World Craziness - Kenya, Pakistan, Syria, etc

Angel Dust on 24/9/2013 at 04:29

I wasn't suggesting you have (but I can see how you might get that impression and so I apologise), I was being honest about my experience in relation to what faetal brought up. I did wonder if it would come across poorly but I'll try to clearer. The first thing I should point out is this 'revelation through cinema' occurred when I was 14 or something, so a dumb-ass kid from a town in New Zealand, and it's not like I consciously thought that people in Arabic countries were some angry, alien species. If you had straight up asked me "Do I think people in Iraq[sup]1[/sup] have the same hopes, dreams and desires as you?", I would have said yes. However, when I watched this film[sup]2[/sup] I realised just how many of the common representations of the Arab world and peoples I had subconsciously absorbed. I was finding myself surprised at these new images and then disturbed and disgusted by that fact that I was surprised. It was a timely lesson for a know-it-all kid.

[sup]1[/sup] It was the time of the Gulf War was still fresh in my mind.
[sup]2[/sup] The actual film was The White Balloon, which is Iranian not Iraqi.

DDL on 24/9/2013 at 09:24

Quote Posted by faetal

Not caring if you kill bystanders is just as bad as planning to kill bystanders, because they know it will happen and they do it anyway. Holding a hat in your hands and saying "unfortunate collateral damage" and thinking that differentiates it IN ANY MEANINGFUL just comes across as sociopathic.

Really not sure I agree with this. You might as well say that removing a brain tumour (but leaving the patient partially paralysed through unavoidable brain trauma) is in no way meaningfully different that deliberately stabbing someone in the brain because HAY I CANS CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE LOL. (I realise comparing "killing terrrrriists" to removing tumours is slightly disingenous, but it was the first example that sprang to mind)

The former aims to treat what it at least perceives as a direct problem, accepting that there are unfortunate but unavoidable consequences, whereas the latter aims to cause maximum outrage, harm and horror. It's the difference between 'bombing bad peeps to make us feel ostensibly safer', and bombing shopping malls so NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE. There are huge differences in legitimacy, firepower, manpower and opportunity. Bombing buildings with precision drones that may nevertheless cause collateral damage is hard, needs a ton of tech and intelligence and money. Bombing shopping centres and schools is crude, indiscriminate, yet shockingly easy. If you asked a spokesman why they bombed a particular building, they'd be able to provide reasoned explanations, lists of the suspects believed to be there, etc. Ask a terrorist organisation why they blew up a school, and it's more or less just NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE.

If you're not going to differentiate between those two approaches, then you might as well call all warfare terrorism....which is a substantial can of worms, I suspect.

faetal on 24/9/2013 at 09:43

It's like saying "I'm going to remove to your brain tumour with this hammer and chisel, I know it will damage lots of other areas of your brain, but I'm going it anyway, because if I break my scalpel, my board might fire me". In case the analogy isn't obvious, the US use drones and explosive ordnance to "target" which pretty much ups the risk of collateral damage from possible, to probable. Because dead US soldiers loses votes and creates scandal at home, whereas dead brown people, not so much. In order to remove US soldiers from risk, they have traded civilian lives and no amount of stage-managed remorse from military leaders and politicians changes that they choose the method which risks civilians lives.

So no, I'm not buying the "this is terrible and unfortunate" line wheeled out after every batch of mass civilian casualties. We're supposed to get all weepy about 9/11 (which of course is appropriate) while dismissing the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan since, because someone found a very convoluted way of saying "whoops".

faetal on 24/9/2013 at 09:51

Quote Posted by NuEffect

I was just discussing these events with a Muslim friend of mine. The topic; how annoying he finds it that every time a bomb goes off in some civilian area it's Islamic terrorists, and how the media portray Islam.

Except when it's a US or Israeli shell, then it's unfortunate collateral damage. Do you really think the change in terminology makes people's dead relatives any less dead? The fact that we treat our style of murder as somehow superior is pretty fucking awful and I blame our media for creating the narrative by which we do so.

DDL on 24/9/2013 at 10:13

Faetal, that still doesn't make it wholly indistinguishable from terrorism, though. Plus I'm not sure "MOAR TROOPS ON TEH GROUND" is a guarantee of less indiscriminate killing, either (been quite a few high-profile cases in that vein). Is a bunch of squaddies shooting their way through a town to get to the one dude they want to kill actually better than just going straight for the leadership and bombing the house containing that dude?

If a terrorist organisation blew up a shopping mall to kill (among other people) a high-ranking military official who was there, THEN we might be (debatably) getting into equivalency territory, but usually it's just "blow up a market because PEOPLE WILL DIE THERE". When you're pulling off tricks like "small bomb to kill a few innocent people, bigger subsequent bomb to kill the emergency workers treating the injured" and other such dickmoves, you're pretty far from 'unavoidable collateral damage' territory.

