You haven't differentiated a riot from an insurrection. You're suggesting that a riot is the same as a non-violent sit in now which is not credible.

Historically, riots have been dealt with using military forces. That goes back to ancient times. The legions were used on occasion if things got really out of hand.

And in any case, if you use the police as I said in the first place, you don't need the national guard.

Things only got so out of hand that the national guard had to step in because the fucking stupid mayor said "give them space to destroy"... she later lied about her orders which are on record both in a press release and in her official memos to the police. Now, if you back off and don't deal with a riot, it gets out of hand very quickly.

Mob mentality is similar to herd mentality in cattle. They're cowards indvividually but they feel invincible in groups. They will retreat if they think their fellows are retreating.

To break them, you need to panic the crowd and fill them with fear. The same way you herd cattle.

Were they as stupid as cattle you could use whips and dogs. But because they're human beings... some tear gas will break up the crowd. Anyone dumb or angry enough to chock through the tear gas and want to keep fighting can get tackled and zip tied.

You do not need to shoot them. Tear gas and zip ties.

As to whether degrees of murder are all murder... yes and no. They're all murder but they're all different types of murder.

And in the case of a riot it is not a fucking insurrection. It is a bunch of angry people that created enough chaos that the latent criminal elements in society that are always suppressed by law enforcement and slip their tether and go wild.

The vast majority of people smashing and stealing stuff are doing it because they want to smash and steal. Not because they want to make a point or because they want take control of the government. That's just anarchy. And you respond to anarchy with order.

Given that most of the opposition to nuclear power is green lobby hysteria... I kind of feel like ignoring the green lobby and going nuclear anyway is basically option 1.

A large portion of the green lobby are the same people that were pushing Malthus's discredited theories. A collection of ideological Luddite zealots. And I have a hard time taking anything seriously that they're involved in... they're too crazy. Let them talk long enough and they'll start talking about mass sterilizations and stuff. It gets crazier the longer you let them talk. Turtles all the way down.

Don't take my word for it... engage one and let them vent. They'll get to the bit where they start advocating genocide. Its always a bit surreal for me. I had this nice young women talking to me about and eventually... she was talking about killing people by the fucking billions. Madness.

Oh my... do you really want to talk about the cold war?

Yes, the US did undermine democracies during the cold war but only when they were seen to be allied with Soviets. I mean, would we have bombed the shit out of Germany during WW2 if Hitler had been Democratically elected? It doesn't really matter.

It was basically WW3 but played out over a generation because we were all to shit scared to go nuclear. So we had a dozen proxy wars all over the planet, did all sorts of nasty economic things to each other, and infested each other with spies, psy ops programs, and other assorted shit.

Would it matter to you if I pointed out that a fair number of democracies were subverted by the soviets as well? I think not. Would it matter if I said that the calculation was that if the soviets gained a foothold they'd use it to project power and undermine other countries?

I don't know what to say to you. The cold war is complicated and the tendency for people that like to talk shit about it is to take a forest for the trees perspective where they only want to look at one tree and not acknowledge that there was a wider struggling going on that rendered that tree little more than collateral damage.

Now, here someone is going to say "but they're people!"... they always are... when you say collateral damage the point is not to dehumanize the situation but to acknowledge that sometimes when you do a thing people are going to get hurt.

Beyond that, a lot of the democratic regimes are fucking crazy and not much use to their own people. A modern example would be Venezuela. A country that has been begging the US to topple them for about 20 years. Not that we want to... its sort of pathetic. They just sit there doing absurd things and then swearing up and down that the Evil Americans are going to invade at any time. And every time they have a problem wtih anything... who did it? America.

They are currently rationing water... in the middle of a jungle. Which is a little like rationing sand in the desert. But if your government is completely incompetent, then anything is possible.

Regardless, if you want to bring up an incident, expect it to be connected to the cold war if relevant, and the issue to be gone through in more detail then you probably expected was possible.

The issues are not as black and white as you likely expect. And sometimes there are no good answers. Sometimes to save the world you have to push some old ladies down the stairs. You don't enjoy it while you do it. But you do it because you have to.

And that's not to say the US hasn't made mistakes or on occasion done some nasty shit.

