided to cap download speeds (not having to worry about competition, or simply not caring) and we'd be worse off than we are today.
neither of which is very desirable
This is the theme of all "network neutrality" idiocy. The whole argument comes down to "other people need to pay for my free stuff, because I'm entitled". I'm all for cutting AT&T down to size, but I thoroughly hate how it will affect small isps. And in fact I fear it will do the exact opposite.
But that something will destroy a market, or will destroy smaller companies just isn't an argument for the democrat party. Of course, it will mostly force smaller isps to just violate the law, for being "network neutral" is close to lunacy from a network engineering standpoint.
After all, if democrats have proven one thing it's that they think that giving everyone substandard service in a "fair" (decided by politicians instead of by reality) manner is infinitely more preferable than improving service for everyone. That such notions' logical end is obviously everyone except politicians starving to death ... just doesn't matter it seems. (and all the way implementing these extreme short-term free-stuff policies democrats scream about how companies "just don't care about the long term". I don't think these people would enjoy the diagnosis of a psychiatrist)
But since the average slashdotter wants 100 mbit for $5 a month, and Obambi promises them network neutrality will achieve that ... *sigh*. In reality network neutrality will be another weapon for the large telcos to use against everyone else. In reality network neutrality will mean lower quality connections for higher price.
But going against "free stuff*" promises with "reality doesn't work that way" arguments is not a very productive thing to do.
You should read the article (unorthodox, I know). It involved a puzzle lasting about 15 minutes in the worst case.
I think that money can motive even a drugged-up hippie for 15 minutes. And yes, intrest, cameras and stimulating conversation would probably motivate better and perhaps a bit longer. I doubt it would work for any realistic job-like length of time though (say, a month).
Add to that the simple fact that using money is not to motivate people that are currently doing the job, that, as the article says, does not work. It motivates other people to vie for the job (especially true for wall-street ceo jobs before Obambi made it an absolute certainty that politicians get the job). The competition and the threat of getting fired (and actually firing incompetent people) ensure the job is carried out by capable people.
But imho, the article is right, giving a raise to an individual will not increase motivation. Except perhaps when it's a raise like in "a christmas carol".
Of course, if too many ceo's think like this jobhopping is going to become a national passtime (although if my colleagues are any indication jobhopping is THE way to get payraises already).
The problem is that wall-street lets people decide for themselves how much they want to earn.
A bit like all public sector people. The only ones really good at it though are these bastards.
And at least in the case of wall street, before the "too big to fail" nonsense and they became de-facto public sector banks, they had a bit of a case that they were actually useful.
Everyone makes mistakes ... how many states are there again ?
Unless of course he was telling a future truth ... and this is perhaps how he wanted to accomplish that.
And frankly, in case anyone missed it ... Obama is a lawyer. A lawyer who went into politics. With all that goes with it. You'd think slashdot would support the candidate that cares about issues they'd consider important (not that I have too many illusions about McCain being different, but hey if there's a choice between someone in big content's bed versus someone merely flirting with them, I know what to choose. At least the next set of shitty laws would take longer in coming. Besides democrats voted in the dmca, if anyone's going to vote it back out it'll be the other party).
<by some time in the future> , we can expect solar-panel technology to have advanced *considerably* from the present state of the art.
That's also something I wonder about. If we install large installations today, we can't even use today's state-of-the-art technology.
And since just about everyone agrees that today's state of the art solar is, well, not good enough, why are we doing more than experimenting with solar ? (yes and off-grid applications, but of course that's not what politicians are sinking our tax money into).
Won't our current result in a large installed base of not just inferior technology, but actually inadequate technology that cannot be changed when the state of the art becomes viable due to the problem that the loans and leases on them aren't yet paid in full ?
The VAST majority of energy on Earth is re-radiated into space at night. Capturing a tiny fraction of that, which is all we need, would have zero effect on anything. This argument is utterly bogus.
And if we change that, won't that result in the mother of all greenhouse effects ?
The problem with Thorium is not that there isn't enough of it, so far I'm with you. Unfortunately it's "stored" in seawater.
That makes mining it prohibitively difficult. And that makes it doubtful it can be mined + used for an EREOI > 1. (and we certainly need an EREOI of 10 or more)
There's also the tiny issue that any viable energy source we have except theoretical fusion processes will run out in less than 100 years time (200 years tops for nuclear power, but that actually an assessment it will last 189 years, assuming energy use doesn't rise and mining costs don't go up, both of which seem to me trivially wrong ...).
And by "viable" I mean anything with an EROI (in energy terms) of > 10 (solar cells, in realistic scenarios are starting to get to a factor of 2 or 3 harvested energy at 50 degrees north production energy, however this is ignoring transport and maintenance, and this only goes if you measure the power output at the solar cell itself, not useful work performed at 50 kilometers distance after 2 transformation cycles on the electric grid).
One thing I don't understand is what illusions we seem to have about the energy cycle :
sun -> plants -> animals -> geological transformation -> oil -> pumping -> human consumption
(apparently this kills nature)
sun -> human consumption
This "new" energy cycle, while more efficient, also puts us in direct competition with plants, and therefore with animals. The only way to increase energy output it to take more energy away from nature. Now nature might be able to adapt to strange new chemicals (a fact frequently denied by greenies, just because this is not instantaneous), but one thing is absolutely sure : nature is not capable of adapting to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die. This is as certain as that stones will still fall downward tomorrow.
So why do people have illusions about directly "stealing" energy from nature ? Of course, there's some low-hanging fruit, like parts of deserts that can be harvested (relatively) harmless (although it will still affect winds, which will have unintended consequences just the same). But oil also had lots of low-hanging fruit. We never stopped when the low-hanging fruit was used up. But by the time we move to harvest solar energy over the oceans, we will have no choice but to eradicate the basis of the food chain : the plankton.
