Private Mars Rocket II

One of the things that helped edge the British through negotiations was a switch by the IRA from "spectaculars" with civilian hits to economic nuisance attacks.

A couple that spring to mind were bridge attacks. They didn't take any out, they didn't even actually have that much explosive, but in the case of one incident they shut down the main M1 motorway junction in London for a busy Saturday and essentially grid locked North London for 8 hours.

People get used to certain things and they really do tend to knuckle down when it comes to attacks - but inconvenience them and something *has* to be done.

That said, I suspect that part of the problem is the British, Spanish and Israeli reactions to terrorism are probably not mappable onto the general USian population. You do actually get used to that sort of thing.

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I hope that we never get used to terrorism, and that we respond to terrorist attacks by being willing to kill whatever number of people it takes to stop the attacks, so that terrorism never becomes a practical strategy to wring concessions out of us. "Millions for defense -- not one cent for tribute," and I will add to that "Better kill millions of terrorist sympathizers than free one terrorist."

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Yes, it's clearly evil to kill those trying to enslve one, rather than simply yield to them and accept that one's higher morality makes one a natural slave.

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So you'd have backed the British up bombing Boston where there was active pro-IRA fund raising going on then?

Just asking. Or does this approach only apply to "other" people?

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No, because I'm an American. But we were giving them just cause for war by allowing the IRA backing. Fortunately for us, we were so strong that the British dared do no such thing.

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Boogle.

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Apart from Boogle^2.

The British didn't do it because it would have been:

1) Wrong
2) Stupid
3) WRONG
4) As counterproductive as internment was in the early 70s
5) WRONG!!!!

Just because you have a moral vacuum where your sense of right and wrong are meant to live doesn't mean the rest of us have.

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Not sure what "Boogle" means, squared or otherwise. Do you perhaps mean "Boggle?"

Why do you consider supporting terrorist attacks, or permitting your citizens to support terrorist attacks against another country to not constitute an act of war, when it obviously would be if the attacks were carried out by the first country's military? Is the same funding magically sanitized when passed through non-governmental hands?

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He doesn't. He considers randomly bombing terrorist sympathizers (especially when that group is poorly defined) as counter-productive and wrong. It creates both more sympathizers and more terrorists.

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Whoever argued for "random bombardment" of anyone?" It wasn't me ... perhaps Dave imagines that "random bombardment" is how one normally prosecutes a war?

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Well, killing millions of terrorist sympathizers certainly sounds like carpet-bombing to me.

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Well, killing millions of terrorist sympathizers certainly sounds like carpet-bombing to me.

Aside from the fact that "carpet-bombing" doesn't mean what you think (the word you were looking for was "area bombing"), the "millions" was constructed by analogy with the "millions for defense" quote. In most cases, the number of people who would have to be killed to destroy terrorist organizations would be far less. And the vast majority of them would be enemy combatants, whom it is always permissible to kill in war.

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I was going to reply, but I don't think you even grasp the knot you're tying yourself in here.

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or permitting your citizens

So under your logic America was committing an act of war against Britain in the 70s,80s and early 90s?

Would you agree? Or is reality a little more complicated?

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Jordan - how about we try to only kill actual terrorists? That's the more humane approach. It's also the more productive one.

Dave - I know you and Jordan have a history, but please let's all keep our cool here.

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Fair enough. My apologies. I am somehow reminded of Phil Dick's essays on the nature of humanity and how you'd spot a fake though :(

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No problem.

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Yes, defining those who disagree with one as "nonhuman" is exactly how one displays humaneness and humanity ...

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Only if they are infact able to behave as a human being. You should read the essays. They're very good.

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In general, defining behavior of which one disapproves as "nonhuman" is the path to the violent suppression of dissent, not to humanity in one's own conduct. Furthermore, the spectrum of "human" opinions is very broad, and includes many far more aggressive than my own.

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In general, no. Suppression of non-human behavior such as wanton murder is how the species distinguishes itself from mere animals.

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Ah ... so Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and modern Iran are composed of "non-humans?"

That's a very large part of the species you've just decided are no longer human. And the implication of them no longer being human is that we can slaughter them like animals if we feel like it.

Heck, I'm being called "nonhuman" simply for arguing that backing, or permitting the backing, of terrorists against State B by State A is an act of war on the part of State A. You don't see where this casual ascription of nonhumanity on the basis of dissent could lead to trouble, down the line?

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They certainly did in-human things, things which should have been suppressed.

There is a huge spectrum of conduct from "suppress in-human activities" to "kill them all."

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Why do you persist in conflating a state with the population in it?

And, for that matter, the method of getting something, terrorism may be wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the goal they seek or the reasons that drive people to do it are.

The IRA and offshoots were a bunch of criminal murdering scum. That didn't make the treatment of the Northern Irish catholic population by the British right, just because they were wrong.

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