I agree with you that all murder is bad, sure, but I'd still argue that angry, reactionary "lashing-out at easy unsuspecting targets"-style murder is worse.

faetal on 24/9/2013 at 12:28

I'm not saying they are indistinguishable, but from some perspectives, US / UK / allied civilians are quite happy for their governments to keep killing with ineffective discrimination and keep paying for it and keep voting governments in, so maybe they feel justified for that reason. Why do we feel it is justified to have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in other countries? Is it because hitting the military targets as well was worth it? Are we ok to keep paying for that? Watching it in a detached way while some serious-sounding embedded reporter explains it in dry terms absolves us of allowing our government to continue? Don't forget, the image we sell worldwide is that our governance is decided by the people. Also, more troops on the ground absolutely guarantees fewer civilian casualties. Less use of explosives = fewer collateral deaths. Direct view of the battlefield (i.e. not through fuzzy drone cams or IR) definitely results in better identification of targets. We've seen footage of US troops murdering a group of journalists from a gunship because the camera one of them was holding may have been an RPG. We've also seen footage of US drone pilots killing a child and then being told "negative, that was a dog" by the guy verifying the footage (to later again be discovered it was a child). It's this kind of "fuck it, we couldn't see properly - commiserations dude" attitude that we all seem to stand behind which is probably making us seem like legit targets. Either that, or muslims are crazy scary, semi-humans that just love the smell or murdering innocents or whatever. But then we have to keep believing that our way is somehow nicer or less evil, because it helps us sleep at night knowing we pay for it and watch it on TV while eating dinner, knowing we're safe from any form of retaliation.

SubJeff on 24/9/2013 at 12:48

Yeah, I'm with DDL on this I'm afraid.

"Collateral damage" is a bs term for "people who got in the way and I just don't care" but that is completely different to "all the people, all, all, ALL!" which is what terrorist bombs are. Being gung-ho when targeting a few people in a civilian area is one thing (and it's a bad thing). Targeting the civilian area BECAUSE it's a civilian area is another kettle of fish.

I think you're conflating two disparate things. I don't think it's justified to kill civilians in other countries.

That has no bearing on what I think of terrorism though.

Thirith on 24/9/2013 at 12:52

I agree with you on the principle, but I think that there's something cynical to the point of view that 'collateral damage' is less heinous when you compare the numbers. The motive may be more reprehensible when it comes to terrorism, but in terms of killing innocent bystanders the state-approved 'collateral damage' approach is many, many times more effective, and that should also figure into the equation IMO.

DDL on 24/9/2013 at 13:25

There're an awful lot of other contributing factors, too: it's common for 'enemy commanders' (srsly the news gets more GI Joe every day) to spend time in built up civilian areas, to discourage targetted strikes, or (if not discouraged) to make them as collateral-damage intensive as possible. And it's a smart move, let's be honest. So how do we apportion blame for that? The terrorists for using civvies as shields, or the military for shooting through the shield? It's a very, very complicated, messy grey area, certainly, but as noted: it's a wholly different grey area from that of terrorist attacks on schools and stuff.

Regarding boots on the ground, it's worth noting that one of the advantages of drones is that you HAVE the footage to analyse afterward. Unless you're equipping every damn GI with a headcam, aliens-style, AND hiring enough analysts to trawl through all that footage, you're not going to have anything like the same post-hoc feedback you'd get from remote drones. If your drone pilot makes a bad call, it's usually based on a fairly concise dataset, and you can work out what went wrong. When all you know is "vasquez and drake probably went apeshit and then things went south", you're dealing with an enormous dataset, and a huge number of individuals: identifying fuckups becomes much harder.

Plus the drones have a more comprehensive viewpoint.

Plus the drones can FLY, which means you can be much more focussed in your targetting. If the drones had to carpetbomb everything all the way to their target each time, then maybe troops would be wiser, but as it is, you're avoiding upteen hundred conflict situations by simply flying over them.

And of course, all the terrible footage of drone strikes is probably cherry picked too, so arguing from a position of journalistic integrity is questionable at best. Nobody is going to spam news channels with tons of footage of wholly successful surgical drone strikes where everything went perfectly, because...well, it's not exactly newsworthy, and more to the point it's fucking ghoulish.

(also, wasn't a lot of that stuff like "killing a cameraman because ZOMG RPG MAYBE?" from helicopters, not drones?)

Thirith on 24/9/2013 at 13:41

Quote Posted by DDL

It's a very, very complicated, messy grey area, certainly, but as noted: it's a wholly different grey area from that of terrorist attacks on schools and stuff.

Yes - from a detached, distant (and arguably more objective, correct) perspective. For the guy on the ground whose family was killed as collateral damage, are you going to tell him that his wife and kid getting killed by a US strike is something entirely different? They're not going to be any less dead or differently dead. At least at that level I don't think the argument of collateral damage being a different grey area is necessarily going to convince all that many people, even if it's a perfectly valid argument on a different level.