Your first question regarding the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings in WW2:

Your second question immediately follows as:

You can forgive me if I 'failed' to answer what was clearly put forward as a rhetorical question. I DID however very directly respond to them. Your underlying premise supposes that the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo not be compared against the costs of abandoning Europe to the Nazi's or a land invasion of Japan, but instead be judged in a vacuum of killing people is bad. You then setup the notion that when considering the morality of the 9/11 attacks we consider, what, the cost in lives of an Al Qaida landing on the beaches of Florida?

I thought my context had been clear.
You ask us to consider the actions taken during the waging of WW2 in the context of Allies and Axis powers being morally equivalent. Considered in a sense where the Allies cause for waging war was no more moral than that of the Axis.
You ask us to consider the actions taken in Al Qaida's jihad in the context of Al Qaida and Infidels as being Considered in a sense where Al Qaida's cause for waging war is no less moral than the defenses raised by the rest of us.

You then pretend to be looking for complexity...

The reality is that our world is far more complex than you are willing to accept from the outset. The reality is that there are men and powers in our world that WILL wage wars of conquest solely and only for their own benefit and no amount of good nature and moral superiority will slow them. The reality is that when those men and powers are not confronted with force and violence they simply kill more people and take more for themselves. In a situation like WW2, it needs to be understood that the Nazi party was demonstrably 'evil'. That coexisting with them was unpalatable. So far that, fighting back was morally a 'good' thing. More complex still, fighting back meant, yes, fire bombings of places like Dresden. I am GLAD the allies won, and I can hardly state with any confidence that if they'd been more gentle in their prosecution of the war that they would have triumphed.

As for you, how about providing your own answer to any of your questions. If you're given control of allied forces, do you wage war against the Nazis in Europe? Do you fight hard, or do you risk losing by being soft handed in your campaign?

You act like you are seeking complexity, but failing to try and answer some of the most difficulty questions of war you are in reality hiding from that complexity you pretend to be seeking.

I was comparing living conditions and the atrocities suffered by the Iraqi people. I didn't class American approval/disapproval as a noteworthy concern to them.

Maybe you skimmed my summary too quickly then. The worst of the abuses to and genocide of the Iraq's Shia majority took place after 1990.

I think it's most enlightening to hear your belief that the sanctions on Iraq were the fault and blame of America, rather than Saddam's steadfast refusal to abide by his obligations to allow inspections of the WMD programs dismantled in the first Gulf war. You remember, when Saddam attempted to reduce the number of UN member states by 1.

You seem to be labouring under a mistaken belief that condemning Saddam and observing the extent of his atrocities is in anyway a defense of American policy and action. It is not, but when discussing the state of Iraq today, it is a hugely important consideration and failure to recognize the extent of those decades of brutality and the impact on its people makes assessing the country impossible. It just makes it easier to say America bad, if you prefer a good/bad check mark for your assessments...

As I means of shortening discussions and ruling out having stupid ones it's easy to follow a simple rule. If anyone is urging a reduction in CO2 emissions, but is NOT pushing hard for more nuclear power, they aren't really interested in a solution and can be ignored.

Disappointing that the IPCC is flirting with failing such a basic litmus test.

If you are stupid and idiotic enough to accept the premise that Al Qaida and the US are morally equivalent actors in some Islamic holy war then you have a point. If the Nazi's were morally equivalent to the allies, then you have a point.

If you accept either of those premises though, you are an idiot, a fool, or a deliberately malicious and hateful person. Your entire POV and argument is based upon an assumption that both parties in any war are morally equal.

Enough of your moral equivalence masturbation already. Do you honestly believe that in WW2 there was no morally preferable party between the axis or allied forces? That's the only question to be discussed.

Hitler and Nazi Germany had in essence seized control of and conquered the entirety of Europe. The option was simply let Hitler and the Nazi's have it, and likely Britain as well, or fight back. Fighting back meant committing horrific acts like the fire bombing of Dresden. Without such horrific tactics of targeting civilians and the means of your enemies production, victory wasn't going to happen. The choices were taking on horrible, horrible acts like Dresden, or standing aside and watching as Hitler and the Nazis made their concentration camps across all of Europe a long standing policy of a long lived Third Reich.

I'm glad our fore fathers chose as they did, and you should be too. Instead your just sniveling like a child unhappy that the world doesn't exist in the way they wish it would.

And I beg the mods, why is this sitting at zero and the parent is +5 insightful for saying ISIS murdering civilians is no different than nations trying to stop them, as though those going on a murdering rampage are entirely equivalent and equally morally just as those trying to stop them. Sad, sad world.

This, a thousand times over.

"Apologists"?

Have your read what Japan did to China long before America ever got involved? Did Japan have any legitimate claim to self defense in it's campaign of slaughter against the mainland? Meanwhile, the American's have Pearl Harbor, and a rather clear picture of who started the fight. That's why you see people 'apologizing' for the war. Most historians though note very accurately that we killed massive numbers of people, very brutally but efficiently. They also note that it was in the context of a defensive and existential war, were the options were be the winner and do it to their people, or be the loser and have it done to you as the Japense already had in China.

