Well, the one thing the US has never understood is that basically all opposition it faces is because nobody likes a primitive bully
Oh sure. The guys who are throwing acid in women's faces, beating men for dressing too western, and burning schoolgirls alive in their classrooms
I don't know how I could have missed that. I must be just as stupid as the US.
people who have a life tend to not become terrorists.
Seriously? Have you looked at the bios of any of the 9/11 terrorists?
Why is it that any time this kind of topic pops up on slashdot, obvious bullshit gets modded up as insightful?
These are not the 1930s or 1940s. We are not fighting countries but loosely connected groups.
Yes, we're being more proactive. To use the WW2 analogy, it's as if we're attacking Hitler and his brown-shirts before he managed to get elected as leader of Germany.
I suppose you'd rather we wait until after?
Before anyone says "but 9/11", let me: Why did they pick the US as a target?
They didn't. Only America-centric ignoramuses think that Al Qaeda only targets Americans. The rest of us know that Al Qaeda has attacked dozens of countries, and is more than happy to kill and maim the citizens of any nation which gets in their way.
Because the US has been mucking about in their countries for decades.
Additionally, only America-centric ignoramuses think that the entire Middle East and Southeast Asia is composed of countries which belong to Al Qaeda.
How many innocent foreigners are you willing to sacrifice to save 1 US citizen? 3000 people died in 9/11 and we've killed at least 100x that to prevent another attack. It seems just a tad over board to me.
2,400 people died at Perl Harbour, and you killed 1,000x that to prevent another attack. That's kinda the point of a defensive war - to kill the other guys so they'll stop killing you.
If you were thinking you would realise that drone strikes on a civilian population - on women, on children, on funerals, on weddings - recruit a thousand terrorists for every one they kill.
No, that's stupid. Terrorist attacks and other militant intimidation tactics in those nations kill orders of magnitude more civilians than any of our efforts have. By your logic, that should have created millions of people actively fighting against the terrorist groups - certainly far, far more than those who fight alongside them.
Arguments like that are just smart-sound rhetoric that ignorant westerners like to repeat so that they can feel good about supposedly being "anti-war". The real world doesn't work that way.
The police will find you guilty of something. It is their job to find you guilty of something.
Yes, if you refuse to cooperate they certainly will find you guilty of something. Nothing pisses a cop off more than some pompous ass who refuses to answer questions. If you piss him off enough I'm sure there will be more than enough evidence "discovered" to convict you without any testimony.
After all, we're chasing the benchmarks established by plants.
You can't be serious. Even the commonly used panels are about an order of magnitude more efficient than plants. If plants are our benchmark, we surpassed it ages ago.
And, if I may cite Wikipedia
You may, but I'm not sure how exactly that quote helps you. Carlson's assessment of Rogers' personality has zero bearing on the situation. Rogers' was informed by his officers that his ship was being targeted by an Iranian F-14. As he was already engaged in hostilities with Iranian gunships (which had attacked him) at the time, that assessment certainly wouldn't have seemed unbelievable. Under the circumstances, he had 2 options:
1. Surrender, and hope they don't sink him anyway.
2. Fire in self defence.
I know people like you would like to pretend that there was a third option - sticking his fingers in his ears and hoping it would all go away - but that's why you're a keyboard warrior and not a ships commander. The shootdown order was the only reasonable action under the circumstances. If you can't understand that, you are not a reasonable person.
No wishful thinking on my side. Bloody merkins shot down an airplane that did nothing wrong and was in its home airspace all the time. The Russians, on the other hand, shot down an intruder.
Honestly, I'm not going to continue arguing with someone who thinks that shooting an intruder at first sight is easier to justify than shooting someone you believe to be a threat after having tried to warn them away. You can continue pretending that "airspace" is some magical space-time shifting force-field, if you like, but you're only fooling yourself.
USSR has shot down an airplane that was flying over their airspace - and in fact over military installations - without any authorisation.
