Where's my gun?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Donkeys kill more people a year. Fact.

I always thought OBL looked like an ass.

[DaShi]

This thread is like the boardroom in the Apprentice.

[Vince278]

I've had tougher bosses.

[DaShi]

Trump has far more patience than I do.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by DaShi
Trump has far more patience than I do.

That's probably for the show. My first reaction has always been to fire the lot of them on day one and fire the people who chose them. The show would be more interesting if he picked the candidates from all applicants (would be a show in itself).

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Cyclotron
It seems likely that these numbers are largely inflated because of the failure to distinguish between resistance and terrorism; I wonder how many armed clashes between the insurgents and the US forces are considered terrorist acts?

Terrorism is pretty explicitly defined, so the only problem should be in the reporting of the incident rather than its classification after the fact. Attacks aimed at civilians should tend to be placed in the terrorism category while attacks on military forces should be considered insurgent action even when there is large collateral damage, which is often the case.

[Sikander]

Re: Re: Where's my gun?

Originally posted by Vince278


1.31 deaths per attack? They really suck big time. Idiots.

Add to that that the vast majority of the victims are of the same ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators despite the fact that this is supposed to be a clash of civilizations.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by MRT144
BOMBS OVER BAHGDAD!!!!!!!!

X / 32 / Tokyo

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Cyclotron
I find it odd that "terrorism" as a method is such a large concern. Terrorism is not something that can be eliminated; the only people I expect to talk seriously about eradicating terror once and for all are Miss World candidates who advocate for "world peace."

Clearly, terrorist attacks by certain groups are a serious concern - 9/11 may have caused many fewer deaths than AIDS, but foreign organizations purposefully murdering people is a concern no matter how you stretch it. Personally, I refuse to believe that politics is so zero-sum that one must choose what kills the greatest number of people and focus only on that; the fact that AIDS is an enormous problem, and a much greater problem in my mind than al-Qaeda, does not make the need to defend against such organizations any less pressing.

But terrorism as a method, compared to AIDS? It's even more hopeless than the War on Drugs. If our objective is to eradicate terrorism, then we'd best give up now - or, if we're really serious about it, analyze what it is that causes people to want to commit acts of terrorism against us and work from there.

As far as the original point of this thread, those numbers seem totally meaningless to me; a person's cause of death is not "terrorism," it is "murder." Terrorism simply describes the method of and meaning behind that murder, and as such it's impossbile to concretely say in all cases what is terrorism and what is not. Many countries cannot agree on what it means; the State Department's definition is very different from the UN's. What is terrorism to us is not terrorism to, say, some Iraqis. What is significant is the number of casualties we have caused in this war - both our own and the others we have killed, and those the insurgents and terrorists have killed. That is the human price that is important, and exactly what nobody seems to want to talk about. How much safety have we bought, and at what price?

I tend to agree, though I'd like to point out that methods like area bombing of cities have been largely curtailed by the people most capable of carrying them out because people gave a damn about methods.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by GePap
Oh, and Straybow:

when will right wing ideologues like yourself realize that osama Bin Laden is one of you? Islamic fundamentalism is a form of right wing ideology, which is why Reagan and his admin. was so willing and happy to give billions to Islamic fundamentalists- because they hate relativism and humanism and socialism just as much as, well, YOU.

Osama and you (and the other right wing ideologues) share the notion of absolute good and evil, and the perverse idea that this absolute and fundamental "right and wrong" means that some people simply deserve to die, and the mania that you (or he) can decide who those people who should die are.

In the end of the day, your ideology of black and white is a hundred times closer to what osama bin laden believes than what some moral relativist like myself believes.

Capish?

So then you are like Stalin? Talk about Pol Pot calling the kettle black..

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


The ironic thing about that is, this is a result of the invasion of Iraq, which was supposedly an attempt to reduce terrorism, esp. that on the US and Usians...

Wow, inciteful post. I never realized the irony inherent in the thread subject. It's particularly ironic because the assumption that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with terrorism was erroneous in the first place. So I see your misplaced Chinese irony and raise you the irony of the misapprehending American taxpayer.