Don't be too snide. A lot of people are graduating college these days with enough debt to equate to a house, but without the house. It's not a bad thing to make decent money without first going into massive debt, and given the bubble of college tuition prices in the US, it's far from clear that a degree is a better deal than, say, tech school for HVAC or auto mechanics or what have you.
I addressed the research to the extent of saying that I don't know what it shows, but I don't care either. I did not advocate drone strikes; noting who is responsible for those deaths is not necessarily an endorsement of the method. I used the word "presumably" because there have been many, many, many examples of people being killed in airstrikes (whether or not by drones) being touted by the enemy as civilians when they were actually combatants.
For the moment, let's put aside the argument of whether or not drone strikes create terrorists overall. They might, but I'm betting that we can build missiles faster than they can recruit people. Instead, I'd like to focus on your closing arguments:
These drone strikes are not only cowardly
In what way are drone strikes cowardly? Are air strikes cowardly? Is artillery cowardly? And even if I were to grant your assumption of cowardice, what obligates me to fight on the same ground as the enemy? Why should I play to his strengths? Am I supposed to hijack airliners and fly them into houses in Pakistan, because that's the best jihadis can do? Or send suicide bombers and plant roadside bombs, because those are their most effective means of fighting? War is not an arena for fairness. War is an awful thing, and the best thing that can be done is to end it as fast as possible, and doing that requires killing the enemy until he realizes that you will not stop, and he will not prevail, and his only option is to quit fighting. Frankly, the only problem I see with the drone strikes is that they are too slow. (Great for killing leaders, but not so good at ending the overall problem.)
they are morally questionable when they are going to have such "collateral damage"
I already addressed that one. The morally questionable behavior is that which puts civilians at risk: the jihadis fighting without uniforms and hiding amongs civilians. If it were otherwise, the enemy need only strap children to his tanks and roll forward to beat you. The purpose of the rules about perfidy is to protect civilians from harm, and it is the enemy, not us, who are endangering those civilians. Their choices are to stop fighting us, to follow the laws of war, or to be responsible for the deaths of the civilians they shelter among. They have chosen the latter. We are not thereby required to not fight them there, and indeed it would be morally reprehensible to do so because it would endanger future civilian lives by increasing the benefit to enemies of hiding among civilians.
at best they are a recruiting sargeant for the terrorist's cause
Possibly so, but what is the alternative? To not fight? Hell, we've effectively given the jihadis most of what they wanted over the past couple of years, most notably with the abandonment of the Musharraf regime, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the war against Libya. All that we need to do to complete the agenda that they originally attacked us for is to throw the Saudis and Jordanians under the bus, and they've nearly completed their first major objective: the overthrow of the regimes in the area and their replacement by regimes unwilling or unable to contest the jihadi cause. Their second major objective, establishing a caliphate, would doubtless follow soon thereafter, where "soon" means after a long, bloody war between Sunni and Shi'a that makes the Reformation look like a Sunday picnic.
But hey, at least the jihadis wouldn't be fighting us, right? Except that they would, and for the same reason they fight Israel or India or the many other places they fight: it builds jihadi street cred to attack the infidels just as much as it does to spread Islam to new regions. So of course they would continue to attack us, as a means of increasing their domestic support in their war against other jihadi factions. So really, we're back to a very old dictum: we may not be interested in war, but war is interested in us.
I'm not advocating drone strikes, though I don't see the difference between "drone strikes" and "air strikes".
I don't know if drone strikes, or air strikes, or small arms firefights for that matter increase terrorism overall or not, though I somewhat doubt it simply because the end point of that argument is that killing your enemies doesn't win wars, and that argument would fly in the face of thousands of years of recorded history and evidence of how humans behave. Regardless, as a general rule, I'm in favor of killing enemies (not opponents; there's a difference) of the US, and since 9/11 the jihadis have been in that category.
I'm an IT guy working for a company that sells women's underwear. What exactly do you think my vested interest would be, outside of American security generally, which hopefully is a vested interest for all Americans?
You didn't address my argument in any fashion. Instead, you resorted to a red herring, guilt by association, an assertion without evidence, a conclusion that doesn't follow from the assertion, and poisoning the well (an insinuation that I am arguing in bad faith). I give your response a D-, and suggest you try again. Perhaps read a book on rhetoric and argumentation first.
And when they then take the boat and don't give it back because you falsely swore to the authenticity of the import paperwork, then what? Yeah, it's only paperwork. It doesn't matter. Until it does. And if you don't think that this could happen, look up civil forfeiture, which is an even worse abuse.
