Re:Ok ... some people are captive
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
The thing is though that first of all Birmingham isn't all that congested, the route to work is basically on the open road once I get to the outskirts of the city ( excepting things like crashes which can cause traffic jams ). Public transport, in general, also isn't too bad if you just want to travel round the city you can generally get there in 1 or maybe 2 bus journeys. I usually travel by bus or walk to most of the places I go to in and around the city and just use the car to travel outside the city. Rush hour does cause delays since there aren't enough buses and there simply isn't anymore room on the roads in city centre for more of them in peak periods. There are lots of unused rail lines which could be re-opened taking a huge strain off the buses, for 20 years this has been discussed but never acted upon.
I just can't see what benefit road pricing would have for anyone, on the one hand the government claim it will cost us no more money that we're paying now which indicates there will be no more money available for them to invest in transport. They already have the money and yet it's not spent on measures which actually improve buses, trains or trams - large parts of the centre of Birmingham were recently completely rebuilt, at vast expense, but no real provision for cycle lanes or more room for buses or rail links. In fact the token bus park they did build had to be closed down because it was too small and buses couldn't actually get into it. I don't see that we have a problem with too many cars, the problem is that there are not enough effective alternatives.
Another daft decision about to made at the moment is to rebuild Birmingham New St Station, which will cost millions of pounds and add a lot of extra floorspace for renting out to shops etc but do absolutely nothing to improve the number of trains actually available to take you anywhere. Spending the money on lengthening other station platforms and beginning to build more tracks would actually improve the service but not generate any money directly for those companies involved.
I did not moan about people making sweeping statements at all.
Apart from when you said this...
Just listen to them bleating about how Muslim people don't 'integrate' and how the Muslim community doesn't denounce terrorist attacks loudly enough.
And then, assuming you're the original Anonymous Coward, you go on to make more sweeping generalisation that everyone who reads the Sun is a right wing racist and most people read the Sun therefore the English are mostly right wing racists.
Even assuming you're correct about all Sun readers being right wing racists ( which I don't think you are ) the Sun is read by only 6% of the adult population of England, not including the rest of the UK. I would say that the 94% of the adult population consituted 'most people' rather 6%, but maybe because that's because I'm not stupid ?
Most English people are decent reasonable people ( who voted for a Left Wing government ) and in general it's people like you who, with your rabid, badly thought out and plain stupid generalisations and predujices are responsible for letting the side down.
Individual road pricing is a silly idea, if the government want to simply price us out of our cars then increasing the fuel duty is the fairest way of doing so, big cars use more fuel as do people who drive more.
Where I live there, in Birmingham, there is one sensible choice of road to where I work ( the A38 ). The alternative is to batter my way through residential streets and rat runs mowing down cats and children on their way to school as I go. Once out of the City Centre the A38 or other A roads are my only choice, as they are for everyone else who needs to go the same way. This makes it a very popular and well used road, the sort of road the government will charge a lot of money for driving on. People who can afford to drive on it to get work will still drive but have less money at the end of the month and those who can't will work somewhere closer to their homes probably for less money.
The real problem which needs to be solved is an effective alternative in public transport. The A38 runs more or less parallel to the railway line between Birmingham & Burton ( taking a slight detour through Tamworth ).
In my car I can leave at 7AM and arrive at work at 7:50 which costs me around £4.50.
If I get the train the nearest station is a 30min walk away and in order to get to work by 8:30AM so I need to get the bus at 6:15. The bus fare is £1.40 and if I get the bus back again ( I often walk ) that's £2.80. The train then gets me to Burton for £12.50 and it's a further 25min walk to where I work - there are no buses. So catching the train gets me to work later, takes an hour and 15mins longer and costs me £55 more every week.
If the buses and trains were more frequent and cheaper I'd catch the train, I prefer sitting on trains to driving however both services have remained as bad as they've always been despite all the efforts apparently going in to reducing congestion so you can't really blame me for thinking road pricing is going to do nothing at all to make my life easier or better and will instead be just another expense which is not re-invested sensibly in the transport network.
Ha ! I live in the Midlands not London, I've never even been to London and I don't give a stuff how much you're paying for driving around or whether your poxy businesses are managing to attract a sufficient number of lardy southern pansies to make a profit.
