Funny events in anti-woke world

[Silvanus]

Yes, let's tell terrorist leaders around the world they will never be punished as long as they have children around. Instead let's focus the blame where it actually lies; the person leading an extremely cruel terrorist organization who decided to blow up his own children.

I'm not sure why you believe waiting until innocents aren't nearby involves briefing the enemy on your intentions.

 

[Generals]

I'm not sure why you believe waiting until innocents aren't nearby involves briefing the enemy on your intentions.

Quite simple, at some point it will become obvious to the targets. And let's be quite clear, you never know when that opportunity will arise. You will potentially allow the target to get away to an undisclosed location because there were no opportunities to strike and you'd actually need eyes on the target 24/7. Which is not that easy in hostile territory.

 

[Thaluikhain]

So, just to confirm, it's not morally reprehensible for terrorists to kill innocent people, so long as the innocent people aren't the target, they were just nearby it? Attempting to crash a passenger plane into the Pentagon is perfectly ok because it's the definition of an important military target and it's just too bad that civilians were on the plane?

 

[Silvanus]

Quite simple, at some point it will become obvious to the targets. And let's be quite clear, you never know when that opportunity will arise. You will potentially allow the target to get away to an undisclosed location because there were no opportunities to strike and you'd actually need eyes on the target 24/7. Which is not that easy in hostile territory.

So... you believe we shouldn't avoid killing innocents, so that the enemy knows they're not safe?

Uhrm, you know what we find objectionable about the terrorists, right? What makes them the bad guys?

 

[Generals]

So, just to confirm, it's not morally reprehensible for terrorists to kill innocent people, so long as the innocent people aren't the target, they were just nearby it? Attempting to crash a passenger plane into the Pentagon is perfectly ok because it's the definition of an important military target and it's just too bad that civilians were on the plane?

Stop smoking pot.

The US raid did try to minimize collateral damage, they sent troops on the ground specifically because they knew there were women and children and didn't want to drone them to hell. Local residents reported the US troops used loudspeakers to warn about their assault and asked women and children to evacuate. It is not their fault the target blew children up. If you don't see the difference than this discussion is hopeless. (This comparison is so completely off base it's just...)

 

[Gordon_4]

I'm not sure why you believe waiting until innocents aren't nearby involves briefing the enemy on your intentions.

It doesn’t but since groups like Hezbollah have been pulling the same dodge since the 1980s it’s unlikely anyone in a leadership position at ISIS won’t already know that. Hell the Bin Laden raid basically basically played out no different to a SWAT team kicking down the door of any given drug dealer McMansion in California. Just the people doing the door kicking were better trained.

In the end I suppose it depends on what kind of war you want to wage. They’ve tried (however fumbling) the hearts and mind and democracy route. Ten years and it didn’t get them anywhere with anything other than a tiny percentage of the population that we still failed to save. So I dunno, maybe they’ll try doing to Kabul what Allied Bomber Command did to Dresden.

So... you believe we shouldn't avoid killing innocents, so that the enemy knows they're not safe?

Uhrm, you know what we find objectionable about the terrorists, right? What makes them the bad guys?

I think it’s reached a point with ISIS that they’re only considered terrorists because they lack key criteria to be considered a belligerent nation state.

 

[Generals]

So... you believe we shouldn't avoid killing innocents, so that the enemy knows they're not safe?

Uhrm, you know what we find objectionable about the terrorists, right? What makes them the bad guys?

No, I say that we should keep the mission in mind. The soviets didn't wait for Goebbels' children to leave the bunker before attacking Berlin either... Should we consider that immoral? After all it's because Berlin was falling he killed his children.
You have a high priority target who purposely hid among civilians to use as a shield and had his wife/wives and children with him. There was no way to know whether or not any opportunity would have arisen to strike without any collateral damage. And again, the US tried to minimize collateral damage, it's the frigging target who set off explosives. We do not blame terrorists for forcing our leaders to blow us up... What makes terrorist bad guys is that they consider innocent civilians the TARGET.

 

[Hades]

Have you seen some of the furry community?

If I had teenage kids I wouldn't want them anywhere near some of the stuff going on there.

I mean do we need to talk about the Rainfurrest incidents (plural)?

I'm not sure there's really much to talk about since Mister Historian does note that this event reflects more on a few saboteurs than the community at large.

 

[Silvanus]

No, I say that we should keep the mission in mind. The soviets didn't wait for Goebbels' children to leave the bunker before attacking Berlin either... Should we consider that immoral? After all it's because Berlin was falling he killed his children.
You have a high priority target who purposely hid among civilians to use as a shield and had his wife/wives and children with him. There was no way to know whether or not any opportunity would have arisen to strike without any collateral damage. And again, the US tried to minimize collateral damage, it's the frigging target who set off explosives. We do not blame terrorists for forcing our leaders to blow us up... What makes terrorist bad guys is that they consider innocent civilians the TARGET.

