I haven't gone anywhere chief, I'm just not engaging with people incapable of being intellectually honest or acting with any conversational etiquette.
I try to use precise language when I'm speaking of terms of art, especially terms with accepted definitions. That's just the lawyer in me. The reason I used "kinetic force" isn't to downplay the gravity of delivering it. I'm trying to say that the analysis is the same no matter how it's done.
I am really worried about what we're doing in Africa, no one ever talks about it, I don't know, we're gonna start droning Kenya now?
You still haven't anwered how its voters fault. Its been going on for 3 pages now. I've asked 5 seperate times myself. How can you blame voters for the drone program when they did not know about it? You haven't answered so i have to assume you don't have an answer but just refuse to say ' i don't have an answer to that' and drop the subject. You keep repeating the same thing in every post but never actually answer the question. It would be nice if you would actually answer but you haven't answered it in three pages when 10 different posters have asked you.
Quite frankly I'm angry and insulted that you are painting yourself as the victim here when you have directly and viciously insulted me mutliple times over mutliple posts while still not answering my question. No, you don't get to claim youself the victim You don't get to claim others are lazily reducing the conversation. it's available. No one is buying your shit because you are a very rude individual who refuses to admit they are wrong and then goes to insults when trying to talk over someone doesn't work. The one being "intellectually dishonest" is you. And I won't stand you trying to pretend you are superior because of your lazy, and quite frankly racist given your "foreigner" remarks towards me.
Good post, don't bother with these people asking you to prove a hypothetical. Obama ran being tough on terrorism and hunting down Americas enemies. He killed Bin Laden and no one questioned his commitment to keeping American' safe.
well if you are curious what orwell has to say about terms like "kinetic force" or the function of international law i'd encourage you to look up the essay. i think you might get a lot out of a classc critique on the power language holds in representing how we talk about violence and right and wrong in the international sphere.
I'm sorry, what? The history of the War on Terror would indicate the number of acceptable civilian casualties is much higher than "zero" given that the US public has accepted a non-zero amount of them. Calling them tragedies after the fact does not absolve us (US citizens, soldiers and politicians) of their murder any more than "thoughts and prayers" absolves policy makers of the responsibility to reduce the number school shootings. The War on Terror is still going. The fact that it is going proves it is accepted. Saying "I don't accept stabbing you" while stabbing me does not mean you're not stabbing me, I should hope.
Obama ran on ending the war and shutting down gitmo and he did neither. He most certainly did not run on being tough on terrorism when McCain was out there saying we would be in Iraq and Afghanistan for 100 years.
Why? So they can go "I'm glad that piece of shit is gone"?
I think all three of those are imprecise in so far as they erase the explosion that it the mechanistic part of the "targeted homicide", but i'm in the social sciences and not law so i can see you and i don't share the same concerns what end precision serves and i will leave you to it.
Can you send me the link to the Orwell piece, or tell me what I should Google?
Nah they elected a corporate democrat so actually it kind of is on them too. But of course they get away with electing even the worst, most morally depraved criminal leaders possible i.e. Trump because America is basically untouchable. If they weren't, they'd be overthrown for that.
www.theguardian.com
He ran against 4 years of fox news and conservatives saying he was weak on terrorism, he wouldn't say Islamic terror, he would cozy up with our enemy Iran, and blah blah blah. All the typical bullshit. When asked if he was weak on terror, he said "Ask Bin Laden if I am weak on terror" (paraphrasing here). Proving he was tough on terrorism was absolutely a huge part of his campaign, and something he had to prove to win.
If you aren't for it, you are against it.
The difference between Obama and Trump is that Trump openly campaigned on being a racist, hateful bigot. Obama didn't make explicit - or even implicit - during his campaign that he was going to use drone strikes on civilians. You can't blame voters for not knowing he was gonna do that.
The first time you got insulted by Nola, I would have just reported, ignored, and moved on. It's not right how they treated you, and you don't deserve a panic attack. When someone else high fives them, report. From the word go, I knew they wouldn't answer any questions and would just do damage control, so there was no point in wasting energy and emotional investment in the arguments. That's how they win, is by tiring you. Online arguments are not worth risking mental health over. I only realised this after Ian Danskin pointed out how trolls work and how best to combat them (context for these videos is the alt right but it applies to all kinds of bad faith folks).
Well Trump said he'd pull out of all the wars but instead he conducted more drone strikes than Obama. So you can make the same argument about Trump voters.
Dem's may have lost big, but not Obama. He won re-election, and left with an all time popularity rating. Whatever Obama's faults, he was doing something right to get those results, and Biden won partially with a "return to how things were before with Obama" atmosphere around his campaign.Obama didn't even publicly mention drone strikes until early 2012, and that was only because he was forced to defend them
Drones may predate Obama, but his resolute use of them is unmatched
Civilians have been killed and officials warn it will ‘weaken the rule of law’, yet the president’s actions indicate drone warfare won’t be going away anytime soon
Maybe some people are fine with being lied to constantly by those in power, but we shouldn't be. This is not an American voter problem as much as it is a power problem. They can't be allowed to willingly lie and then use those lies to continue murdering secretly.
And all this secret murdering and proving we can war like the Repubs still had the Democrats losing big during Obama's admin. So we know from experienced reality that the shit don't work. What would work is not trying to be Repub lite with continually misleading the public, hiding evidence, and saying "fuck you" to Congress every time they try to limit your murdering powers.
No shit, I understand how the electoral college works and that it isn't fair but that's not the topic here. No matter the process, the results are the results.
The war on terror is a meaningless term. You fight the war on terror in ways that do not include drone strikes.
I think you are misunderstanding what I was trying to get across. The drones are ultimately irrelevant, they are just a tool to fight in the war on terror. I think they were used poorly and wrongly, and Obama should have realized the damage they were doing far earlier and done more to prevent that.
Even then, you cannot fault the voters for that. If I told you that I decided to not vote for Biden this past election for fear that he might expand Obama's drone program, then this entire forum would ridicule me and call me a fool for increasing Trump's chances of winning. What choice would I have had? To not vote at all? Even then, that would have been deemed as "a vote for Trump." What would you have the American people do? We could all collectively agree to not vote at all, but that would require oneness of mind among some 240 million eligible voters, which kiiiiiiiiiinda seems unlikely.
My point, in as few words as possible for clarity's sake is that the US public has "accepted", as in "tolerated the continuation and normalization of" civilian casualties, and that the acceptance is indicated by the fact that we are still there. However, if you were talking about personal acceptance, whereas I was talking about general public acceptance, then the digression here is pointless.
They were "avoidable" in the sense that to "avoid" them, all you would have to do is not deploy troops in Afghanistan and withdraw what troops you have there, or refuse the authorization of military strikes with explosive weapons against targets living in/among civilians. To use your knife analogy, only permit assassination of targets with knives, then we "avoid" this whole bombing civilians nonsense which we both agree is some degree of "unacceptable".
If that happened on American soil, there would be no nuance for the other side. But because it's in a far away land concerning brown folks who don't speak English or espouse American values with little media coverage in general, it's easy to abstract those humans as just pawns in a war game.
I'm blaming both voters equally when it comes to foreign policy. However I'm not arguing that Trump and Obama are the same when it comes to domestic issues. In the American people's self-interest they should vote for a democrat but lets stop pretending that a corporate dem president helps the rest of the world anymore than a republican one.
No need to worry about being reductionist here, thank you for your service over there whatever capacity it was in. I'm glad we both have a perspective rooted in our experiences.
I think we might've been talking past each other, then. I completely agree that all of the casualties we're talking about were "avoidable," using your definition of the term.
