Incidentally, I don't know about the situation in the US, but in the UK this is one of the key rationales for this kind of action. Since it is a defence to argue that your actions were motivated by the need to prevent a greater crime, this kind of action potentially presents an opportunity to raise the legality of the state's nuclear weapons policy in court. As the article says:
> The U.S. Attorney’s office filed a document they called “Motion to Preclude Defendants from Introducing Evidence in Support of Certain Justification Defenses.” In this motion, the U.S. asked the court to bar the peace protestors from being allowed to put on any evidence regarding the illegality of nuclear weapons, the immorality of nuclear weapons, international law, or religious, moral or political beliefs regarding nuclear weapons, the Nuremberg principles developed after WWII, First Amendment protections, necessity or US policy regarding nuclear weapons.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, issued 8 July 1996, unanimously interprets the text of Article VI as implying that
"There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control."
> By the way, it's a really crappy air force that can't do an air strike with sleeping-gas bombs.
I daresay that would be a lot less effective than you might expect. See the Moscow theater hostage situation[1][2] for what happens when trying to use it on a fixed target with ground level access. Imagine how much harder that would be from an air-drop, and the concentration gradient you'd end up with. Individual dispensers, cluster-bomb style might help a bit, but I still think you'd end up killing anyone close-by if you wanted it strong enough to permeate buildings.
Calling in a heavy smoke/CS drop and then retreating might be a sensible option, although I don't think there's nearly enough (public) information for anyone to judge definitively on the correct course of action in this instance.
The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.
If "effective" includes "not killing innocent civilians" then sleeping gas would work much better than what they are dropping now.
If smoke or CS would work better, well it's the military's responsibility, not mine, to the the R&D to pick the right tool to protect civilians as required by law.
> The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.
Precisely. If anything, it's a much more easily controlled environment for gas diffusion, and allowed almost immediate entry by the special forces to clear the area. Even then, there were significant hostage fatalities (although in a large part due to medical staff not being timely informed of the nature of the gas, or provided with the antidote)
Achieving that level of consistency of dose (enough to work, not enough to kill) in a rural village environment, via air-dropped containers, is, IMO, utterly impossible.
I'm arguing against your suggestion of 'sleeping gas bombs' only, not that the indiscriminate bombing is/was the correct choice.
In addition, R&D only determines what you will have available maybe some time in the future. If you're in combat right now, you don't have the luxury of waiting 3-5 years for promising test-bench stuff to make it to your rucksack/support units.
If all you have is high-explosives, eventually everything looks like rubble.
If "effective" includes only "not killing civilians", opening a hot dog stand nearby would work as well. However, if it also includes "stop 400 Taliban fighters from shooting at us", the situation become a bit more complex. Smoke would just remove visibility. But Taliban don't need much visibility - they already know where the forces are, they were fighting for the whole day in the same setting, and they probably know the village inside out anyway. And they also don't care if they hit a civilian by mistake, so they can just keep shooting in general direction. And if you use some real active chemistry, the civilians - especially children - would be the ones hit the worst.
They don't have phasers that can be set on stun either.
There are chemicals, of course, that can cause loss of consciousness, but any that causes loss long enough to be effective against the force of 400 people hiding in urban setting, would kill most of the civilians. It's not random that when the human is anesthetized it is done in controlled setting by an experienced doctor with very precise mixture of chemicals - it is very dangerous to do it and exceeding dosage could be lethal or cause permanent harm. Military weapon can not adhere to such dose requirements so it will be either ineffective or extremely dangerous.
This was the easiest setting - everybody in one enclosed building and civilians can be treated within minutes after the attack is done. Imagine doing this in a complex urban setting, with multiple buildings, with 10 times as much enemies, where both enemy and civilians can be anywhere. It's just impossible to do without killing everybody and leaving the place a chemical wasteland.
And, of course, on top of that, if US military does it once, Talibans get gas masks. But civilians would not, so the only effect would be killing civilians.
His argument is that radical Islamists hate us for what we do, not who we are. But we do what we do because of who we are. That's nearly a tautology in a democracy. We support Israel because its people largely share our values. We threw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and maintained a presence in Saudi Arabia because we support and defend the sovereignty of our allies, particularly when those allies supply vital resources. We continued to prop up Mubarak because we thought he was better than the alternative, etc.
All of these are policies reached through a free, democratic process, which has not been a hallmark of those societies which have welcomed Al Qaeda into their midst.
Also, have you heard of Sayyid Qutb? Just curious.
Also remember when all the fatwas were proclaimed for a Danish newspapers publication of a cartoon featuring the Prophet Muhammad? That's not even considering the issue of extremist religion and Sharia law, as led to the shooting and near-murder of Malala Yousafzai.