Correction: that had been flying over their airspace. There's good evidence that the actual shoot-down occurred after the aircraft had already left Russian airspace. But this is also irrelevant - nobody is saying the Russians didn't have the right to shoot it down, only that they were trigger-happy assholes for not bothering to verify its identity or communicate with it.
Crisis situation my fat arse, the American captain was just trigger happy.
I know that believing this would make you happy. However, unless your ass is so fat that it can warp time and allow you to change the past, no amount of wishful thinking can change the facts of the situation.
Citation needed. US metallurgy has always been ahead of the Russians
Umm, we did that once upon a time [wikipedia.org] too, and in our case the airliner was in a known civil air traffic corridor, rather than miles off course like KAL 007. Of course, the incident did happen in a tense combat zone, so the mistakes made need to be viewed in that context..... It's actually a good case study for scenario fulfillment.
Oh, there's a wee bit more difference than just that. The American shoot-down was during a time of crisis, when the people responsible believed themselves to be under attack, yet even then they tried to get positive ID and warn the aircraft away before firing in self-defence. The Russian shoot-down occurred out of the blue, when the people responsible had no reason to feel threatened, yet they didn't bother to try and identify the aircraft nor did they try to warn it. The pilot who fired the missiles stated on record that he knew it was a civilian airliner, though he suspected it "may have been converted" for "spying purposes".
Both situations were deplorable, of course, but making a mistake during a crisis situation is a hell of a lot more understandable than blindly killing anything that crosses your border without even trying to talk to it first.
Also, the Russians actually shot down two airliners - one in 1978 and one in 1983. The first one isn't well known because it managed to land after being hit, and only resulted in the deaths of 2 passengers. It's memorable to me only because the Soviets had the balls to send South Korea a $100,000 bill to cover the expense of shooting down their airliner and then rescuing the passengers.
That's the opposite of what communism is.
I'm afraid this just reflects more of the thinking that communism is "what happened in the USSR". As opposed to a political system set out by Marx in his writings.
No, it's an understanding of the fact that any imposed communist system HAS to be top down. Marx acknowledged as much, which is why he advocated for a more organic transition to communism rather than having it imposed by rebellion or government mandate.
Of course, I think he was rather naive
How many of the countries that the USA has performed regime change in continue to be repressive? How many right wing totalitarian governments have there been?
The answer to your first question depends on how you're defining regime change
"Right Wing" is such a loosly defined concept that the answer to your second question can be, "all of them", " none", or anything in between.
Not sure what either question has to do with the topic, though.
My theory is that isn't not the political system that breeds repression, but that people brought up under one repressive system will tend to learn the lesson and be repressive when they get their chance at power. I believe the stats correlate closer with my explanation.
I believe your explanation is just a less accurate rephrasing of my explanation. I said essentially the same thing, with the added caveat that the type of government can make abuse of power easier or harder. If you disagree with that, I'd love to know why.
And in all cases it's been a repressive state. So maybe that wasn't anything to do with communism after all and was more to do with Russian culture.
I don't think any serious person ever suggested that communism makes good people do evil things. The problem with communism is that it's inherently a top-down system of government. It makes abuse and corruption easier because it concentrates power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats who can always use "the public good" as a trump card for any action they decide to take.
To put it another way, an oppressive nation can continue to be an oppressive nation regardless of the political system they adopt, but some political systems make it easier than others.
I think 7 years might be excessive, but the law may call for that, and the jurors are instructed to prescribe a sentence based on how the law is written.
The sentence is probably meant to serve as an example. There's been a notable uptick in the past decade of violent protesters committing criminal acts, then crying police brutality and pretending to be innocent victims. That kind of behaviour is not only destructive and illegal, but also impacts the ability of legitimate protesters to hold peaceful demonstrations. It seems very likely that the judge was trying to send a message.
"Free markets select for winning solutions." -- Eric S. Raymond