Fitzrovia, Westminister CC, who cares - it all sounds like nonce talk to me so why don't you to just cut out this girly cat fighting and give each other a big slobbery kiss on the lips like you're obviously both gagging to do, you damn southern pansies.
Classic, first of all you denounce the entire UK as a bunch of right wing Sun reading racists and then in the very next sentance you moan about people making sweeping statements about sections of society. A case of double standards here perhaps ?
The majority of people in the UK are not right wing Sun reading racists, although some of us are and some of the more religiously inspired members of the Muslim community are really not interested much in integration.
If you actually want to do something to help both the right wing racists and the isolationist muslims it's best to see people as they actually are rather than relying on broad caricatures.
That is the truth that is more palatable to me and many others
You might think it's a better idea but that doesn't really make it a 'truth' now does it.
On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance. At least make an effort to open your minds to the real wonders of reality.
If I was the music company I'd place some kind of signature in my files and keep a watch on how many of them later appeared on common piracy sites. It would be interesting to see how many, or few, of them leaked out.
Nice work comrade, I have simply erected a large mirror in front of my Television so the mind control signals are directed right back through the spying tubes to controllers themselves !!! Soon I will have them in my power.
I live in the UK where we have the state run National Health service and this is my experience.
First of all because it's ran by the state the 'state of the NHS' is a constant political question which leads to endless political interference in its day to day operation. According to the Government the NHS has never had so much money invested in it and has never been more efficient. According to the opposition of course the exact opposite is true. Consequently every grievance or problem with the NHS that does come along is national news and everyone is very well aware of it, e.g. the new doctors registration scheme ( horribly botched IT drive project ), nurses being trained here and moving elsewhere for higher wages or someone somewhere wants some very expensive drug the NHS refuses to suppply and now they're going to die etc etc.
From direct experience however of both myself, my family and my friends I think the vast majority of people have a very positive experience with the NHS and would not like to see it scrapped.
My gran fell over and broke her hip, the ambulance came and took her to hospital, they operated the same day to repair it and she spent a week or so being looked after in hospital. When she went home nurses came to visit until she was well enough to get to her local doctors for checkups. No queues, no waiting, no incompetence and she hasn't a bad word to say about any of the nurses or doctors who she spoke to.
I cut my hand on a rusty nail once, went to A&E and was seen immediately by a doctor who checked me out and then was stiched up by a very pleasant nurse. I went back to the hospital the next day to see a hand specialist, waited for 15mins and was out after an X-Ray and a chat 30mins later. From there I saw my local GP and her nurse to get the stiches out and inbetween to check on the progress of the wound. Again I had no problems with any of this everything went very smoothly and I felt I was in the hands of professionals.
My uncle has had a heart attack and complications with flesh eating bacteria, he was in intensive care for a couple of months and has had regular contact with both the hospital, the nurses who came and visited him and his GP during his recovery period and still has regular contact with them all for periodic checkups now. He also is very satisfied with his care, he is no longer able to work due this.
I'm sure people do have bad experience with the NHS just like I'm sure they have bad experiences with private healthcare companies but I suspect that with the political interest in the NHS, not to mention the media interest etc, we're far more likely to hear about problems in the NHS, because it's basically transparent, than we would with private companies who would be more able to cover things up.
Total nonsense. If this was even remotely true and hunter gathering was such a wonderful, easy and rewarding lifestyle then we'd still be doing it wouldn't we.
This is just some kind of idealised hippy/eco nutcase dream scenario and most likely is based on some extremely sketchy or badly analysed evidence.
The other point is that whilst today we recognise the propensity to save, thrift, non-violence etc as positive characteristics this is not necessarily how they would have been viewed back before the industrial revolution.
Saying that people who don't share these values are lazy is an expression of our views from a time 200 years on whereas maybe free spending and not shrinking from the fight were positive traits back then.
The other thing is that people still carried on drinking beer in preference to tea/coffee long after the industrial revolution had started.
I remember seeing a programme about the people who built the Forth Rail Bridge and they still got through a fair amount of beer each day, they were Scots but I'm sure this wasn't untypical behaviour.
Absolutley, and as a major importer of cattle trucks into the US I'm happy to report that with the large new orders in the pipeline I'll soon be able to retire and live a life of luxury. It's not all doom and gloom you know.
Michael Moorcock achieved a similar feat in his Dancers At The End Of Time series in which humanity, by the end of time, has invented and discovered everything - left the knowledge in the charge of its cities and just gets on with enjoying it's self.
