| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
) Actually, not really, not all that much. You *might* be able to knock down Al-Quaeda a notch or two, but by forcing a reality where little kids have to fear drone strikes from the sky every waking moment you ensure a next generation of angry people ready to lift arms against you.
I don't think that having non angry people is really a possibility. Even if we weren't bombing them, we're still propping up our prefered dictators who can keep the oil flowing, and even if we stopped doing that the decadent west is an easy scapegoat for the anger of how much life bites when you live in a desert, you have sand in places you can't even name and there's no basis for an economy that needs more than a few thousand (foriegn, imported) people to work the oil rigs.
The goal with the bombing isn't to win a popularity contest, its to keep the people who want to kill us from becoming the people that can kill us by messing with the cash flow. Jihad against america 4.0 seems to be circumventing that by radicalizing American Muslims who are already here when they visit for vacation or on facebook. But even then without a support network you have one person with a gun and not 19 people acting in concert with planes.
Not saying that I know any better solution that those assassinations, but just that the mindset has to be "this is a temporary solution and we must devote serious energy and thought to finding a better way".
Get green energy, build the electric car, set up a national power grid run off of 40 nuclear power plants in nevada and tell the middle east asta la vista we don't need your oil.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
No. the least bad alternative is accepting that the CIA et all are real human beings, not mystical ninja. If you're waiting for a level of assurance that can't be provided then you're out of luck.
The least bad alternative is not doing your job and verifying information, then going "F+&* 'em all! Send the explosive!" to a location containing none of the targets they were trying to take out?
If "Yeah, that's the right guy" is a level of assurance that can't be provided, you shouldn't be bombing people in the first place.
"Oops!" doesn't cut it when you just killed an innocent man and his family when they were sitting down to dinner because you couldn't be arsed to send an actual person to check and verify the validity of information, and instead told Joe Schmoe the drone operator sitting in his office chair thousands of miles away to flip the switch based on hearsay and blurry images that might, maybe, in the right light look like the guy you actually wanted to kill.
Especially when killing the right guy has a minimal impact at best. Even killing Osama, who was supposedly the big bad dude in charge of at least one major cell accomplished jack and all in the grand scheme of things.
Playing the odds, it's really not worth it. If you have a 50% chance of getting the right guy, and getting the right guy moves you .000001% closer to accomplishing your goal, it's not worth the 50% chance of getting the wrong guy, which gets you 0% closer to your goal, and 100% closer to being that guy who just killed innocent people for no discernible gain.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Oops!" doesn't cut it when you just killed an innocent man and his family when they were sitting down to dinner because you couldn't be arsed to send an actual person to check and verify the validity of information, and instead told Joe Schmoe the drone operator sitting in his office chair thousands of miles away to flip the switch based on hearsay and blurry images that might, maybe, in the right light look like the guy you actually wanted to kill.
How do you propose sending someone in?
Does this apply to actual war as well?
Or just anti-terrorism?
Ideally it would apply to actual war as well, but it's somewhat less practical when you have boots on the ground and getting information in real-time is nigh impossible. Sometimes you won't know who is in what building when bullets start flying, for example. Those deaths are tragic, but arguably unavoidable.
In this case, however, you're thousands of miles away with comparatively all the time in the world to check and verify you have the right info. It's not like you need to take hours to then fly someone across the ocean to deal with the problem, you have a guy contact you and within a few minutes you can act on that information.
The deaths caused by not doing this are, IMO, tragic largely because they ARE avoidable.
"Oops!" doesn't cut it when you just killed an innocent man and his family when they were sitting down to dinner because you couldn't be arsed to send an actual person to check and verify the validity of information, and instead told Joe Schmoe the drone operator sitting in his office chair thousands of miles away to flip the switch based on hearsay and blurry images that might, maybe, in the right light look like the guy you actually wanted to kill.How do you propose sending someone in?
Not my job to figure that out.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Not my job to figure that out.
What happened on carters mission to rescue the hostages and the difficulties with the helicopters when they went in after Osama have convinced me that they're not holding back the phlebonium: there really is no practical way to do this over a large distance from a base.
"Don't make the attacks" would be a legitimate argument. Hard to make a case for, but doable.
But make the attacks but do them better doesn't seem like a legitimate position. Trying to change the reality of the situation so you don't have to make a hard choice between two bad options doesn't make the choice go away. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Well, I did say do it better or don't do it. I think currently how drone strikes are handled, the downside swarfs the upside.
From a practical standpoint, if the drone strikes were more effective, but still had a large margin for error, the losses could be considered distasteful but worth the benefits.
But from what I can tell, the strikes are both largely ineffective, and still have a large chance of accruing collateral damage. That takes it out of the realm of acceptable losses to me. Either the effectiveness needs to be increased, or loss of life minimalized, preferably both.
