Moderator: Global Moderator
+1.Coffee wrote: You're wrong. They are expansionist in nature. They seek to install Sharia law in any land they live in, once they acquire great enough numbers. It's happening already in the UK and Dearbornistan, Michigan. It happened in Egypt recently, except that the Army was able to push them out. It happened in Afghanistan.
Well it looks like he's said he's an independent. So I'm happy to go with that.TennPaGa wrote:Surely you don't think Coffee is a conservative. He's not.Pointedstick wrote: conservatives use to refer to libertarians?
He's a neocon.
It's a mistake to pretend that Muslims beliefs or behavior, or any human behavior, represents a single spike on the far end of a spectrum Coffee. That has no basis in fact regardless what your personal prejudices may have led you to believe.Simonjester wrote:whose "leaders" are nuttier than nutter-butter, it may not change way we have to deal with the country much now, but it is a important distinction, the Persians were at one time very western and reasonable people and if they wouldn't get shot or disappeared for doing so, many likely still would be...Coffee wrote: This was designed to put pressure on Iran (who are nuttier than nutter-butter and we do not want to have nukes).
I assume we're leaving out drone strikes, doors kicked in in some Afghanistan village and whatever we might be doing at our 1,000+ foreign military bases that we will never know about, right?Coffee wrote: Number of terrorist attacks in the past week committed in the name of Judaism or Christianity: Zero.
Name calling is a cognitive bias and a technique to promote propaganda. Propagandists use the name-calling technique to incite fears or arouse positive prejudices with the intent that invoked fear (based on fearmongering tactics) or trust will encourage those that read, see or hear propaganda to construct a negative opinion, in respect to the former, or a positive opinion, with respect to the latter, about a person, group, or set of beliefs or ideas that the propagandist would wish the recipients to believe. The method is intended to provoke conclusions and actions about a matter apart from an impartial examinations of the facts of the matter. When this tactic is used instead of an argument, name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against an idea or belief, based upon its own merits, and becomes an argumentum ad hominem.TennPaGa wrote:Surely you don't think Coffee is a conservative. He's not.Pointedstick wrote: conservatives use to refer to libertarians?
He's a neocon.
Are you implying that we are targeting civilians and that we're doing it in the name of Christianity, somehow? I'll assume not.MediumTex wrote:I assume we're leaving out drone strikes, doors kicked in in some Afghanistan village and whatever we might be doing at our 1,000+ foreign military bases that we will never know about, right?Coffee wrote: Number of terrorist attacks in the past week committed in the name of Judaism or Christianity: Zero.
Regardless of whether or not this is true (it may well be), don't you think that the drone strikes terrorize affected communities and serve as a potent recruitment tool for future terrorism? Especially when innocents are killed… I mean how would you feel about the federal government if they killed your spouse/parents/children/siblings while attempting to apprehend a criminal?Mdraf wrote: Even ultra liberals like the president have come to understand that drone strikes at the terrorists wherever they may be is an effective pre-emptive defense against homeland attacks.
I would suggest that this strategy is fatally flawed when the target country is full of poor ignorant people who are already close to the tipping point of supporting terrorists. Push too hard and cause too much collateral damage you end up converting the local population to your enemies' cause faster than you can kill them. Then you need to formally declare war and just kill all of them and stop pretending it's some kind of targeted international police action.Mdraf wrote: Your guiding principle in such conflicts is to use the military to push back the terrorists long enough to win over the local population with a nation building exercise. This program has never worked out for the United States, but that doesn’t mean that generations of military leaders don’t insist on going through the motions of applying it anyway.
I'm not saying we should seek the moral high ground. Obviously the business of war is killing people and breaking their stuff. What I am saying is that if a particular strategy of killing people and breaking their stuff happens to result in the production of more people who need to be killed and whose stuff needs to be broken in order to achieve the original goal, then the goal cannot be achieved because attempts to attain it result in it becoming more and more difficult.Mdraf wrote: Seeking the moral high ground is a fool's quest. Wars cannot be fought without hurting someone and trumpeting your morality makes it all too easy for your enemies to charge you with hypocrisy.
No. But we stopped carpet bombing in Vietnam. If we resumed it with drones I would definitely expect Vietnamese terrorism.Coffee wrote: Why? Do drone strikes cause more collateral damage than carpet bombing we did in Vietnam?
What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter. If your brother is blown up in a drone strike, are you going to say to yourself, "Well, at least those Americans spent billions of dollars developing precision-guided munitions, or else my sister and mother might have gotten it too!" ?Coffee wrote: Even with conventional rockets, when terrorists hide behind schools and hospitals, do you think counter strikes at those targets create less collateral damage than drones?
Yes, I think it is. Is this really a realistic expectation? If a country is being aggressed against by a foreign power and a small subset of the population becomes terrorists, I would expect sympathies to run deep for the terrorists--who of course will be considered freedom fighters or revolutionaries.Coffee wrote: I understand what you're trying to say, I just think it's phooey. Any civilized people would turn to the terrorists hiding in their midst and say, "Get out! You're endangering us... and we will not stand for it!"
Is that really too much to ask?
Thank you for illustrating the problem with knee-jerk reactions to slogans.Reub wrote:This is why I could never be a Libertarian. We would be pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler's successors if this line of reasoning won out in the past.MediumTex wrote: What exactly is our beef with Iran?
Yes, they are sponsors of international terrorism, but has any of it been against the U.S.?
Yes, Iran has probably made life more difficult for U.S. forces in Iraq, but perhaps that is a good argument for simply getting U.S. forces out of Iraq.
Yes, Iran has probably been trying to develop a nuclear weapon. Is that not their prerogative as a sovereign state? Have they signed any treaties agreeing not to do that? (maybe they have, I just don't know).
Sometimes it's useful to take a step back from an enemy and make sure you remember exactly why he is your enemy. The truth with the U.S. and Iran probably has more to do with other Middle East countries (i.e., Arab countries) wanting the U.S. to act as its bodyguard against Iran (i.e., a Persian country).
The thing that puzzles me about the Persian/Arab tensions, though, is if they are all Muslims, what's the problem? Surely the will of Allah is that all Muslims should love and respect one another, right? (I thought it was the infidels who were supposed to get the rough treatment.)
