61–70 of 100 posts
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Well, if the Russian's are targeting terrorists (those people who attack civilians) then we should applaud their efforts for saving civilian lives.
If it's an armed conflict between two groups of people who both consider themselves "citizens" of their locale and another country steps in, is it their right to decide which are the citizens and which are the terrorists?
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In World War II bombings targeted civilians, and were designed in such a way to inflict firestorms and terror. By body count alone drones and IEDs are quite tame. http://www.amazon.com/The-Bombers-Bombed-Allied-1940-1945/dp...
It is true that if you consider Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the situation has much improved since then.
Two firebombing runs on Tokyo alone killed more people than the atomic bombs, and by the time of Hiroshima, almost every major city in Japan had been hit, some almost totally burned out.
The firebombing of Japan was so brutal that the Japanese supreme war council didn't even bother to convene until three days after Hiroshima - when the Soviet Union entered the war. Apart from being a new type of bomb, Hiroshima did not stand out as a substantial escalation.
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Well, if the Russian's are targeting terrorists (those people who attack civilians) then we should applaud their efforts for saving civilian lives.
Even if you make the assumptions that killing terrorists is always a good thing, that it is possible to accurately identify terrorists, that it is possible to kill them without collateral damage, etc... How do you know if they are honest about their intentions? Just take Putin's word for it?
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I'm glad someone said it, but I have the feeling that if anyone could have slowed or reversed the national infection, Eisenhower would have been that person. (It would have been unreasonable to expect of Truman, anyway.) It makes me wonder if Ike actually even considered the MIC a problem during most of his presidency, or whether perhaps it was only when they stopped taking his calls as a lame duck that he had his ep…
It's easy to blame him, but he had surprisingly little power to stop it. The President (then, as now) could point it at any target he wished, but could do little to shut it down. Congress is where the true power lies. They could, with a single vote, shut down any and all of it. Blame them. Or, if you rather, blame yourself for voting the wrong people into Congress.
At this point, the only way to stop these particular pigs from feeding at the trough would be to destroy the trough. That will happen eventually, but you might not enjoy it.
I think there is a limit to putting real robots on the battlefield, humans will always be necessary. It's always been possible to get the support of citizens and sometimes foreign government support by having real humans in the field doing humanitarian work. This cannot be replaced by dumb robots, a human face will be required to work with machines or else they will always be seen as inferior and untrustworthy.
I could see the US Government eventually having ATLAS style robots with tablets / large screens for faces, kind of like robocop but the soldier would just be remote controlling the robot.
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Even if you make the assumptions that killing terrorists is always a good thing, that it is possible to accurately identify terrorists, that it is possible to kill them without collateral damage, etc... How do you know if they are honest about their intentions? Just take Putin's word for it?
Well, at times there will be collateral damage when targeting terrorists just as when targeting other enemy combatants. Sure, Putin's (or any other's intent) is a different matter, but on the whole, any country should be allowed to use drones or any other technology to target individuals who target their civilians (eg, terrorists) as well as their military and infrastructure. What they do not have the right to do is…
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So Heroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist attacks?
IIRC both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because it would hurt japanese military the most. Back in those days a plenty of civilians died anyway during regular bomb raids. But yeah, to some extent is probably was a terrorist attack.
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Terrorists often hit military targets as well (Khobar towers, Beirut Marine barracks, etc.). Throughout most of "the troubles" the IRA targeted the military or police, should they not have been considered terrorists? The techniques of terrorists (say: car bombings) are shockingly little different in practice from drone strikes. Sure, certainly the intent is very different, but the result is nevertheless a disturbingl…
The IRA, INLA and their equivalents on the other side of the sectarian line such as the UVF were always considered terrorists here in the UK. [NB That's not to say I can't understand the violent reaction of the members of the Nationalist community - even if I am appalled by what they often chose to do]
During Obama's administration alone (6 years) more than 2400 people have been killed by US drone strikes, nearly 300 of them civilians (89% "terrorists"/military). Certainly that is a better ratio than the IRA, but the fact that we are willingly waging such a devastating war with significant "collateral damage" (in another 6 years or so we will have killed as many civilians as the IRA did) with so little public debate or oversight should be chilling to anyone.