More accurate information gathering is, at least on paper, the best solution since it would achieve both of those goals.
Currently it's not a matter of having your cake and eating it too, it's a matter of having your cake and it falling off your fork halfway to your mouthba lot of the time. Now you neither have cake, nor have you eaten it.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Side note:
Can we not debate Christianity in this thread? There are lots of threads you can necro, or start a new one for that. If you're making a comparison with Islam, sure that might be relevant, but at this point a couple of you have wandered to debating just Christianity by itself.
Get green energy, build the electric car, set up a national power grid run off of 40 nuclear power plants in nevada and tell the middle east asta la vista we don't need your oil.Plastics, Wolf. Plastics.
Plastics are also made from plant-based oils.
Get green energy, build the electric car, set up a national power grid run off of 40 nuclear power plants in nevada and tell the middle east asta la vista we don't need your oil.Plastics, Wolf. Plastics.
We have more than enough production in the US to manage that.
We don't even get a lot of our oil from the middle east. Mostly our concern about it is what it does to the international market.
And, it's not as if I am making up stuff from no-where. The original meaning of the Jihad was mostly similar to that of Christian crusades. It took being demolished by the Mongols to get the Muslims to become less militant - fro Wikipedia,
According to diplomat/scholar Dore Gold, at beginning of the ninth century, "Muslim theologians broadened the meaning of jihad, de-emphasizing armed struggle and, under the influence of Sufism, adopting more spiritual definitions. ... the Islamic mainstream had shifted away from this focus on the religious requirement of a universal campaign of jihad. Consequently, the meaning of shahid changed as well. Whereas the term had originally applied to one who gave his life in battle, a scholar or someone who led Muslim prayers could now be compared to a shahid when his day of judgement arrived."
If you're dating this shift to the 9th century, it's much too early to be ascribed to the Mongol conquests.
|
1) Main difference between christianity and islam as far as I'm concerned is that the Christian world did a better job of separating state and church. Yes, religious values still have about a million times the impact that I would have liked them to have, but it's still a far cry from the Muslim world, where religion has overwhelming power over politics, education and everyday life. Of course religion doesn't have a monopoly on encouraging negative behavior, but that doesn't really matter much.It had to do with the fact that many of the Founding Fathers ranged from lip-service Christians, far out gnostics, to downright atheists. As well as literally being the smartest men in the colonies. Their inspiration was to avoid the deep seated Christian internecine wars which had plagued Europe for centuries.
Christianity has never voluntarily separated itself from state control. Indeed the evangelical and Catholic faiths to this day are doing their best to tear down the wall built by the Establishment Clause, and impose their values on the rest of us.
So when Christians look to pat themselves on the back on the Church/State issue, they can only do so by ignoring a lot of history, both past and present.
You're talking US, I'm talking western world in general - mainly means Europe, which went through a renaissance (the namesake one), and later a French Revolution, parts of a monumental process that took power away from organized religion and old monarchies and transferred it to democratic secular states. The U.S might owe a lot of its (somewhat, partially, and less so than the rest of the western world) secular nature to the founding fathers, but they owe their own atheism to cultural movements that have been going on for hundreds of years in the cultures they hailed from.
In the Muslim world today, "Atheism" just isn't a thing. You don't really get to be one if you live in Egypt or Indonesia, at least not openly, because the surrounding culture is not tolerant to that. That used to be the case in Europe with Christians as well, but wasn't anymore by the time the founding fathers came about.
In the Muslim world today, "Atheism" just isn't a thing. You don't really get to be one if you live in Egypt or Indonesia, at least not openly, because the surrounding...
This seems to be more of a thing when it comes to poor countries than specifically muslim countries; Atheists in Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina seem to fare a lot better than they would in say Uganda, which is Christian.
It can also be seen _within_ a country, say in the US, where I'd imagine it's far harder being an atheist in Alabama than in central New York.
In the Muslim world today, "Atheism" just isn't a thing. You don't really get to be one if you live in Egypt or Indonesia, at least not openly, because the surrounding...This seems to be more of a thing when it comes to poor countries than specifically muslim countries; Atheists in Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina seem to fare a lot better than they would in say Uganda, which is Christian.
It can also be seen _within_ a country, say in the US, where I'd imagine it's far harder being an atheist in Alabama than in central New York.
That's really not fair to Alabama. It may difficult to get elected to a state office as an atheist in Alabama, but it won't affect your safety, or ability to get a job, or where you can buy a house.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That's really not fair to Alabama. It may difficult to get elected to a state office as an atheist in Alabama, but it won't affect your safety, or ability to get a job, or where you can buy a house.