I'm pretty sure most Amazonian tribes and tribes living elsewhere in far flung corners of the globe are aware of our civilisation by now. We may not be aware of their specific existence, but they can still be found with western t-shirts and cheap tacky toys that have found there way to them through trad with neighbouring tribes.
The point is that at some point there was no one living in the rain forest but over time there is absolutely no inhabitable area left on the planet which does not have an indigineous population of some kind. In our case it seems humans expand to fill any environment capable of supporting them, assuming we don't all get killed in some kind of massive disaster it looks likely this will continue out into any inhabitable planets we can reach.
I don't doubt there is life out there in the universe, probably huge quantities of it but I can think of quite a few reasons why we may not have seen any of it yet.
Firstly we haven't travelled beyond our solar system yet and don't have powerful enough tools to really investigate other suns or planets to locate other life forms so we're reliant on the aliens bumping into, or locating , us.
Even though there may be billions upon billions of planets harbouring life forms only a small fraction of them might be intelligent life forms with the resources to build what we would call advanced industrial infrastructres. They too might take a very long time to leave their solar systems and actively try to find other intelligent things.
Even if another civilisation was exploring the universe is so massive that it could take billions of years for them to come across us.
We've only been able to study space to any degree at all in the last 100 years or so which is a ridiculously small period of time and our knowledge about what's going on around us is still extremely narrow compared to what we may learn in the next 1000 or 10,000 years. However you dress it up the fermi paradox is simply guesswork, even if an alien society is out there and has detected us and is signalling away furiously to us they are probably doing it using methods we have no concept of at present and we're simply not hearing them.
I agree with you about the fact that advanced societies aren't necessarily going to be any less dangerous than less advanced ones.
If you look at the history of cultural interaction on the Earth so far it's fairly clear that less advanced societies meeting with more advanced societies are more or less playing the lottery as to whether, at the time, they benefit from or are harmed by the interaction. In some cases less advanced societies have benefitted from meeting with a more advanced one but in an awful lot of cases they have found their own society and culture are more or less destroyed.
In the case of Earth these interactions are between the same species so at least the lesser advanced of the two societies can be assimilated into the more advanced one over time but it's quite probable that this would be a lot harder when faced with an entirely alien culture. One example of what might happen is similar to what happens when a human comes across an ants nest, if it's not bothering him and he can get nothing useful from it he'll just ignore it, if it is bothering him he'll destroy it or if it provides him with something he needs he'll manage it to suit his purposes. If he's a scientist he might study it but I think it's very unlikely that he'll attempt to communicate with it and find out what it wants or negotiate with it.
Presumably in the case of alien civilisations we may be able to communicate on some level with them through a mutual understanding of maths or physics but I think it's simply a matter of random chance as to whether the alien civilisation paid any regard to what we were saying so far it involved them doing what we wanted.
If you don't have the slightest idea what's going to happen to you then you'd have to be pretty stupid to commit your entire planet, your entire civilization and species to jumping irrevocably into it !
Why do you presume that only "our way" of existence, energy consumption/production or even "consciousness" is the only way?
Because "our way" is something we have definite evidence for any "other ways" are just pure speculation, yes maybe all other alien species are entirely different to us but then again maybe they're not, we don't know and until we do it's useless, from any practical point of view, to simply make up what we think things might be like rather than take our own example of one concrete example of how intelligent life can come about.
I've never read the FSJ blog before up until today and to be honest I don't think it's particulary funny at all and I don't think is because I'm lacking a sense of humour. Perhaps when there was chance it was the real Steve Jobs that added something to the blog but to me it just looks like an on-going attack on various people and companies.
Despite looking as though he's taking the piss out of Microsoft most posts concerning them seem to end up with them looking quite good and he obviously doesn't like open source stuff or indeed Apple very much.
Given Dan Lyons previous output I'd say it's not unlikely he's getting some kickbacks for portraying various targets in a bad light.
You don't have to behave like Hitler in order to take control of a country, please see the British example of controlling a third of the globe with only minimal aggressive subjugation. See also the Malaysian example of dealing with dangerous insurgencies.
The point is that the military response is not the whole answer to anything and in this case the trick is, as you say, to get out of the way and try to minimise the damage from the seemingly inevitable civil war.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps an easier way of representing it is that if each football field was represented as a library of congress you would need 11,208,339 of them
They change into knickers in the cellar ? Kinky.