It's possible they made every effort to avoid endangering innocents (I'm not going to use the euphemism "collateral damage"), and it's possible that another chance was unlikely. We don't know if that's the case. But the US doesn't have a good track record in those respects, so I find it easy to believe they didn't care much.

"What makes terrorists bad guys is that they consider innocent civilians the targets", you say, but then indicate that you also consider them acceptable casualties, whether they're targeted or not... you can see how that's not far enough distinct, surely.

 

[Silvanus]

I think it’s reached a point with ISIS that they’re only considered terrorists because they lack key criteria to be considered a belligerent nation state.

A belligerent nation state can still be terrorist. Daesh are a terrorist organisation because they engage in terrorism, and wouldn't cease to be so even if they were a nation state.

But one of the characteristics they're lacking is the intent or ability to actually run a government or state structure. In areas they control, they essentially just continue to operate as a hyper-violent occupying force. They abdicate the responsibilities of actual government, because it's the shallow pretence of psychopaths.

 

[Generals]

It's possible they made every effort to avoid endangering innocents (I'm not going to use the euphemism "collateral damage"), and it's possible that another chance was unlikely. We don't know if that's the case. But the US doesn't have a good track record in those respects, so I find it easy to believe they didn't care much.

"What makes terrorists bad guys is that they consider innocent civilians the targets", you say, but then indicate that you also consider them acceptable casualties, whether they're targeted or not... you can see how that's not far enough distinct, surely.

Nonsense. The distinction is quite clear, that's why at the army there is the concept of "proportional response" and not "You never strike unless you are 100% sure only the intended target will be hit". Collateral damage is always a possibility in any armed conflict. Heck even when police officers raid a terrorist hideout it's possible to have collateral damage. Accepting that we don't live in a James Bond movie is different from justifying terrorist tactics which involve the maximization of civilian casualties.

And yes the US track record is dubious at best. But you're not going to incite better behavior when you just blindly rage even when they do seem to make efforts. If no one is going to be happy anyway they may just as well use drone strikes 100% of the time. Or perhaps the solution is to let scum like Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi walk freely while they lead an organization that persecutes and murders on a daily basis. Or maybe we wait until the Syrian government decides to strike? Because we know how much they care about collateral damage.

 

[bluegate]

Iowa House Bill Requiring Livestreaming in Public School Classrooms Dead for Session | The Iowa Torch

State Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, introduced HF 2177, a bill requiring live video feeds in public school classrooms during instruction time.

iowatorch.com

Party of small gubbment, y'all. Inching closer to that beloved facism the right keeps rubbing their dicks to.

 

[Silvanus]

Nonsense. The distinction is quite clear, that's why at the army there is the concept of "proportional response" and not "You never strike unless you are 100% sure only the intended target will be hit". Collateral damage is always a possibility in any armed conflict. Heck even when police officers raid a terrorist hideout it's possible to have collateral damage. Accepting that we don't live in a James Bond movie is different from justifying terrorist tactics which involve the maximization of civilian casualties.

And yes the US track record is dubious at best. But you're not going to incite better behavior when you just blindly rage even when they do seem to make efforts. If no one is going to be happy anyway they may just as well use drone strikes 100% of the time. Or perhaps the solution is to let scum like Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi walk freely while they lead an organization that persecutes and murders on a daily basis. Or maybe we wait until the Syrian government decides to strike? Because we know how much they care about collateral damage.

This is a ridiculously zero-sum reply. Recognise the gulf of possibilities between the two polar positions of 'drone strikes 100% of the time' and 'letting him walk free'.

Hardly "blindly raging", by the way; I originally said it's worth questioning, and then said it's possible the US made the right moves, but I just don't trust that's the case. That's an appropriately critical approach. They've broken international law and gone way too far enough times for us to skip the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Generals]

This is a ridiculously zero-sum reply. Recognise the gulf of possibilities between the two polar positions of 'drone strikes 100% of the time' and 'letting him walk free'.

Hardly "blindly raging", by the way; I originally said it's worth questioning, and then said it's possible the US made the right moves, but I just don't trust that's the case. That's an appropriately critical approach. They've broken international law and gone way too far enough times for us to skip the benefit of the doubt.

Comparing a reasonable intervention and the idea you cannot always afford to avoid all civilian casualties is at the very least blind.

An article with more details on what we know;

US strike framed to spare civilians after mounting criticism

Facing criticism for civilian deaths in U.S. airstrikes, the Biden administration targeted the leader of the Islamic State group in a way that was riskier for American forces, landing dozens of U.S. commandoes outside his Syrian hideout rather than targeting him with an airstrike.

apnews.com

" A lieutenant of the militant leader and that man’s wife also died along with a child, after the pair fired upon U.S. forces, officials said. "

"Al-Qurayshi lived in a house that also housed multiple families, going outside only to bathe on the roof occasionally, one official said. That meant any airstrike would have all but unavoidably killed women and children and other noncombatants as well."