The perfidy is on the part of the enemy. When the jihadis violate the laws of war by hiding among civilians, not wearing distinctive markings and the like, it is the jihadis who caused the death of the presumably innocent, or at least non-combatant, civilians around them. It is not the drone operators who are responsible for those deaths. Why is it, by the way, that people always seem to ignore that the Geneva Conventions and other laws of warfare actually take into account the fact that the other side might not fight by those rules, and in that case effectively absolves the side that does?
You've obviously never worked around the government. Let me tell you how this would actually work. The people whose jobs are imperilled by any efficiencies the consultants find (bureaucrats) would be put in charge of managing the consultants. A raft of paperwork would be required for anything the consultants wanted to do. It would require approvals up to the Secretary level even to visit an office where someone works directly with the public. Every report turned in would be rejected based on some obscure requirement that had never previously been mentioned. (I once saw a consultant spend three months tracking down a regulation they were required to comply with, only to find out in the end that not only did it not exist, it had never existed.) If by some miracle the consultants nevertheless found some way of improving efficiency, they would be profusely thanked for helping the American people, and their report would be "summarized" to the funders in such a way that it was obvious that the department was already running at maximum efficiency and the only way to reduce the cost of the department, or its personnel, would be for Congressmen to personally strangle kittens on live TV in prime time.
It's called the Washington Monument defense, after the Interior Department's scheme to avoid being cut back in the Reagan administration. Reagan proposed cutting something like 5 or 10% of the Interior Department's budget, and getting rid of a lot of the small parcels of parkland that no one visits and that have no unique ecology or real value. The US government owns something like 25% of the land area of the US directly, and Reagan's idea was to get rid of a lot of the bits that didn't actually have value. Because the smart thing to do is to let the bureaucrats who know the ins and outs of all of this land pick what would go, Reagan deferred to the bureaucrats at Interior for a list of lands to sell off or give away. For example, there is a "park" that consists of something like 350 square feet of land, between two private parcels of land, in the middle of the Nevada desert, that the government owns because of a surveying error when the land was originally titled. This "park" has to be inspected regularly (required by law and policy), and there are maintenance costs (because of access right of ways, if I'm remembering correctly). There is zero value to the government in owning this, so naturally it should be on a list of land to be gotten rid of, right? Nope. The top of the list of things to close if these budget cuts went into effect was the Washington Monument.
Keep that in mind when the Air Force says 2/3 of its aircraft would be grounded in months. Note that they don't mention laying off the valets who serve the general officers, or closing golf courses for senior officers, or getting rid of some of the fleet of executive jets that the Air Force maintains. It's called a "gold watch" in the military, but it's basically identical to the Washington Monument defense.
But the bunny inspectors will continue to be fully funded (yes, we pay people to inspect stage magicians' rabbits) and the money will keep flowing to the cronies of the President and various congressvermin.
You should, perhaps, read the Constitution, which defines treason. It is not this. Something does not have to be the apex of bad to be bad. This is bad, and it's unconstitutional, but it is not treason.
By analogy, I (or more aptly, the *AA) could express astonishment that you give out your wifi password to everyone who visits your house. I don't see that being a remotely useful argument.
Um, what? I think you misunderstand the significance of the stable resonance of Pluto's orbit with Neptune's. It's just a way of describing where Pluto is. What's important about that is how many other objects share that same orbit, and how large they are, not what the orbit is. (IIRC, the other objects are called Plutionoids, but I'm too lazy to Google and be sure.)
Not really. "Cleared its orbit" doesn't mean no co-orbital objects. All planets have LaGrange point co-orbitals for example. Pluto is different in that it has a lot of co-orbitals, and some of them are almost as large as Pluto itself. Essentially, it's a KBO rather than a planet proper, by the current definition.
The beacons are at best publicity. To own something, either others need to recognize your ownership and leave it alone, or some larger power (like governments on Earth with property physically located in their territory) needs to recognize your ownership and defend it, or you need to defend it. In the hypothetical case where I have the resources and will to do it, and I come across an asteroid I want to mine that has one of their beacons on it, I'd just take the beacon, too. At the very least, the power source would be useful for something.
Two reasons. The first is that the volume of materials in orbit is really, really tiny. The second is that each of these different types of space junk would require (potentially) different processing techniques, equipment and so forth. Even discounting property issues, those simply make the idea financially insane. So I expect some national government somewhere will certainly try it at some point.