But who amongst our peers has a better record? Name another world power in history that has tried as hard as us to be nice guys. Often as not when the US is compared to someone we're compared to Canada or Finland or something. That's a bullshit comparison.

You'd have to compare us against the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the Holy Roman empire, the Ancient Roman empire, the Mogul empire, the Islamic Caliphate... etc.

That is, if we're being judged for topping countries, please don't compare us against countries that couldn't topple other countries if they tried.

... Stop and read first. The issue isn't that they're women but that they're almost always women and they're presuming to talk about gender issues. Not women issues. But often as not men. It used to be called women's studies and just like the Department of War, changing the name doesn't actually change the nature of the beast.

The gender studies programs are generally speaking dominated by women, most of them are academic feminists, and frankly it isn't science.

They're basically like creationists in that they have a set ideology and they go around looking for evidence to confirm their bias.

If we all agree it is bullshit when the creationists do that, then can we please show a little common sense and knock the women's studies programs for doing the same thing?

Frankly, I don't see why we have the programs in the first place. The whole thing is properly a subset of anthropology which is probably why the women's studies programs HATE anthropologists. Seriously. Bring up anthropology in front of them... they'll vomit straight in your face, their heads will spin around a few times, and they'll start climbing around on the ceiling.

Its frankly another bullshit science that gets subsidized by undergraduates that are forced to to take the course and then have zero use for in the rest of their lives. And while you could say the same thing for anthropology of philosophy, at least there is some intellectual integrity in those fields where as in women's studies its just propaganda, group think, and often as not hate speech filtered through so many hipsterish orwellian terms that you don't actually understand the depth of fuckery until you've unpacked all the inherent assumptions.

Doubtless someone wants to disagree? Bring it on. :D

Sure, but is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute? It is only relevant if an absolute and not particular to whomever you're talking about.

For example, the Imperial Japanese were experimenting with Germ warfare prior to their defeat. Was that wrong or merely wrong because the Japanese did it? See what I'm saying?

So when you refer to something, please don't simply refer to whomever did it but rather explain what about what was done made it wrong.

For example if a soldier shoots another soldier in the face... is that wrong? What if one of the soldiers were a Nazi? See? Making moral judgements is very hard in these matters unless you keep a very clear mind about it.

As to the Hague, it only exists because the allies made it relevant. This presumption that there is such a thing as international law outside of the Western hegemony is naive. These laws are only binding because the great powers enforce them. That is literally the only thing that makes any of it relevant at all. So saying the US should be taken in for war crimes when the US doesn't agree with your judgement is contradictory. There is no world government. There is no justice. There is just us.

As to your idea of killing a few CIA people... well, I gave you the options.

You can either accept the interrogations or the CIA is going to go to plan B. You can't really stop it. You can fume and be mad about it I guess, but I don't see that as especially productive.

The alternative solutions are:

1. Doing nothing.
2. Pretending to reduce CO2 emissions while not actually doing it because the instant anyone tries they suddenly realize they can't afford to do the thing they set out to do... so they just make it LOOK like they're doing it.
3. Geo engineering.

Choose any of the three.

I prefer 1 or 3 because 2 is just 1 with pretensions.

yes, torture is wrong... However, if I am interrogating someone, I not inherently torturing them. What is more, if I use a psychologist to help me interrogate people better, I am further not torturing someone.

Look, the DoD funds a lot of scientific research in the US. Robotics, physics, computer science, atomic physics, biological research, medicine, etc.

Why is it right for all those scientists to help the DoD but not psychologists? If a psychologist knows how to break a hardened terrorist in a shorter amount of time without inflicting lasting harm on the person... then why would I not do it?

These are people it should be noted that in most cases we would have killed outright in the field if we didn't think they had value in interrogation.

A lot of this anti interrogation stuff is just going to encourage the CIA to do two things:

1. You're going to see more black sites in proxy countries that will keep the whole thing secret and even if it does come out we'll just say they were in a Polish jail or something.

2. We'll just kill them outright rather than bothering to interrogate them.

With the interrogation, we get the potential of learning more about what is going on so that we can be more effective at shutting down terror cells. And there is a potential that the person can be released to live an otherwise peaceful life.

