And already the unsupportable “it’s terrorism!” charge has been downgraded to “terrorist tactics.” Sorry, but it’s not terrorism. This is also a gross distortion of what I wrote.
When you argue that the government of a country is a terrorist organization that the entirety of the nation actively supports, you must know in advance that you’re not going to get much agreement when you tell people that the only moral position is the one they have never used.
I’ve been around since the 60s, when similar arguments were being offered. And for far better reasons that today. The Johnson and Nixon administrations really were committing utterly immoral acts and lying to the public about them. Johnson quit, but Nixon went on to declare war on his own people, the half of America who didn’t agree with him. Boy, the Good Old Days.
The answer then is the same as the answer today. Reform from within. Shake up the dominant parties and shift their worldviews. This is a process rather than a thing and takes decades. The parties today, however, are not the parties of the 60s.
Whether you advocate violence, as some did in the 60s, or withdrawal, as a third party protest vote is, you’re doing it wrong. It can’t work. You may feel better about yourself, but in reality all it does is give the people you find most immoral the most power. It’s self-defeating.
Adult males also included al-Libi and al-Awlaki, may they rest in pieces. Note the words “areas of known terrorist activity” in your quote. What you’re describing is a way the administration may be avoiding acknowledging civilian casualties, which (if true) is a bad thing, and so are the mistaken strikes that have killed significant numbers of people. However that’s still not terrorism and your suggestion that adult males are being targeted at random is very misleading.
I agree. The thread should have ended right here.
Agreed. I’m an Ohioan who agrees with about 90% of what the President has done in his first term and thinks Romney would be far more aggressive abroad. Despite some qualms about drone strikes, I will very happily vote for Obama.
That’s not what it says. What it says is bad enough; don’t make it sound worse.
Obama is NOT targeting random adult males in an effort to terrorize people. What his administration is doing is targeting suspected terrorists, and then pretending there were no innocence killed by counting innocent dudes as terrorists. That’s a sleazy awful thing to do, but it’s not at all the same thing as targeting innocent people.
Doe the OP realize that if every single Doper voted for one of her/his pet candidates, the person voted into office would either be Obama or Romney?
That’s certainly why I’ve always voted & probably always will vote Republican!
Not really.
The hell are you talking about “unsupported”? They intentionally targeted areas where civilians were guaranteed to be in order to frighten people from supporting a group that holds power in that specific region. No more support needed.
But that will cancel out my vote for Nixon’s head!
Yes, really. It’s not even close. I wrote that the tactic isn’t terrorism for several different reasons and that it’s also a method used publicly by an elected official in a democratic system, which is worlds away from the deliberate targeting of civilians by terrorist groups, who don’t answer to anybody. Your response was to distort that into ‘so voters can approve terrorist tactics OMG WTF?’ The problem is that in order to respond to my statements, you not only had to change your terms (which is an acknowledgement that I was onto something), you had to totally distort what I was saying (also a tacit acknowledgement of my point). Sorry, this is really a losing effort. The drone strikes are problematic and need to be used very carefully because they’re prone to errors and abuses, but they’re not terrorism.
I eagerly await your cite demonstrating that the purpose of the program is “frightening people” rather than attacking a terrorist group.
From the cited report:
In other words terrorism.
I have to admit I wasn’t convinced because “people are afraid” doesn’t come anywhere close to making a tactic terrorism and doesn’t have speak to the purpose of the strategy, but then I saw you’d deployed bolded text.
Aren’t you a little old for sarcasm? Great way to avoid the content.
You don’t know him very well, do you?
At any rate, I’d just like to say that I’m relieved that the subject line of this thread says that Obama is a terrorist for things he has actually done, and not because he has dark skin or is supposedly a Muslim.
I responded to the content: the fact that people are frightened doesn’t make it terrorism. I was going to say that’s a bad analysis, but in fact it’s more of a word game than an analysis. Sorry. Military strikes against a terrorist group are not terrorism even if people are frightened of them (as if full-scale war or attacks by a terrorist group aren’t frightening).
Because I do no such thing. I’ve never voted for someone in my life; only against.
Killing the adult (and by “adult” we mean “older than ten or so”) males in a region just for being there is more commonly known as a massacre; not just terrorism. I’m reminded of the Mongols killing every boy too tall to walk under a table without ducking. This is terrorism at best. We’d certainly call it terrorism and massacre if it was being done to whites and Christians and not brown people and Muslims.
Which basically amounts to a variation on “terrorist is what the big army calls the little army”. And popular terrorism is still terrorism.
That’s not is what being discussed. What’s being discussed is males killed in drone strikes being described afterward as likely terrorists rather than civilians.
We are doing both. Killing people just for being male in a particular area - we’ve been doing that at least as far back as Fallujah - and then declaring our victims to be terrorists.