The thing is though that first of all Birmingham isn't all that congested, the route to work is basically on the open road once I get to the outskirts of the city ( excepting things like crashes which can cause traffic jams ). Public transport, in general, also isn't too bad if you just want to travel round the city you can generally get there in 1 or maybe 2 bus journeys. I usually travel by bus or walk to most of the places I go to in and around the city and just use the car to travel outside the city. Rush hour does cause delays since there aren't enough buses and there simply isn't anymore room on the roads in city centre for more of them in peak periods. There are lots of unused rail lines which could be re-opened taking a huge strain off the buses, for 20 years this has been discussed but never acted upon.
I just can't see what benefit road pricing would have for anyone, on the one hand the government claim it will cost us no more money that we're paying now which indicates there will be no more money available for them to invest in transport. They already have the money and yet it's not spent on measures which actually improve buses, trains or trams - large parts of the centre of Birmingham were recently completely rebuilt, at vast expense, but no real provision for cycle lanes or more room for buses or rail links. In fact the token bus park they did build had to be closed down because it was too small and buses couldn't actually get into it. I don't see that we have a problem with too many cars, the problem is that there are not enough effective alternatives.
Another daft decision about to made at the moment is to rebuild Birmingham New St Station, which will cost millions of pounds and add a lot of extra floorspace for renting out to shops etc but do absolutely nothing to improve the number of trains actually available to take you anywhere. Spending the money on lengthening other station platforms and beginning to build more tracks would actually improve the service but not generate any money directly for those companies involved.
Apart from when you said this...
And then, assuming you're the original Anonymous Coward, you go on to make more sweeping generalisation that everyone who reads the Sun is a right wing racist and most people read the Sun therefore the English are mostly right wing racists.
Even assuming you're correct about all Sun readers being right wing racists ( which I don't think you are ) the Sun is read by only 6% of the adult population of England, not including the rest of the UK. I would say that the 94% of the adult population consituted 'most people' rather 6%, but maybe because that's because I'm not stupid ?
Most English people are decent reasonable people ( who voted for a Left Wing government ) and in general it's people like you who, with your rabid, badly thought out and plain stupid generalisations and predujices are responsible for letting the side down.
Individual road pricing is a silly idea, if the government want to simply price us out of our cars then increasing the fuel duty is the fairest way of doing so, big cars use more fuel as do people who drive more.
Where I live there, in Birmingham, there is one sensible choice of road to where I work ( the A38 ). The alternative is to batter my way through residential streets and rat runs mowing down cats and children on their way to school as I go. Once out of the City Centre the A38 or other A roads are my only choice, as they are for everyone else who needs to go the same way. This makes it a very popular and well used road, the sort of road the government will charge a lot of money for driving on. People who can afford to drive on it to get work will still drive but have less money at the end of the month and those who can't will work somewhere closer to their homes probably for less money.
The real problem which needs to be solved is an effective alternative in public transport. The A38 runs more or less parallel to the railway line between Birmingham & Burton ( taking a slight detour through Tamworth ).
In my car I can leave at 7AM and arrive at work at 7:50 which costs me around £4.50.
If I get the train the nearest station is a 30min walk away and in order to get to work by 8:30AM so I need to get the bus at 6:15. The bus fare is £1.40 and if I get the bus back again ( I often walk ) that's £2.80. The train then gets me to Burton for £12.50 and it's a further 25min walk to where I work - there are no buses. So catching the train gets me to work later, takes an hour and 15mins longer and costs me £55 more every week.
If the buses and trains were more frequent and cheaper I'd catch the train, I prefer sitting on trains to driving however both services have remained as bad as they've always been despite all the efforts apparently going in to reducing congestion so you can't really blame me for thinking road pricing is going to do nothing at all to make my life easier or better and will instead be just another expense which is not re-invested sensibly in the transport network.
Ha ! I live in the Midlands not London, I've never even been to London and I don't give a stuff how much you're paying for driving around or whether your poxy businesses are managing to attract a sufficient number of lardy southern pansies to make a profit.
Fitzrovia, Westminister CC, who cares - it all sounds like nonce talk to me so why don't you to just cut out this girly cat fighting and give each other a big slobbery kiss on the lips like you're obviously both gagging to do, you damn southern pansies.