Furthermore, for obvious reasons solar energy production, if it ever becomes usable, will compete with food production (like biofuels), esp. in places like africa, further exacerbating an already bad situation.
So why do I get the nagging feeling that solar power (and wind power, for similar reasons) may be popular now, but as soon as they're implemented on non-trivial scales, we will see their effects on nature, they'll become a new green bogey man ?
Reminds me of these things
Actually both are interested in conquering it. Both would prefer to have Afghanistan first though.
Of course it's a near-certainty that China will attack at some point, the real question is when. But both are very interested in keeping any kind of capable troops out of Iran.
As such, they don't mind the islamic idiots (who can't even keep their planes in the air WITHOUT anyone shooting at them) that currently occupy Iran.
Since you clearly have made up your mind, I stop this discussion. Hezbollah does indeed use schools, UN marked vehicles (and real UN vehicles) and civilian shelters to launch missiles.
At that point, what choice does the IDF have ?
If you seriously think Hezbollah is more peaceful than the IDF (and presumably America), I suggest you move to southern Lebanon.
Why is it always Jews that must endure constant rocket strikes ? I mean, suppose the worst is true, and the civilians of southern lebanon had to endure a few rocket strikes. Israel's been constant rocket strikes for over 20 years now, and apparently you demand they don't do anything about it ? I seriously suggest they tell you, and any civilians to go fuck yourself, while they're firing rockets at you.
Apparently the only thing that can make one "peaceful" in minds like the abomination that sits on your head is a willingness to kill progressives. I would pray, if I were you, that people don't start realizing this.
In order for such a blockade to work, you'd need the cooperation of China and Russia, though (it's very hard for progressives to count borders it seems. Or at least no-one ever blames Egypt for a certain very unpopular blockade). This is probably a lot harder to get than you seem to think.
when a country is having the shit bombed out of it, right?
When "the shit is bombed out of it", I'd agree with you.
Of course, Israel (unlike Hezbollah) limited itself to launch sites, and clear military targets, which was designed no to impede people movement (a specific goal was not to disturb food distribution), and which left all Hezbollah infrastructure except rocket launchers intact.
Hezbollah, of course, did nothing of the sort. And frankly, given that the Geneva convention is a sort of international law version of a canon law principle, it seems very logical muslims don't follow it. They have different rules of engagement. They have a slightly more forgiving attitude to enemy combatants, but treat everyone and everything as an enemy combatant. Everyone gets ONE chance to totally submit to muslim authority, anyone who doesn't immediately takes that option gets killed, or tortured and killed if they can do it (the actually "preferred way" to do it is crucifixion in sharia).
Of course, everyone seems to agree that a muslim is someone who follows "the islamic way" and everyone truly hates everyone who wants sharia.
Wouldn't it be very inconvenient indeed if "the islamic way" were to be the translation of the arabic word "sharia" ?
Except that's indeed so.
The real question is "up to what point do we really have a choice" ? There is a breaking point.
E.g. WWII was considered by the united states sufficient reason to suspend civil liberties, and treat the Japanese on American soil as enemies. I doubt anyone seriously disagreed with that tactic back then.
Actually during 99.99% of history that fear was more than just a little justified. Just because you live in both a geographical area and time where that isn't true anymore doesn't make telling people about "baddies" a conspiracy, it merely makes you a narrow-minded egoist.
Furthermore you're assuming countries like Iran would even be interested in protecting their civilian population in the first place (they certainly displayed NO concern whatsoever for Lebanese lives in 2006, using them as human shields).
Furthermore if Iran started a war because their conventional resources are running out, they could make the case that the only way to protect their civilian population is to win the war (this is why some people say Iran is at least as likely to attack Saudi Arabia as it is to attack Israel). In most wars, if the attacking party would have done nothing, that would have had results as bad as losing the war they started (historically most wars were started to conquer resources that were economically necessary).
And then there's the "issue" that this is a war crime. Camouflaging military equipment as civilian. But wait, how many Iranians are in jail for doing just that in 2006 ? How many muslims are in jail for that ? Oh wait ... none. The more liberal media don't even mind the use of human shields anymore.
Of course, the only way to adapt to that attitude is to start firing on civilians as a matter of policy.
You never, ever, ever camouflage your military systems to look like civilian infrastructure.
What, pray tell, was the main tactic employed by Iran against Israel in 2006 ? It wouldn't by any chance be ... camouflaging weapons as civilian housing blocks ?
We're talking here about people who use kindergartens to camouflage launch sites. Is there really any serious doubt that they'll use container ships ? Especially knowing that western media have for dozens of years always blamed the people taking out the missile launch site, and not the bastards using human shields ?
Get real.
I keep wondering why this isn't exploited more. An American carrier battle group (and any other for that matter) can defend against, maybe 10-20 cruise missiles. If 100 are fired at the carrier group, there's no way it would survive (and yes 100 cruise missiles is a hell of a lot cheaper than a carrier battle group). One phalanx, if it's extremely lucky, can take out 5-6 missiles, no more. More modern systems can take out 10 missiles.
It's a matter of time till someone starts taking this approach.
How does that help ? These containers are not meant to explode upon unloading. They are meant to launch missiles. God forbid they're capable of carrying nuclear payloads (if the commercial is realistic in the rocket's sizes, it seems to me the missile is certainly big enough for that). If this is actually used by anyone, America can no longer allow any trading ship within 500 miles (or whatever the range) of any American shore. And America will be forced to use immediate lethal force against any container ship that violates this.