You side against interrogation entirely and both of those things go out the window.

Choose.

I had a friend that quit psychology because he couldn't perform experiments. A lot of it is ethics considerations.

Imagine a chemist having to worry about the ethics of the chemicals he was studying? The problem with psychology is that to do a proper experiment, you might need to break someone's mind to learn what is going on. But that is unethical and so you can't really do serious study into the human mind in most cases.

Consider medicine if they were unable to ever harm a human body and if the body couldn't be studied after death?

There's no such thing as a dead mind you can study and take apart to learn how it works. That is how doctors first started. They worked on the dead to understand how they were put together so they could heal the living.

The other place things were learned was in the triage tents of the legions. Men would be brought in with stab wounds, blunt trauma to the skull, etc... and the doctors were asked to save as many soldiers as they could.

For psychology to be as real of a science as medicine... we're going to have to have the gloves taken off. But that won't happen.

Even the largely harmless tests in the 60s and 70s on college students were considered to be too harmful and unethical. So we can't do anything anymore.

Most of the studies I've seen are statistical studies. And frankly that is everything that is wrong with modern science. Nearly all the statistical studies I've seen were bullshit due to poor handling of the methodology and mistaking the belief that a given conclusion was likely on little more than the bias of the researchers than on whether or not the conclusion had actually been proven.

The man just said, there is a problem in psychology. And that is just one. I think if they can start repeating the experiments a bit more they might make the science less full of shit. But ultimately given that they can't really tear someone's mind apart and then put it back together... I don't think they're really going to learn much.

If you need someone to hold your hand that is one thing. However, that isn't why I go to see a doctor.

It is a requirement that you know they're bad people. So in the case of your charity example, you'd have to show that whomever you wanted to charge with this knew the money was going to terrorists.

... *sigh*... okay, then how is this different from a riot?

I think you're just latching on to insurrection because it has fewer negative connotations which is basically linguistic pathos. I find this type of meaningless rhetoric to be counter productive.

A thing is what a thing is indifferent to whatever you call it. I can call something great a pile of shit or I can call a pile of shit something great... it is still going to be itself.

I find no positive or redeeming qualities in this "incident" nor do I find the participants in it to be someone I can sympathize with. I can empathize with anything. I can empathize with a monster if I want. But sympathy? This was stupid.

You have the King family amongst others citing the whole thing as counter productive.

Defending a riot accomplishes nothing. This "insurrection" as you wish to style it has no value or meaning.

Whether or not the police were even guilty of anything is still debatable. And for the sake of argument if they were blameless, consider the moral and ethical consequences to your "insurrection" if it acted without provocation or justification OF ANY KIND.

Frankly, I think you're sticking your dick in a moral garbage disposal and flipping the switch. It won't end well.

The NSA thought the same thing and has found it to be more complicated than that.

Psychology can be a real science though. It just has to preform experiments and limit its theorizing to the data.

Furthermore, statistical data is vastly over used and really should be reduced radically in its application. Especially data that is mined from other studies and re-appropriated for other purposes. The mishandling of statistics is something I think we've all seen and I'm sick of it.

Doesn't matter.

That's a struggle for anyone that wants to organize a protest.

Look at the protests put on my MLK jr. He was a big fan of sit ins for example. He'd have all his people sit down somewhere and then King would lead them in a prayer or a sermon or something. And anyone standing up and acting crazy was understood to not be part of his protest.

What is more, if anything crazy started to happen, he would tell his people to go home immediately.

His family has actually been very outspoken in these latest racial issues. Ferguson and Baltimore got responses from the King family and they said in both situation that the protesters should have gone home or organized very differently because the whole thing is indistinguishable from a riot which is counter productive.

If someone is providing "material support" to terrorists then fuck them. Lets say Osama bin ladin is living in my house and I know it is him... and I and feeding him and giving him cover. That is an example of material support. If you're doing that... then allow me to say on behalf of the American people, that you can eat all the fucking dicks.

Exactly why is this a bad thing? I don't get it. Someone explain this to me?

Does material support not mean what I think it means? I don't understand.