Fatality.
oh_my_080980980 wins.

I can't say I really care about his womanizing. Or any politicians. My concepts of sexual "morality" differ pretty seriously from the mainstream, which I consider to be utterly illogical. When you say "no longer matters", I say "should never have mattered". Sure he was a hypocrite, being he was a Pastor, but I think most Christians are hypocrites struggling with cognitive dissonance over their god-given rules and human nature/reality.

What you mean, is that there are already many facilities present in many systems for doing what they're doing. We don't all use debian (/etc/interfaces? holy crap.) w/o NetworkManager anymore. You blame libvirt for trying to handle the actual problem in a fashion that causes the least amount of headache for the majority of users across disparate systems. That's silly.

Scaffolding is actually what they're talking about. Lots and lots of really silly scaffolding to hold together a few dozen instructions of code. Java (I do regularly have to write Java code, unfortunately) really, really suffers from this.

I understand the pragmatic need to accept collateral damage. But ISIS is an insurrection style force. Like any rebellion rising from the ranks of the populace- you CANNOT bomb it into submission. You will only strengthen its numbers. Collateral damage maybe nearly impossible to eliminate, but in a war against a popular uprising (ISIS is recruited from among the populace of the area- and outside of its area, populations that belong to the very groups it's fighting) you simply have to eliminate it. The longer it goes on, the more recruiting power every collateral kill has. Unless we're ready to just firebomb the entire fucking place into oblivion, we've got to do it the ugly way. Go in with people and catch the bad guys.

You're right- that was incorrect wording from me.
More accurately, we gave an ideology the fuel it needed to become a real problem.
We gave them their Great Satan. There's way too much blood on our hands.

You're an idiot if you think that matters to the people this organization recruits.

Furthermore, I'd argue children in their homes aren't civilians who wandered into a combat zone.

We can argue all day who is more immoral, but the fact is, we're acting like the British Empire trying to put down an annoying insurrection of restless natives. Hitting them with the heavy hand of someone who is convinced in their own superiority, moral righteousness, and not afraid to use overwhelming force. These things may work against a country, but they won't work against small organizations that recruit the wronged that WE are wronging.

The only thing going our way at this point, is that they may finally end up pissing off enough of their own recruiting source that their insurrection gets stamped out by the massive reserves of manpower surrounding them.

Agreed- 100%.

Of course. If not 100%, I have no doubt they were in the modeled outcome.

One that fell within the range of "acceptable", I imagine.

Can't argue that.

Not relevant to the example above, at all. But again, that they do that can't be argued.

That's pretty rich, coming from us.

I'm bitching less about the morality of it (my opinion is clearly that it is wrong), but the sheer stupidity of it. We're fighting an ideology that is created by our actions. It would be like trying to fight the American Revolution by quartering Continental soldiers in private homes and taxing them without representation. It's stupidity. There's no doubt that what we are doing, is in some part, originated from a sense of trying to do right (ignoring any corrupting influences), but we're still Doing It Wrong (TM). What's the right way? I don't know. But this isn't it. We have to stop killing those innocents. We have to stop creating those grieving fathers and brothers. This isn't a symmetrical war where we're trying to stamp out morale- you can't stamp out the morale of people with a well-earned vendetta against you.

Damn, I really regret commenting on this page now. You're down at the bottom and very deserving of my mod points :/

Mod this dude up. His brain works.

You seem like a really reasonable guy.
These people are evil, sick fucks. There's no doubt about it. But you should put what they do in the context of what is done to them. First thing to look at- the bombed out building.
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Then that.

I want these guys stomped out of existence as much as the next guy, but I'm pretty goddamn sure we're doing *nothing* but making more of them with every father that sees his child's destroyed remains in a bombing campaign against those people. I'm sure this dynamic has existed long enough that they're figured it out and actively WANT us to bomb them to some extent.

That being said, do we just let them win? Of course not. But we HAVE to find a way to fight them without creating more of them. Doing so is the very definition of fucking stupid.

You are right that the deliberateness of the act can definitely be contrasted to the indifference in the American counterpart, which would be firing missiles into houses full of people to kill a single guy, watching from a remotely piloted armed surveillance platform as they burned, with not a single picture of the charred bodies of children appearing on American media sources.

These people are fucking savages, but I don't believe our top brass in the defense-intelligence structure are any better. We're just a little more worried about being re-elected.

You are right- there is a difference. But that difference becomes muddy to the father or brother of a murdered child. If I were a psychotic religious nutjob that wanted to spread my ideology across a fertile landscape, all I'd need to do is troll the government (or people out to stop me) into creating enough sentiment against itself. At that point, it doesn't even fucking matter why they were doing it. All that matters is the blood of innocents is on their hands, and people will take up arms against them. They will rally to any fucking flag that waves high enough.

Nonsense. I know some "things" that have the right of free political spending... I mean speech.

I didn't see that- you're dead on, then.

My position is correct. But how'd you make the jump toward arrest? If collaborating with terrorists were a crime, half of the top 1% of this country would be incarcerated overnight.

Couldn't agree, more.
I think Langley and the Pentagon probably deserve about 800x the airtime as ISIS perpetrated evil, but hey. If you show us blowing little children to bits, or their flaming bodies running from wrecked buildings, then you stray too far away from propaganda and into the realm of journalism.

We need the enemy to be irrationally violent. We don't want them to appear like a group of people who have suffered countless deaths of their innocents against fire dropped from the sky and have been easily whipped into a religious furor in their grief by a group of clerics.