So apparently there was also a lieutenant and as his wife fired at the soldiers that means at least one woman present can be considered a combatant. And based on the article we can assume a child was the unfortunate collateral of cross fire because his parents decided to shoot instead of surrendering.
And finally apparently people didn't leave the building very often meaning they indeed couldn't have waited for the building to be cleared of all the children.

And i do recognize the gulf of possibilities between two polar opposites. The operation at hand was one of those possibilities.
The only two black and white people are you and Thaluikhain who seem to believe you either only tolerate military operations with 0 civilian casualties or basically justify terrorist behavior.

EDIT: Talking about myriad of possibilities, short of letting him run free what type of operation do you think would have caused less collateral damage than sending in a commando which even went out of its way to warn civilians before carrying out the assault? Because short of sending Daniel Craig I don't see it. I can come up with plenty of more dangerous possibilities though.

 

[Silvanus]

And i do recognize the gulf of possibilities between two polar opposites. The operation at hand was one of those possibilities.
The only two black and white people are you and Thaluikhain who seem to believe you either only tolerate military operations with 0 civilian casualties or basically justify terrorist behavior.

Except neither of us have actually said that. In fact, that description of my position directly contradicts what I've explicitly said.

The details you're quoting are coming from the government briefings. Suffice it to say they've been unreliable in the past. If you're happy to assume all reasonable options were evaluated, and all reasonable precautions were taken, feel free-- but past experience indicates its not a safe bet. Remember when the US military bombed a civilian hospital, and a flurry of post-hoc justifications talked about acceptable collateral? Yeah.

The guy needed to die. They might have taken the best available option to achieve it. But I don't trust them to do it. And I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

If you were trying to design a magazine to tantalize, excite, and frustrate QAnon believers, you could hardly do better than a 1997 issue of George. Due to the peculiarities of history, the muscular free market, and the fact that we live in hell, copies of the issue—which is taglined “Survival Guide to the Future”—have recently sold for thousands of dollars on eBay. The magazine has become one of the minor holy objects passed around by the Q crowd as evidence of the truth of their addled quest.

George enjoyed a short but infamous run, often inextricably tied with the rocky fortunes of the Kennedy family itself: It was published from 1995 to 2001, and co-founded and edited by John F. Kennedy Jr. himself, who wanted to cover politics, he said, like pop culture. That led to some truly surreal situations, as Esquire wrote in a 2019 retrospective, like Drew Barrymore posing as Marilyn Monroe, with whom JFK Sr., is, of course, famously suspected to have had an affair. The magazine folded about 18 months after Kennedy, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren Bessette were killed when he crashed a small aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean just off Martha’s Vineyard.

Some QAnon followers believe JFK Jr. is alive and well, living in light disguise and appearing at QAnon conferences. Depending on which QAnon devotee you ask, the real, living JFK Jr. is a man named Vincent Fusca, or another man named Juan O. Savin, both big wheels in the QAnon circuit. Another faction, led by a man named Michael Protzman, spent about a month and a half milling around Dallas, awaiting what Protzman promised would be the Christ-like returns of JFK Sr., Jr., and Jacqueline Kennedy. (When that did not happen, Protzman led a group to a Trump rally in Arizona, claiming Trump was JFK in disguise, which also didn’t quite pan out. His group, however, is still active.)

Against that psychedelically weird context, the significance of the 1997 Survival Guide to the Future makes more sense. The cover features a waspy-hipped space vixen—Dutch model Karen Mulder—saluting jauntily; inside, JFK Jr. has a lengthy interview with Bill Gates, preserved on archive.org, where the two talk about the ways that the nascent internet is changing politics.


“The internet is scalable,” Gates proclaims, “in the sense that if something really catches your eye, you can become as educated and involved on the subject as you want to be.” Indeed.

Another supposed quote from the Gates interview was the subject of a Snopes debunking; he was said to have predicted that the planet would be “choked to extinction by a lung-attacking virus.” In fact, that quote is from a different article—a group of predictions about the future by a collection of writers, including science writer and psychoanalyst Arno Karlen, who wrote the “lung-attacking virus” prediction.

Due to the prescience of the cover alone, the magazine has been an object of fascination for the Q crowd for quite a long time. In January 2020, QAnon expert Travis View, one of the co-hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, noticed that an enterprising Amazon seller was listing it for $25,000, apparently hoping, he wrote dryly at the time, “to capitalize on the QAnon community's devotion.” (View’s real name is Logan Strain; he’s been clear that he uses a pseudonym as an added layer of protection from the people he covers, but was nonetheless himself the subject of a very strange Washington Post story not long ago, implying that his use of the View name was unethical.) At one point, View added in a follow-up tweet, Fusca was seen circulating at a Q event wearing a T-shirt with a George cover on it, hinting far more broadly than usual at what Q believers think his real identity is.