I dearly do wish people posting drivel like yours would spend more of their time reading and watching what's on Al Jazeera. You speak the popular party line out west of how many people died in Iraq because of overthrowing Saddam. You talk about how horrible the sectarian violence is that followed his ouster. Al Jazeera at least has the competence to take a longer view. Specifically that the sectarian violence in Iraq was NOT created by the ouster of Saddam, nor by the war and occupation of western forces.

Saddam spent decades brutalizing the population of Iraq, and intentionally seeding sectarian division and hatred. He didn't just gas Kurdish Iraqi's, he used the gas to round up as many of them as he could. He moved them into concentration camps where he slaughtered the fighting age males, and systematically raped the women with the intention of impregnating them with half Arab children. He made a very well documented and thorough effort to essentially breed the Kurdish Iraqi's out of existence. It seems unsurprising then that the Kurd's aren't enamoured with the Sunni Iraqi's that were Saddam's power base.

Saddam waged a similarly genocidal campaign against Iraqi Shia, estimates run as high as 200 thousand Shia Iraqi's killed. Not soldiers on soldiers though, nor as a consequence of some civil war, but as a campaign of extermination where the women children were every bit the intended targets of his campaign as anyone else. He then followed that genocide up with a campaing of divide and conquer of the surviving Shia Iraqi's. He spent years catering to and even officially supporting the Shia clerics that remained in Iraq and registered themselves. This created a wonderful rift between the 'brave' Shia who'd remained Iraq from the refugees who'd fled largely to Iran during the genocide. Once the domestic Shia movement was large enough and had sufficiently distanced itself from the refugees, he then pulled out the party registration list and slaughtered everyone leading or involved with the internal Shia movement.

That's just two examples of the Stalinesque playbook that was the entirety of Saddam's rule. Yet, ignorant 'sympathetic' western suckers still stand around here making comments like yours about how much damage the west did to Iraq by removing Saddam. Some even compound the folly by noting that however bad Saddam was, at least he maintained a semblance of order.

If you followed Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, the occupation, and the ensuing violence and chaos you wouldn't be spewsing such ignorance, because they at least covered the root cause of the anger decently. Far better than any of the media out west here who have absolute blinders on to any influences but that directly attributable to us, as though the world is some manner of vacuum solely and only alterable by western action.

As you say, you are not a lawyer. If you don't know the odds of spontaneous or random resistance to round-up then you early never worked on a farm either. The courts in Canada, with actual lawyers, and with actual Ag experts decided against Percy. There's also not a farmer around that would ever even consider spraying their seed crop with roundup, as they know without doubt they have just as much success setting it aflame in hopes of gaining a flame tolerant seed. Percy absolutely set out with the intent to acquire Monsanto seed and knew without any doubt the seed he planted, grew and went to sell was the same seed patented to them. In the opinion of Canadian courts he clearly had violated patents and was charged. What's more relevant is that nobody's normal farming practices in any way were threatened or chilled or even worried by his case.

That's a great rationalization of why you can't cite an example. It's the same thing I told my friends who farm when I was trying to relate how malicious Monsanto was to them. They then patiently asked again for a single example of Monsanto suing a farmer for using his own seeds he'd grown as he always had but was victim of cross pollination. I thought I'd find one of the hundreds easily with a quick google search. That was more than ten years ago, and I've already cited Percy's case as the closest match I've been able to find so far.

To summarize, if you can't cite an example all your rationalizations are just so much noise obscuring the truth. I'd feel vindicated too if you can find a case, but the reality I've looked into suggests the narrative is just anti-GMO propaganda.

Which is why I began my post stating that is a totally valid complaint.

The claim up thread was that a farmer just trying to use seed he grew himself was suddenly attacked in court because his field had been contaminated. I was pointing out that the only case I'm aware of even resembling that, was very different. I merely observed that the farmer being sued, very intentionally and deliberately sought to collect seed exclusively and only from the contaminated plants and no other.

I must also point out your wording, which suggests the 'culling' was quite normally. That's simply flat out wrong and ignorant. Take a crop of non-GMO canola and spray it with round-up, and you end up with zero plants surviving. It's the same result, 10 times out of 10. The sole and only purpose of Percy spraying his field, other than to sabotage his own crop, was to attempt to harvest contaminated seed.

Whether that should be legal or not is separate. I don't think I'm a monster to say I can see both sides. The money required to research and develop such a seed is large, and so there is advantage to society in being able to recouperate that cost to encourage someone to actually bother doing it. On the flip side, I'm a software guy and patents are ridiculously abused already and cutting them way back is my default mode,

Not sure who we is. For my part in Canada it's still Chlorine. You can actually smell it in spring time because they have to up it so much.

Wrong. Take our most basic food we consume, water. Standard practice is to load it with a poison, chlorine, to kill the bacteria like E Coli in it for the benefit of not getting sick from the water.

Which is a totally valid complaint. The courts and legal system disagree and belief that patents should be allowed in this case though.

The point I was drawing was that Percy didn't accidentally start planting the patented seeds, he deliberately and intentionally set out to get his hands on the patented seed instead of his own that he'd been growing before. It was NOT, as has been falsely portrayed, a suit against some poor guy that tried to replant his own seed that got contaminated against his wishes.