No doubt. I think MS would have been better off had they called their mobile OS "Metro" and left Windows for their desktop OS. Trying to blend the two is a disaster waiting to happen. Really, that's not even true, it is a repeat of the same disaster that has been happening to MS for a decade as they've tried to establish Windows on tablets and mobile phones, only now going in the other direction. Sane people create an OS that is suitable for the conditions in which it is to be used. MS creates an OS and decrees it is suitable for use in any conditions. At one point, they had the power to make that (mostly) stick. They no longer do.
What you are missing is the differentiation between conservative in its original sense and conservatism as a political label in the US. In the US, "conservatives" tend to be what were called liberals in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and "liberals" tend to be radicals or conservatives (reactionary ones at that) using the terminology from that time period. What one thinks of as "conservative" in the common definition (aversion to risk, clinging to the past, etc) more often politically describes the American Left than the American Right (with the exception of center-left groups like those Clinton represents, and social conservatives). American politics is a complex and odd thing, and the labels don't do it justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Mao is first, followed by Stalin and then Hitler.
Don't be too snide. A lot of people are graduating college these days with enough debt to equate to a house, but without the house. It's not a bad thing to make decent money without first going into massive debt, and given the bubble of college tuition prices in the US, it's far from clear that a degree is a better deal than, say, tech school for HVAC or auto mechanics or what have you.
You don't need the words "for profit" there. Non-profit schools, state schools for example, are doing the same thing and for the same reasons.
I addressed the research to the extent of saying that I don't know what it shows, but I don't care either. I did not advocate drone strikes; noting who is responsible for those deaths is not necessarily an endorsement of the method. I used the word "presumably" because there have been many, many, many examples of people being killed in airstrikes (whether or not by drones) being touted by the enemy as civilians when they were actually combatants.
Look up what HUD gets up to. Or Labor.
Well, OK, but if wishes were horses.... Alternatives which cannot be implemented to attain their desired ends are not actually alternatives.
For the moment, let's put aside the argument of whether or not drone strikes create terrorists overall. They might, but I'm betting that we can build missiles faster than they can recruit people. Instead, I'd like to focus on your closing arguments:
In what way are drone strikes cowardly? Are air strikes cowardly? Is artillery cowardly? And even if I were to grant your assumption of cowardice, what obligates me to fight on the same ground as the enemy? Why should I play to his strengths? Am I supposed to hijack airliners and fly them into houses in Pakistan, because that's the best jihadis can do? Or send suicide bombers and plant roadside bombs, because those are their most effective means of fighting? War is not an arena for fairness. War is an awful thing, and the best thing that can be done is to end it as fast as possible, and doing that requires killing the enemy until he realizes that you will not stop, and he will not prevail, and his only option is to quit fighting. Frankly, the only problem I see with the drone strikes is that they are too slow. (Great for killing leaders, but not so good at ending the overall problem.)
I already addressed that one. The morally questionable behavior is that which puts civilians at risk: the jihadis fighting without uniforms and hiding amongs civilians. If it were otherwise, the enemy need only strap children to his tanks and roll forward to beat you. The purpose of the rules about perfidy is to protect civilians from harm, and it is the enemy, not us, who are endangering those civilians. Their choices are to stop fighting us, to follow the laws of war, or to be responsible for the deaths of the civilians they shelter among. They have chosen the latter. We are not thereby required to not fight them there, and indeed it would be morally reprehensible to do so because it would endanger future civilian lives by increasing the benefit to enemies of hiding among civilians.
Possibly so, but what is the alternative? To not fight? Hell, we've effectively given the jihadis most of what they wanted over the past couple of years, most notably with the abandonment of the Musharraf regime, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the war against Libya. All that we need to do to complete the agenda that they originally attacked us for is to throw the Saudis and Jordanians under the bus, and they've nearly completed their first major objective: the overthrow of the regimes in the area and their replacement by regimes unwilling or unable to contest the jihadi cause. Their second major objective, establishing a caliphate, would doubtless follow soon thereafter, where "soon" means after a long, bloody war between Sunni and Shi'a that makes the Reformation look like a Sunday picnic.
But hey, at least the jihadis wouldn't be fighting us, right? Except that they would, and for the same reason they fight Israel or India or the many other places they fight: it builds jihadi street cred to attack the infidels just as much as it does to spread Islam to new regions. So of course they would continue to attack us, as a means of increasing their domestic support in their war against other jihadi factions. So really, we're back to a very old dictum: we may not be interested in war, but war is interested in us.
And when they then take the boat and don't give it back because you falsely swore to the authenticity of the import paperwork, then what? Yeah, it's only paperwork. It doesn't matter. Until it does. And if you don't think that this could happen, look up civil forfeiture, which is an even worse abuse.