Especially to drive around London in, who the hell wants to drive around London in the first place ?
Classic, first of all you denounce the entire UK as a bunch of right wing Sun reading racists and then in the very next sentance you moan about people making sweeping statements about sections of society. A case of double standards here perhaps ?
The majority of people in the UK are not right wing Sun reading racists, although some of us are and some of the more religiously inspired members of the Muslim community are really not interested much in integration.
If you actually want to do something to help both the right wing racists and the isolationist muslims it's best to see people as they actually are rather than relying on broad caricatures.
You might think it's a better idea but that doesn't really make it a 'truth' now does it.
On a side note I find it incredible that people persist in clinging to narrow minded beliefs such as those imposed by religious observance. At least make an effort to open your minds to the real wonders of reality.
If I was the music company I'd place some kind of signature in my files and keep a watch on how many of them later appeared on common piracy sites. It would be interesting to see how many, or few, of them leaked out.
Nice work comrade, I have simply erected a large mirror in front of my Television so the mind control signals are directed right back through the spying tubes to controllers themselves !!! Soon I will have them in my power.
I live in the UK where we have the state run National Health service and this is my experience.
First of all because it's ran by the state the 'state of the NHS' is a constant political question which leads to endless political interference in its day to day operation. According to the Government the NHS has never had so much money invested in it and has never been more efficient. According to the opposition of course the exact opposite is true. Consequently every grievance or problem with the NHS that does come along is national news and everyone is very well aware of it, e.g. the new doctors registration scheme ( horribly botched IT drive project ), nurses being trained here and moving elsewhere for higher wages or someone somewhere wants some very expensive drug the NHS refuses to suppply and now they're going to die etc etc.
From direct experience however of both myself, my family and my friends I think the vast majority of people have a very positive experience with the NHS and would not like to see it scrapped.
My gran fell over and broke her hip, the ambulance came and took her to hospital, they operated the same day to repair it and she spent a week or so being looked after in hospital. When she went home nurses came to visit until she was well enough to get to her local doctors for checkups. No queues, no waiting, no incompetence and she hasn't a bad word to say about any of the nurses or doctors who she spoke to.
I cut my hand on a rusty nail once, went to A&E and was seen immediately by a doctor who checked me out and then was stiched up by a very pleasant nurse. I went back to the hospital the next day to see a hand specialist, waited for 15mins and was out after an X-Ray and a chat 30mins later. From there I saw my local GP and her nurse to get the stiches out and inbetween to check on the progress of the wound. Again I had no problems with any of this everything went very smoothly and I felt I was in the hands of professionals.
My uncle has had a heart attack and complications with flesh eating bacteria, he was in intensive care for a couple of months and has had regular contact with both the hospital, the nurses who came and visited him and his GP during his recovery period and still has regular contact with them all for periodic checkups now. He also is very satisfied with his care, he is no longer able to work due this.
I'm sure people do have bad experience with the NHS just like I'm sure they have bad experiences with private healthcare companies but I suspect that with the political interest in the NHS, not to mention the media interest etc, we're far more likely to hear about problems in the NHS, because it's basically transparent, than we would with private companies who would be more able to cover things up.
Total nonsense. If this was even remotely true and hunter gathering was such a wonderful, easy and rewarding lifestyle then we'd still be doing it wouldn't we.
This is just some kind of idealised hippy/eco nutcase dream scenario and most likely is based on some extremely sketchy or badly analysed evidence.
The other point is that whilst today we recognise the propensity to save, thrift, non-violence etc as positive characteristics this is not necessarily how they would have been viewed back before the industrial revolution.
Saying that people who don't share these values are lazy is an expression of our views from a time 200 years on whereas maybe free spending and not shrinking from the fight were positive traits back then.
The other thing is that people still carried on drinking beer in preference to tea/coffee long after the industrial revolution had started.
I remember seeing a programme about the people who built the Forth Rail Bridge and they still got through a fair amount of beer each day, they were Scots but I'm sure this wasn't untypical behaviour.
Absolutley, and as a major importer of cattle trucks into the US I'm happy to report that with the large new orders in the pipeline I'll soon be able to retire and live a life of luxury. It's not all doom and gloom you know.
Michael Moorcock achieved a similar feat in his Dancers At The End Of Time series in which humanity, by the end of time, has invented and discovered everything - left the knowledge in the charge of its cities and just gets on with enjoying it's self.