Islamist culture is not entirely compatible with Western democracy, just as far-right fundamentalist Christian extremism is not entirely compatible with Western democracy (e.g. the 1996 Olympic Park bombing).
I'm using Islamist as the term was first defined, which means exactly "Islamic terrorism". As far as I know there's never been a popularly-agreed-on meaning of "Islamist" other than that, if you're referring to the peaceful followers of Allah the term is Muslim, or perhaps Islamic, but never Islamist.
Christian on the other hand is already overloaded with many meanings and I don't feel like inventing new words when I can simply add adjectives as appropriate.
"Islamism" certainly does not mean "Islamic terrorism". It means a belief that Islam should be a force in the public sphere, not just a private religion.
Well, it's certainly a pity that Islamic terrorism is a big enough threat that they had to invent a Huffman-coded word for it. Though perhaps we can treat it as a relief that Christian terrorism is no longer so prevalent that we had to make a shorter term for it after we invented 'terrorist'.
Though I hear 'Crusader' is a close equivalent among many Muslims, for obvious reasons. I don't think Americans or most West. Europeans would understand that as a negative connotation though.
So you are telling me that the "decadence" of modern Western society simply FORCED the USA to support the Shah, Mubarak, Ben Ali, the dictators of Bahrain etc etc etc down through history?
Like the Western world couldn't possibly have beer and miniskirts without installing dictators in or invading other countries?
If you think OBL would have been thrilled with a peaceful, democratic, Islamic world with all the freedoms and associated "decadence" we see in the West, just so long as the U.S. had never interfered there, I don't think you are seeing the whole picture.
Obviously the U.S. record in the Middle East is not spotless. But it's not as if we haven't been a force for good there on more than one occasion. The Suez Crisis comes to mind immediately, as does Desert Shield/Storm. Our record there isn't better or worse than our record in, say, Central and South America, yet for some reason, Nicaraguans and Chileans aren't blowing themselves up in Times Square.
In the Monkey King Legend the heroes are warned not to overwhelm the monster by a reference to the Art of War by Sun Zi.
If I remember correctly, the translation is "even a rat will fight if cornered", though today we might mutter something about "asymmetric warfare" in response to "full spectrum dominance".
Sun Zi wrote in about 500BC. So it's not like you were warned yesterday. You've had 2500 years of warning.
Expect kamikaze attacks. They happen. Especially from people who feel they have nothing to lose, and feel under attack from very, very strong opponents.
But they don't. Not from the Vietnamese, nor the Indians nor are the Gabonese. Nor the Chileans and Nicaraguans, as was pointed out in the comment I originally responded to.
But they did from the Vietnamese, when the Vietnamese were occupied.
And try googling for "suicide attack India" or "suicide attack Kashmir" or "suicide attack Sri Lanka", you'll find plenty of hits.
Just because South Americans haven't done it (yet) (that we know of), it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Like I told you, you've had at least 2500 years warning.
Hell, there's even the American saying "Give me Liberty or give me Death!"
I have referenced academic study on this topic elsewhere, go read it.
Occupation is one reason the kamikaze may feel like a cornered rat. Indirect occupation is another.
This can be because the perpetrator (USA) is giving weapons to the actual occupier (Israel), because the perpetrator is implementing a sanctions/embargo regime amounting to a mediaeval siege that killed half a million, mostly children (Iraq) or because the perpetrator has installed a "government" in your country to do the occupation for it (Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Ethiopia etc etc etc Saudi Arabia).
If you google for the jihadis' motives, you'll find that they mention all three.
Given that the actual 911 attackers were Saudis, I would have thought that US sponsored tyranny in Saudi Arabia would have been their main motive, but it appears that they were significantly motivated by fellow-feeling for Palestinians.
It is not an excuse if the guy is ready to throw himself and an airplane into a building for it. That means the guy is pretty sincere. The word you are looking for is motive.
The fact that you do not find their motives "reasonable" intrigues me. Is it their methods you disagree with, or their grievances?
If you think their grievances are not legitimate, does it change when you substitute "gold rush" for "oil rush" and "red skin" for "rag head"?
(By the way I'm not thrilled about getting bombed. I almost lost a friend in Boston.)
> It is not an excuse if the guy is ready to throw himself and an airplane into a building for it. That means the guy is pretty sincere. The word you are looking for is motive.
The human unconscious is a mysterious place.
> The fact that you do not find their motives "reasonable" intrigues me. Is it their methods you disagree with, or their grievances?
I disagree with deliberately targeting civilians. I also think the worldview of these perpetrators is rather distant from reality.