The perfidy is on the part of the enemy. When the jihadis violate the laws of war by hiding among civilians, not wearing distinctive markings and the like, it is the jihadis who caused the death of the presumably innocent, or at least non-combatant, civilians around them. It is not the drone operators who are responsible for those deaths. Why is it, by the way, that people always seem to ignore that the Geneva Conventions and other laws of warfare actually take into account the fact that the other side might not fight by those rules, and in that case effectively absolves the side that does?
So why should someone else be bound by the GP's notions of whether and how guns should be loaned out?
Funny: even though I mostly agree with you in principle, I don't find you particularly rational.
He's likely speaking as a percentage of GDP, rather than absolute dollar terms.
You've obviously never worked around the government. Let me tell you how this would actually work. The people whose jobs are imperilled by any efficiencies the consultants find (bureaucrats) would be put in charge of managing the consultants. A raft of paperwork would be required for anything the consultants wanted to do. It would require approvals up to the Secretary level even to visit an office where someone works directly with the public. Every report turned in would be rejected based on some obscure requirement that had never previously been mentioned. (I once saw a consultant spend three months tracking down a regulation they were required to comply with, only to find out in the end that not only did it not exist, it had never existed.) If by some miracle the consultants nevertheless found some way of improving efficiency, they would be profusely thanked for helping the American people, and their report would be "summarized" to the funders in such a way that it was obvious that the department was already running at maximum efficiency and the only way to reduce the cost of the department, or its personnel, would be for Congressmen to personally strangle kittens on live TV in prime time.
Keep that in mind when the Air Force says 2/3 of its aircraft would be grounded in months. Note that they don't mention laying off the valets who serve the general officers, or closing golf courses for senior officers, or getting rid of some of the fleet of executive jets that the Air Force maintains. It's called a "gold watch" in the military, but it's basically identical to the Washington Monument defense.
But the bunny inspectors will continue to be fully funded (yes, we pay people to inspect stage magicians' rabbits) and the money will keep flowing to the cronies of the President and various congressvermin.
You should, perhaps, read the Constitution, which defines treason. It is not this. Something does not have to be the apex of bad to be bad. This is bad, and it's unconstitutional, but it is not treason.
By analogy, I (or more aptly, the *AA) could express astonishment that you give out your wifi password to everyone who visits your house. I don't see that being a remotely useful argument.
Depends on the insurance company. Mine (USAA) pays replacement value up front.
Um, what? I think you misunderstand the significance of the stable resonance of Pluto's orbit with Neptune's. It's just a way of describing where Pluto is. What's important about that is how many other objects share that same orbit, and how large they are, not what the orbit is. (IIRC, the other objects are called Plutionoids, but I'm too lazy to Google and be sure.)
Not really. "Cleared its orbit" doesn't mean no co-orbital objects. All planets have LaGrange point co-orbitals for example. Pluto is different in that it has a lot of co-orbitals, and some of them are almost as large as Pluto itself. Essentially, it's a KBO rather than a planet proper, by the current definition.
The beacons are at best publicity. To own something, either others need to recognize your ownership and leave it alone, or some larger power (like governments on Earth with property physically located in their territory) needs to recognize your ownership and defend it, or you need to defend it. In the hypothetical case where I have the resources and will to do it, and I come across an asteroid I want to mine that has one of their beacons on it, I'd just take the beacon, too. At the very least, the power source would be useful for something.
Two reasons. The first is that the volume of materials in orbit is really, really tiny. The second is that each of these different types of space junk would require (potentially) different processing techniques, equipment and so forth. Even discounting property issues, those simply make the idea financially insane. So I expect some national government somewhere will certainly try it at some point.
No doubt. I think MS would have been better off had they called their mobile OS "Metro" and left Windows for their desktop OS. Trying to blend the two is a disaster waiting to happen. Really, that's not even true, it is a repeat of the same disaster that has been happening to MS for a decade as they've tried to establish Windows on tablets and mobile phones, only now going in the other direction. Sane people create an OS that is suitable for the conditions in which it is to be used. MS creates an OS and decrees it is suitable for use in any conditions. At one point, they had the power to make that (mostly) stick. They no longer do.
What you are missing is the differentiation between conservative in its original sense and conservatism as a political label in the US. In the US, "conservatives" tend to be what were called liberals in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and "liberals" tend to be radicals or conservatives (reactionary ones at that) using the terminology from that time period. What one thinks of as "conservative" in the common definition (aversion to risk, clinging to the past, etc) more often politically describes the American Left than the American Right (with the exception of center-left groups like those Clinton represents, and social conservatives). American politics is a complex and odd thing, and the labels don't do it justice.