It'll certainly affect your social life though. Alabama's Baptist country. They'll give you the sad "Oh you poor thing" eyes in public if they hear about it and spread more nasty gossip than the cheerleader's table in high school behind your back.
I'm not convinced it wouldn't affect your ability to get a job either, if you actually told the interviewer.
That's really not fair to Alabama. It may difficult to get elected to a state office as an atheist in Alabama, but it won't affect your safety, or ability to get a job, or where you can buy a house.It'll certainly affect your social life though. Alabama's Baptist country. They'll give you the sad "Oh you poor thing" eyes in public if they hear about it and spread more nasty gossip than the cheerleader's table in high school behind your back.
I'm not convinced it wouldn't affect your ability to get a job either, if you actually told the interviewer.
Big city, it won't most of the time. Small town, they already know, because you're not in church. Which is all that really matters. Also means you don't plug into the local networks.
Edit: Mind you being a Muslim isn't going to be better. :)
Even in really small cities there will be a Baptist church and a Methodist church. Just because you aren't at their church doesn't automatically translate. I think the biggest caveat would be if you publicized your atheism it might cause you problems but that's seems a strange thing to do by definition (essentially you would be going around telling everyone what you aren't, seems weird.)
Also, just did a meetup search of Atheist groups near Mobile and Birmingham. There are 4, with about 1800 total members. So it seems like social life probably isn't all that stunted if you are willing to look. That's also people who are specifically looking to hang out with other atheists, it doesn't include religious types who wouldn't give a flying crap about your spirituality (or lack thereof.)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Even some pockets of upstate new york are pretty banjoey with regards to religion.
And banjoes.
Admittedly, everyone from Alabama I know (family, mostly) are small town sort of folk.
|
Even in really small cities there will be a Baptist church and a Methodist church. Just because you aren't at their church doesn't automatically translate.
I agree with your point, but....
If there's ONLY one Baptist church and ONLY one Methodist church, that's not a small city, or even a town. Hell, it's not even a village...it's a hamlet. And it barely qualifies as that.
I grew up in a small town...about 8,000 people when i was a kid, up to about 10,000 now. And I couldn't even begin to tell you how many churches there were. I'd lay odds that there were at least two dozen churches there...probably a lot more.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
You guys are discussing Christianity. And not in a context to compare or contrast with Islam, or Muslim people. Seriously, there are at least a half dozen threads you can necro (or just start a new one). Some of them have thousands of posts.
Have I mentioned my kids lately...
|
|
In the Muslim world today, "Atheism" just isn't a thing. You don't really get to be one if you live in Egypt or Indonesia, at least not openly, because the surrounding...This seems to be more of a thing when it comes to poor countries than specifically muslim countries; Atheists in Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina seem to fare a lot better than they would in say Uganda, which is Christian.
It can also be seen _within_ a country, say in the US, where I'd imagine it's far harder being an atheist in Alabama than in central New York.
Well, the two (poverty and religion) certainly serve as a chicken-and-egg process in this context. A highly religious population is going to spawn less scientists and engineers and other high skill people that are needed to accumulate wealth these days, which generates poverty. Poor folk are less educated and need more mental support, generating religious beliefs.
The funny thing about the Muslim world is that so many parts of it could have been prosperous if managed better, rather than using all that oil income to build preposterous palaces for the ruling families.
Also, "religion" as we are discussing it here mostly applies where the monotheistic faiths are prominent. I don't know what exactly is going on in China and India, only that it is hard to understand to our eyes because the entire concept of faith is different. I don't know how those kinds of faith systems correlate with poverty.
Even in really small cities there will be a Baptist church and a Methodist church. Just because you aren't at their church doesn't automatically translate.I agree with your point, but....
If there's ONLY one Baptist church and ONLY one Methodist church, that's not a small city, or even a town. Hell, it's not even a village...it's a hamlet. And it barely qualifies as that.
I grew up in a small town...about 8,000 people when i was a kid, up to about 10,000 now. And I couldn't even begin to tell you how many churches there were. I'd lay odds that there were at least two dozen churches there...probably a lot more.
That helps to make my point actually. Someone had said earlier that you don't have to be "out" as an atheist to be suspected because people won't see you at church and they'll just automatically know you are one.
My point is even the absolute smallest collections of mobile homes that managed to file a township registration with the state will have at least 2 churches (Methodist and Baptist.)
For what it's worth, if that township is in Texas it will also have a Dairy Queen and a Sonic, but I digress...
One of the best things you can do for yourself and your county:
STOP WATCHING TELEVISED NEWS.
While it's not perfect, I get all my news from NPR and the BBC. Televised news isn't news, and is just contributing to all the problems by distracting people from real issues and sensationalizing things for profit.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
There's really only one channel thats THAT bad....
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