“I think it's newsworthy,” View told Motherboard of the George cover, “as an illustration of the absurd JFK Jr. mythology within some segments of the QAnon community.” An equally strong draw, though, he points out, might be the tagline about Hillary Clinton being indicted. The full article about her isn’t preserved online, but in 1997, the Clintons were still fighting through the swamp of the Whitewater scandal, and special prosecutor Ken Starr told an appeals court that Clinton could be indicted. (Clinton’s lawyer told the Associated Press at the time, “To say Mrs. Clinton is the subject of investigation is obvious, but to imply there is any real basis for it is ridiculous.”) Hillary Clinton was, of course, never indicted for anything, and Ken Starr went on to play a starring role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Conspiracy YouTubers have shared issues of the magazine, and the pages they display show that the article was indeed about Whitewater.)

All of this leads us to the current situation, where a search for the phrase “survival guide to the future” on Twitter or various QAnon forums brings up endless discussions about how COVID-19 was a plandemic, JFK Jr. is alive and well, and Bill Gates is the root of every conceivable evil.

A search on eBay shows that 11 copies of the magazine have recently sold—between November 2021 and late January—for amounts ranging from $730 to nearly $2400. Three eBay sellers are currently listing the magazine for even more, between $2,000 to $3,499.99. At least two other enterprising people are selling T-shirts with the cover on them, for a far more affordable price. Several minor conspiracy personalities on YouTube essentially just read the magazine out loud.



In the end, the curious place this magazine issue holds in conspiracy culture is one more depressing data point to illustrate how conspiracism is seeping into every aspect of our lives, the ways we view one another, and the ways some of us look back on even minor elements of history. Unless, of course, you happen to own a mint-condition copy of a particular 1997 issue of George magazine—then it’s just a great opportunity

 

[Chimpzy]

It's Greg Locke. Dude is straight up evil. Google some of the shit he's done over the years and you'll realize that this, while striking, is far from his only fascist behavior.

Also a ... man ... of his word, it seems

They're Burning Books in Tennessee

Greg Locke's zealots set fire to sacred millennial texts like Harry Potter and Twilight

www.nashvillescene.com

Nice, living that griftin lifestyle with gusto. Or if it ain't a grift: Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

 

[Generals]

Except neither of us have actually said that. In fact, that description of my position directly contradicts what I've explicitly said.

Nonsense:

So, just to confirm, it's not morally reprehensible for terrorists to kill innocent people, so long as the innocent people aren't the target, they were just nearby it? Attempting to crash a passenger plane into the Pentagon is perfectly ok because it's the definition of an important military target and it's just too bad that civilians were on the plane?

So... you believe we shouldn't avoid killing innocents, so that the enemy knows they're not safe?

Uhrm, you know what we find objectionable about the terrorists, right? What makes them the bad guys?

My position has always been that it is not always possible to avoid all civilian casualties and these were the conclusions you two drew. Black and white.

The details you're quoting are coming from the government briefings. Suffice it to say they've been unreliable in the past. If you're happy to assume all reasonable options were evaluated, and all reasonable precautions were taken, feel free-- but past experience indicates its not a safe bet. Remember when the US military bombed a civilian hospital, and a flurry of post-hoc justifications talked about acceptable collateral? Yeah.

The guy needed to die. They might have taken the best available option to achieve it. But I don't trust them to do it. And I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.

Correct and the briefings is all we have to go on for now. Based on the available information the operation was done as well as it could have.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Also a ... man ... of his word, it seems

They're Burning Books in Tennessee

Greg Locke's zealots set fire to sacred millennial texts like Harry Potter and Twilight

www.nashvillescene.com

Nice, living that griftin lifestyle with gusto. Or if it ain't a grift: Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

Wonder what would happen if a bunch of leftwingers were to cheer him on because Rowling is a TERF?

 

[Silvanus]

Nonsense:

My position has always been that it is not always possible to avoid all civilian casualties and these were the conclusions you two drew. Black and white.

No, you're distorting how the conversation went. My first post on the matter was that it was worth questioning the wisdom and morality of carrying this out with innocents present. Your immediate reply was to equate that position with letting the enemy know he's always safe around kids. You're the one who chose to delve into black and white reductionism.

Correct and the briefings is all we have to go on for now. Based on the available information the operation was done as well as it could have.

If the only available information we have is a briefing by the ones who carried it out and have an obvious interest in a certain line, then the rational thing isn't to just accept it and ask no questions. Had we applied that approach the last 20 times the US broke international law overseas, we wouldn't have found out about it.