faetal on 26/9/2013 at 10:05
Quote Posted by DDL
This debate is getting a bit silly. I'd prefer less HIGHLY CHAERGED IMMMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT and a bit more...rational distance, so I might step back until things calm a tad, but hey.
As for school bombing, well, I can't be fucked to trawl through news sites all day for "terror group claims success after accidentally bombing a school" because that's stupid, but (
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp39ch.html) this seems to provide a fairly extensive list of terror attacks that hit schools, many of which were deliberately targeted AT THE SCHOOL, and many of which hit schools as well as/instead of the intended target, and which were nevertheless claimed by terror groups. Whether claiming an attack is the same as endorsing it is..semantics, I guess. I don't think terror attacks use a conventional scoring system.
Well if you don't know that terror groups consider school hits a success, then how about just not saying it? Also, you might not have noticed this, but it's emotional distancing which is the problem. We take a step back from the fact that our armies kill innocent people because it's upsetting, so we sanitise it by calling it collateral damage and then tie ourselves in semantic knots with justifications about how it is better than terrorism, because it's stated aim is different. Then we wonder why people conflate US / UK citizens with the governments oppressing them - possibly because we give them a free ride by not getting caught up in the morality of killing innocent people. Also, unless I'm typing in capitals and using meme-like affectations to supplement my emotions (I know I'm awful for having emotions wrt killing people - what kind of a-hole am I?) - you can probably assume they're not necessary to make your point.
(A lot of those school bombings were in the US)
DDL on 26/9/2013 at 10:07
Quote Posted by faetal
Well if you don't know that terror groups consider school hits a success, then how about just not saying it?
Fucksake, dude.
Ok, if we define success as "we did what we wanted to do", then "we wanted to blow up a school...and we blew up a school" is a success.
Happy now?
Edit: and some of them were in china, israel and japan..your point?
faetal on 26/9/2013 at 10:13
Ok then - I agree that all of the school bombings on your list were probably intentional.
All I'm saying is that if being careless is netting more civilian deaths in one country in 12 years than intentional attacks, then carrying on with the same style of warfare is accepting those deaths. Whether "part of the plan" or not, I'd say that dismissing the importance of people's lives won't have a much different net result to deciding to take them.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan#Civilian_casualties) - this is our "better" way of killing people.
Chimpy Chompy on 26/9/2013 at 10:35
Quote Posted by faetal
Car-bombings etc.. not factored in - check the reference.
I went to the wiki page and it says Iraq Body Count claim civllian:military of 1:2, not 1:1. Which I guess still isn't great. But I don't know how much of that was the initial invasion and how much is the ongoing campaign.
Quote:
How deadly is a stray bullet versus a stray daisy cutter (which were used, against international conventions)?
One stray bullet in an entire ground forces battle? And a tank shell will still level someone's house.
re: evil, I realise the world is loaded, and there's is a reason I referred to the act and not the people. I think there is such thing as a killing less bad than deliberately targeting a school, sure.
And sometimes person A will describe a guy with a gun and a bomb differently to person B. And A and B have different experiences and perspectives shaping that view yeh. But I'm not quite ready to say A and B are equally correct.
june gloom on 26/9/2013 at 10:54
man i left this thread to cook for a bit and next thing i know there's scorch marks on the wall and someone's crying and the smoke detector won't stop screaming in japanese
faetal on 26/9/2013 at 11:15
Quote Posted by Chimpy Chompy
I went to the wiki page and it says Iraq Body Count claim civllian:military of 1:2, not 1:1. Which I guess still isn't great. But I don't know how much of that was the initial invasion and how much is the ongoing campaign.
It says the initial "shock and awe" invasion is excluded as there was no reliable way to get a body count.
Quote:
One stray bullet in an entire ground forces battle? And a tank shell will still level someone's house.
Well yes, but a drone or plane can do it quicker and with less warning of how impending it is. Also - tanks can't do Daisy Cutters.
Quote:
re: evil, I realise the world is loaded, and there's is a reason I referred to the act and not the people. I think there is such thing as a killing less bad than deliberately targeting a school, sure.