> If you think their grievances are not legitimate, does it change when you substitute "gold rush" for "oil rush" and "red skin" for "rag head"?
(c) you can only condemn the violence if you would not do the same thing in their place.
To me, that means you should be able to sell them a peaceful method as being more effective than jihad. Well, we have a historical record.
The peaceful, liberal, pro-democratic reformers in the middle east seem to have gotten defeated and tortured by the CIA and their local satraps. Like what happened to my family.
On the other hand Jihad seems to be winning in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and so on.
The relative I was thinking of was an activist for constitutional democracy and against absolute monarchy. Don't know what happened to him in prison; he doesn't talk about it.
TL;DR People do not run kamikaze attacks against other people for being less religiously conservative than they are, they run kamikaze attacks against occupiers.
Pray tell, which Islamic nations was the U.S. "occupying" on 9/11? We're getting way off topic, re: decadence and "hating freedom", but let me try to bring it back. Why blow up the World Trade Center? Surely that was a symbolic act, against a quintessentially civilian target.
As I've stated elsewhere, and as you can find by googling what jihadis actually say about their motives, the motive for 911 included the occupation of Palestine and US enabling of it.
And if they wanted to make a symbolic attack, they would have hit the Statue of Liberty, not financial and military targets like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Furthermore it is you who are taking things off-topic.
The topic was jlgreco commenting about the Granai massacre, and how resistance in Afghanistan is because (sarcastically) "they hate us for our freedoms"
You tried to make it out that "Western Decadence" in fact was the reason, which is plain WRONG and contradicted by authorities which I have cited and provided references for.
You have repeatedly attempted to derail the point by going off on a tangent about Osama Ben Laden's psychology, or why Nicaraguans haven't reacted the same way, despite all of my efforts to stick to the topic. The 911 example is a similar red herring, because NO Afghans, Taleban or otherwise, were involved in that attack.
> As I've stated elsewhere, and as you can find by googling what jihadis actually say about their motives, the motive for 911 included the occupation of Palestine and US enabling of it.
It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what's true, and it matters what's right.
It's as though you defend a child's tantrum because the child explained "my mummy didn't buy me any sweeties".
You think jihadis are in truth really pleased about how Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, how they can't get their homes back and how they're treated like dirt everyday?
That's retarded, they're mad as hell about it, and as it happens many non-terrorist Middle Easterners are mad as hell about it too. If you doubt that, read the 2004 Pentagon Defense Science Board Report.
Furthermore, many non-Middle Easterners are mad as hell about it too. Many jews are mad as hell about it as well, as you can see from looking up eg mondoweiss.net
Finally, many Americans - including veterans and ex-intelligence personnel - are mad as hell about the American money and lives being expended to harm the Middle East on Israel's behalf, which you can see by looking up eg The Council for the National Interest.
There are a lot of videos on youtube taken by US/British/Whoever troops with helmet cameras on youtube where they get sucked into a gunfight. I've watched a few, usually linked to me by reddit or family members who are in the military. Generally the way it goes is that the camera man will be walking around with his buddies, cracking the crude jokes you would expect, and all of a sudden a mortar round lands near them or the dirt in front of them starts getting whipped up by bullets. Everyone scrabbles and starts firing at various adjacent hilltops or ridges. Fairly intense stuff.
The part that gets me though is how the videos are always labelled. It is always "Gun battle with Al Qaeda" or "Taliban sneak attack"* or whatnot. I don't blame the camera man and company for shooting back or anything, but where are they getting the "Al Qaeda/Taliban" part from? It is not like the attackers are wearing uniforms (or can even be seen in most cases...) It really does seem to be implicitly assumed that anyone who sees value in shooting at foreign troops in their country must be members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. This rubs me incredibly wrong.
Sexism is if you're Noether in 1915 and you can't get a faculty postion because you're a woman.
Sexism is not if you are being a nag and you get called a bitch as a result. The guy in the story just sounds like a jerk who wasn't taking his TA responsibility seriously.
Finally, even if there were sexism in that one CS departmenT it wouldn't mean that there's hidden sexism in CS departmentS. That's just stupidity and assumption.
Because one female had a problem in one CS department, she implies the same problem exists everywhere from Timbuktu to Helsinki?
Sexism can manifest itself in many ways, and the subtle ways arent less legitimate concerns just because it could be worse. "At least youre not getting beaten, be thankful for that".
Sexism can totally be if you are a "nag" and get called a "bitch"!
Talking about an isolated relatively minor situation with the lens of sexism becomes difficult, because without establishing a pattern of behavior, its hard to determine if the situation is sexism or not.
