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Chomsky: spying does not protect you

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Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#71
post #55
post #13

Favorite quote: "Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists maybe in history." "Suppose you are walking down the street and you don't know whether two minutes from now the guy across the street and everything around him is going to be blown away by a sudden explosion run by somebody a couple thousand miles away. You're terrorized. And in fact villages, regions, countries are terrorized by these [dro…

OK, I can understand Chomsky's argument that drone strikes should be classed as a terrorist operations. But the 'biggest in history'? What about the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the rape of Nankin or the genocide of Cambodia?

Terror and murder count don't go hand in hand. They are rather orthogonal.

There were murdering regimes that murdered without sowing too much terror through the population because they were good at hiding and squashing the news. As people disappeared news did spread but it was always rumors that could be dismissed.

Then there is terror -- a single death using a particular technique or weapon withe the particular amount of publicity could be very terrorizing. It is is always attacks on small-town America. Imagine this news story "Cuban drone killed a young family in the small town Idaho because it was believe to be the hiding spot of (Luis Posada Carriles)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles], a known terrorist sheltered and protected by the US government"

Ok, so one family killed. Now imagine the terror, the talking heads ("experts") on TV, the news channels, the presidential address, declarations of war, additional security checks etc etc.

See the difference?

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#72
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can argue all day if its worse for civilians to be killed by drones or the Taliban, but they are still dead. Except in one situation it's not "us" killing them. Or our tax dollars paying for the flying killer robots that do the job.

The killer robots are inevitable, at least they are an improvement on the more imprecise F-22 airstrikes (we now have precision to make real mistakes, before mistakes were inevitable because we lacked precision). On the other hand, we are just a few steps away from SkyNet. But the issue is should we be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq at all, or just let those countries go to hell by themselves? Civilians die either…

Sure, but "at least try and do something" seems to always result in the US military killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

I'm not saying isolationism/non-interventionism is the best way, but the US doesn't seem to be able to follow up "let's do something" with anything other than a big remote-controlled radar-invisible flying death party.

How about no.

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