Gorgon

well, I woke up, went down to get something to eat, vacuumed, researched a bit on a paper i'm writing. Now i'm watching the simpsons. Wow what a fantastic premise for a thread.

What does that mean if you live in Europe, I can never figure these things out.

R00fls

Why use the word 'wrong' if it's not a moral question. I know, those are demanding on the little gray cells.

There was a cat and a dog

Eradicating a terrorist organization by anti terror means such as torture, abduction, death squads, assassinations, seems to have a very poor track record. Israel has tried assassinations for decades with no tangible results, and there are costs to draconian measures for a democracy. The threat posed by terrorism compared to say ,war, is negliable. One response would be to simply accept that a liberal democracy is the target of terrorism once in a while, because the weaknesses that make terrorist able to operate are the same ones that define the country: freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of the press, due process of the law. If we are to be permanently on vigil, do we permanently damage these constitutional guarantees ? There are, in short, very few truly effective choices, and doing something, is not always better than doing nothing.

You can't qualify that statement or make any about how often either result occurs because both failure and success is kept a secret after the fact. Rather we are left with some airy notion that so and so many terrorist actions have been prevented through torture, that significant intelligence obtained through torture helped a military campaign to fruition, these are claims though that by their nature are never fully investigated.

Lets stay away from straw men shall we, obviously the observation that torture doesn't work is general, not specific.

Thats not the point he tried to make at all, rather torture induces the subject to tell the interrogator any wild tale he thinks will make it stop. Everyone breaks sooner or later.

At least McCain can't subscribe to this relative weighing out of torture, as if 'torture light' existed. He was tortured himself and doesn't mince words. I think we ought to consider torturing the president and the secretary of state, it would be a valuable life lesson with practical applications. The central question of whether torture works. Well, here's the rub, it does work if you are able to cooperate the information gathered, in essence it is one source with just as many motivations for telling the truth as for telling what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. It all depends on how ruthless and impatient you are in search of intelligence. As for this 'being a war after all' - when does the war on terror end, are we pretty much indefinitely committed to the pursuit of stamping out a strategy employed since the birth of anarchism in the late 19th century, well you could go further back and include the Assassins, the Thugs in India, the Jewish Zealots, and claim that terrorism has been at work for as long as marginalized factions have been trying to seize and change the social and political agenda.

He ran the place into the ground, I can't think many examples of a socialist revolution gone this wrong.

I voted for 'wedgie'

No. Thats not as stupid a maxim as it sounds, all empathy derives from self, on being able to sense your own pain, or pleasure in others (I dunno why but that sounded a little kinky). By protecting the group you protect yourself.

Everybody owns a little bit of everybody else, that is the basic premise of financial institutions in a global marketplace. It's also why a collapse of a few key loan institutions as a result of the housing crisis could, if we are not careful, create a cascade effect not seen since the 1920s.

Security methods these days offer excellent protection against lone crazies. A lot has been learned from the attempt on Reagan. Ted Kennedy was in the middle of a crowd, poorly screened, and John Lennon had no protection. Nevertheless it could happen again, you can't foresee every eventuality or completely examine every person a politician shakes hands with.

I guess that depends on intent doesn't it. If you believe the coalition acted out of an altruistic desire to free the people of Iraq, it could be considered moral. I actually think that was a small part of it, emphasis on small. Morality can be divorced from legality and perhaps truthfulness as well, although starting a war on a purely moral basis, I don't think there is a real world precedent.

Morality has a tendency to be swallowed up by international politics, at best the UN can be convinced to intervene in some third world plague pit not directly in the crossroads of so many different strategic aims. A majority broke the rules in dealing with Milosovich, and the international outrage was decidedly muted. I think though, that an action in order to be moral has to be free of lies. The coalition wanted weapons to be there and in their rush to prove it asked the people they are ultimately responsible to, their own voters, to risk their lives based on exaggerated and unsubstantiated intelligence claims.

I'm no expert on international law, i'm just going on reports. You would assume that a commitment to be a member of the UN, and to abide by it's principles and charters either matters, or it doesn't. In purely practical terms the president's prerogative trumps international commitment, the report you linked to in its conclusion states definitely that 'regime change cannot be the objective of military action', and yet the coalition is convinced, well, make a show of being convinced, that they got their resolution and with its somewhat ambivalent and emminently interpretable wording could do away with the say of the security council. There are way too many questions raised and conditions not wholly fulfilled for blatantly declaring that the war was sanctioned. The invasion of Iraq unquestionably weakened the already imperfect security council and organisation, because what does it really mean now that it can be sidestepped by a minority when the decision doesn't go their way.

Michael Caine was in every movie made in the late 70s and early 80s. Roughly.

The UN charter does not allow for the notion of 'preemptive strike', and the US and UK are signatories. The adopted resolution do not change that fact, neither do you start interpreting resolutions and going to war on your own. The war was technically illegal, thats not really in question, Kofi Annan said as much. Now as to whether being in compliance with the UN charter means that much in practical and legal terms to a head of state, that is something else, apparently it does not. This is a contradiction in national law that is expectable when you think about it, but in terms of the organisation's own rules, there is no doubt.

Well, how much is freedom worth in lives, to use Bush speak. I guess it depends on where you live. The Kurds are flourishing and clear of insurgency and terrorists. Of course now they have to deal with Turkey, who would like nothing better than eradicating them.

What ? The image loads slowly and whacks out the format on my screen. Thats it.

We don't have any clear idea of how many people have died in fighting or otherwise unnatural causes because both the US military and the Iraqi authority realise that the number would probably be very unflattering. No body counts, no images of soldiers in caskets. Where is the upside in meticulously documenting failure. A conjectured number is much easier to attack as politically motivated.

Yes, they stole the name from Norse Mythology, now is that any reason to spam the entire image again.

In any case, being a survivor in a post apocalyptic mutant infected earth might well lend itself better to the sketchy and temporary feel of 90% of the quests in a Bethesda game, as will the exploration, which they were always good at, now if they could only throw in something more rewarding for the trouble of exploring than a scamp, a pile of bonemeal and a ruby, we might be getting somewhere.