What happens when many females encounter similar attitudes in many CS work spaces. Will we still deny that society isnt perfect?
That's just an unbacked assertion; come back with something better.
"nag" and get called a "bitch"!
If you are a nag you probably deserve to get called a bitch. I'm fairly certain if I nag like the OP, I'll get called a bitch, and I'm not a girl. If that's sexism, I supposed it's misandry if I get called a dick. Lame.
What happens when many females encounter similar attitudes in many CS work spaces
What happens is that it will be demonstrable with a valid statistical test, instead of being stretched from one anecdote to a complaint about CS DepartmentS in general, which the idiotic OP did. I'm waiting for you to produce the stats.
"Come back with something better", "I am waiting on you to produce the stats", "<crickets/>"
...um, why would I want to engage in a discussion with someone who communicates like this?
Also before you insult people's arguments by attempting to devalue them as assertions lacking proof, make sure you are also not guilty of the same. You use a lot of absolute language for someone concerned with evidence.
Lots of things in life cant be proved, does that mean we cant talk about them like mature and curious adults?
It was abuse, using a misogynistic word, in a department where there is already a dearth of women due to the hostility they face. Brushing it under the carpet by denying her experience isn't helpful. You don't need to read this story to learn of sexism in CS departments, just ask any woman who does computer science and you can hear plenty of stories.
Right, but it's an anecdote. The title of the piece suggests some sort of comprehensive study, but fails to deliver anything beyond a single story of friction between two people (one of whom clearly has women issues).
Its more about what was communicated/interpreted than the actual words.
Take for instance: "I'm not going to let some bitch tell me what to do" vs. "Hey bitches, whats up?"
the first statement could communicate that the speaker has issues with females telling him what to do. The second statement is playful and affectionate.
However, because the word bitch is so generic and well used, the first speaker could easily only have issues with unpleasant people, not females. Its not clear.
That's why it is better to talk about a person's pattern of behavior, rather than labeling an isolated incident as sexism.
where there is already a dearth of women due to the hostility they face
Where the hell did you pull that from? I suppose there's a "dearth" of men in nursing too? Can I infer an epidemic of misandry because we don't have 50% male nurses? Ludicrous.
just ask any woman
Yeah, because the plural of anecdote is data </sarcasm>
If you think Salafist Afghanistan, Kohmeinist Iran and Baathist Iraq had anything in common then you know jack shit.
That's like comparing Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the US colonies in Cotton Mather's time, sticking them all into one big pot because they are all "Christian". Idiocy.
You miss the point: It's not that all the
versions of Islam and Islamic governments
are alike. Instead, it's that in the more
backward Islamic countries, Islam is essentially
all the culture there is. And Islam is not
just a religion but is also into law,
government, education, etc. So, in such a country, Islam
is about all the culture there is and can
block, actively or just passively by default,
essentially all progress.
As you point out, there are still some differences.
But what is in common is that Islam, in whatever
flavors, is so strong, and not just a
religion, and essentially all the
culture there is, is able to block progress.
Look, to be more clear, the problem is not
just Islam. Instead, the Roman Catholics ran
everything in Western Europe for hundreds of
years, were corrupt, blocked progress, and
finally Europe got out of it, after religious wars,
etc.
The point is not that Islam is a bad religion,
even if it is. Instead the point is that to
run a good society, need a good culture, and that
culture needs to come from much more than just
some religious clerics. A religious state,
Roman Catholic, Islamic, or anything else, just
will not be a successful state. In the countries
where Islam is the only culture, Islam needs
to shrink back to being just a religion, hopefully
one of several, and let the culture have other
inputs besides just religion. Got it now?
Don't patronize me. You wrote a screed justifying bombing the hell out of civilians because you didn't like their speech. Somewhere in your moral bankruptcy, you wrote
So, in an Islamic country, take away Islam, and there's no culture at all and, then, just chaos
This was your characterization of Iran and Iraq, which showed that you don't know jack. It also won't work for Turkey or Malaysia.
By the way, "nation building" failed in Germany as well, largely because Americans are hypocrites who SAY "nation building" and DO war profiteering, corruption and vindictiveness. The result was Adolf Hitler.
So the US had to fight another World War with Germany, and after getting their asses kicked so badly by the Axis, and coming close to losing in several ways, the US decided in 1945 to do actual nation building in half good faith, hence the Marshall Plan. This time round, it succeeded in Germany and Japan.
Unfortunately, the US forgot this lesson by 9/11, so when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, they went back to "nation building" by Blackwater XE and Halliburton, with predictable results.
That's federalism, not nationalism.
Nationalism is "Deutschland Uber Alles"