And sometimes person A will describe a guy with a gun and a bomb differently to person B. And A and B have different experiences and perspectives shaping that view yeh. But I'm not quite ready to say A and B are equally correct.
I'm not claiming they are equally correct - this is why e.g. manslaughter is not the same as murder. But serial manslaughter with continual practices knowing that innocents will die, for a war that has very flimsy justification? If you're on the receiving end, I'm sure it feels very much like evil and very much like terror. Us lot comforting ourselves otherwise won't change that and won't stop the retaliation. Again, if a factory owner's practices kills a person a year and they just give some "you can't make an omelette..." BS as an excuse, people would equate that to dismissive of the value of human lives.
(Tangent) That said, a spate of kids died from
E. coli poisoning, which was traced to practices in various large meat processing factories (cutting cows open fast to increase throughput means that faecal matter gets into the meat) some time in the '90s. Legislation was introduced to install bacterial monitoring at various stages of the meat processing, but the US meat processing lobby calculated that it would be cheaper to pay out of court settlements to the parents of dead kids than to install these measures, so they buried the legislative process under mountains of appeals and it never saw the light of day. I guess human behaviour is just fucked when there's massive financial gain to be had. Bear in mind that the Iraq has "cost the US" around (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War) $6 trillion. When I say "cost the US", I mean this is how much money the tax payers have paid the businesses which produce weaponry, ordnance etc... As I said before, war is super-profitable for the right people. I can't think of another way to get that much money transferred from public to private funds in such a short space of time.
DDL on 26/9/2013 at 11:27
Bank bailouts, maybe?
faetal on 26/9/2013 at 12:07
Well yes, that's another great one, but you need financial crises to come along for that, plus those are considered loans rather than one way money transfers.
That liability burden more or less means that more bailouts can't happen without imploding the entire financial system. The funny thing about the bail-outs is that the government took loans underwritten by some of the banks being bailed in order to pay them, so the government is paying interest to the people that owe them the money from bail-outs.
Chimpy Chompy on 26/9/2013 at 13:20
Quote Posted by faetal
It says the initial "shock and awe" invasion is excluded as there was no reliable way to get a body count.
well your intial link said:
According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count, a United Kingdom-based organization, American and Coalition forces had killed at least 28,736 combatants as well as 13,807 civilians in the Iraq War, indicating an essential civilian to combatant casualty ratio of 1:2.[20] It is unclear what percentage of civilians were killed in the initial invasion by the coalition.I don't know if that means if those counts aren't including the initial invasion, or that for some people they don't know if they were killed in the invasion or soon after.
Possibly I'm nitpicking. Still don't know where you got 1:1 from!
Also you suggest being "being careless is netting more civilian deaths in one country in 12 years than intentional attacks". I went to the (
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/ten-years/) IBC site myself and it estimates the coalition caused about 55% of civillian deaths in the first year and 7% in subsequent years.
re: daisy cutters, that usually refers to BLU-82 which was used against some al-qaeda bases in afghanistan, but I don't think it's standard kit for every time soneone wants a terrorist dead. I mean, yeah, planes can carry more ordinance in general. But one hellfire missile can conceivably do less damage than a pitched battle.
Quote:
Us lot comforting ourselves otherwise won't change that and won't stop the retaliation.
I don't disagree about the recruitment drive the war on terror has probably (and self-defeatingly) been. Invading Iraq was an especially stupid move, I think. I'm less ready to say something specific like bombing a house with a known terrorist leader is unjustified.
I guess I don't know what to think about someone who suffers awfulness and then sets out to do even worse awfulness in retaliation. (where worse I mean motivation and targets, not just body count). The pragmatic questions are easier than the moral ones, sometimes.
SubJeff on 26/9/2013 at 22:50
I think the difference here faetal, is Israel was not trying to kill civilians. They are purposely heavy handed and they care less about collateral damage than many others would.
But if their targets were not amongst civilians no civilians would be hurt.
The practical outcome may be the same but the morality and the ethics are completely different - not caring if you kill vs trying to kill. The alternative, from their POV, is not to bomb at all and in doing so just allow their enemy free reign to attack without risk of retaliation. Regardless of weekday you feel about the actual events you must understand the logic here.