In actual fact it's Sir Alec, if he was a Lord it would be Lord Guiness and if he was a King it would be King Alec.
I'm pretty sure most Amazonian tribes and tribes living elsewhere in far flung corners of the globe are aware of our civilisation by now. We may not be aware of their specific existence, but they can still be found with western t-shirts and cheap tacky toys that have found there way to them through trad with neighbouring tribes.
The point is that at some point there was no one living in the rain forest but over time there is absolutely no inhabitable area left on the planet which does not have an indigineous population of some kind. In our case it seems humans expand to fill any environment capable of supporting them, assuming we don't all get killed in some kind of massive disaster it looks likely this will continue out into any inhabitable planets we can reach.
I don't doubt there is life out there in the universe, probably huge quantities of it but I can think of quite a few reasons why we may not have seen any of it yet.
Firstly we haven't travelled beyond our solar system yet and don't have powerful enough tools to really investigate other suns or planets to locate other life forms so we're reliant on the aliens bumping into, or locating , us.
Even though there may be billions upon billions of planets harbouring life forms only a small fraction of them might be intelligent life forms with the resources to build what we would call advanced industrial infrastructres. They too might take a very long time to leave their solar systems and actively try to find other intelligent things.
Even if another civilisation was exploring the universe is so massive that it could take billions of years for them to come across us.
We've only been able to study space to any degree at all in the last 100 years or so which is a ridiculously small period of time and our knowledge about what's going on around us is still extremely narrow compared to what we may learn in the next 1000 or 10,000 years. However you dress it up the fermi paradox is simply guesswork, even if an alien society is out there and has detected us and is signalling away furiously to us they are probably doing it using methods we have no concept of at present and we're simply not hearing them.
I agree with you about the fact that advanced societies aren't necessarily going to be any less dangerous than less advanced ones.
If you look at the history of cultural interaction on the Earth so far it's fairly clear that less advanced societies meeting with more advanced societies are more or less playing the lottery as to whether, at the time, they benefit from or are harmed by the interaction. In some cases less advanced societies have benefitted from meeting with a more advanced one but in an awful lot of cases they have found their own society and culture are more or less destroyed.
In the case of Earth these interactions are between the same species so at least the lesser advanced of the two societies can be assimilated into the more advanced one over time but it's quite probable that this would be a lot harder when faced with an entirely alien culture. One example of what might happen is similar to what happens when a human comes across an ants nest, if it's not bothering him and he can get nothing useful from it he'll just ignore it, if it is bothering him he'll destroy it or if it provides him with something he needs he'll manage it to suit his purposes. If he's a scientist he might study it but I think it's very unlikely that he'll attempt to communicate with it and find out what it wants or negotiate with it.
Presumably in the case of alien civilisations we may be able to communicate on some level with them through a mutual understanding of maths or physics but I think it's simply a matter of random chance as to whether the alien civilisation paid any regard to what we were saying so far it involved them doing what we wanted.
If you don't have the slightest idea what's going to happen to you then you'd have to be pretty stupid to commit your entire planet, your entire civilization and species to jumping irrevocably into it !
Because "our way" is something we have definite evidence for any "other ways" are just pure speculation, yes maybe all other alien species are entirely different to us but then again maybe they're not, we don't know and until we do it's useless, from any practical point of view, to simply make up what we think things might be like rather than take our own example of one concrete example of how intelligent life can come about.
I've never read the FSJ blog before up until today and to be honest I don't think it's particulary funny at all and I don't think is because I'm lacking a sense of humour. Perhaps when there was chance it was the real Steve Jobs that added something to the blog but to me it just looks like an on-going attack on various people and companies.
Despite looking as though he's taking the piss out of Microsoft most posts concerning them seem to end up with them looking quite good and he obviously doesn't like open source stuff or indeed Apple very much.
Given Dan Lyons previous output I'd say it's not unlikely he's getting some kickbacks for portraying various targets in a bad light.
You don't have to behave like Hitler in order to take control of a country, please see the British example of controlling a third of the globe with only minimal aggressive subjugation. See also the Malaysian example of dealing with dangerous insurgencies.
The point is that the military response is not the whole answer to anything and in this case the trick is, as you say, to get out of the way and try to minimise the damage from the seemingly inevitable civil war.