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Ytlaya posted:Okay, so basically "there's just no reason to use them in most cases unless they're targeting civilians." That's a pretty good reason to ban their use, though I'm not sure it really makes using them against civilians morally worse than using conventional weapons against the same civilians (though I guess it at least erases all doubt that killing civilians was the intent of the attack). Basically everyone agrees that out of the NBC weapons chemical weapons aren't that much worse than chemical explosives. They're still taboo because the great powers don't really have that much need for them (white phosphorus aside which is useful both tactically and as a terror weapon).
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Apr 14, 2018 20:13
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Ytlaya posted:Honest question - what is the reasoning behind chemical weapons being worse than getting bomb shrapnel embedded in your torso or whatever? I'm not asking this as some rhetorical thing, but because I'm genuinely curious what the rational is because making a clear distinction between them and "conventional" weapons. Unlike nuclear weapons, it doesn't have the whole "an entire city destroyed with just one bomb" aspect and I don't think it renders the area uninhabitable for a while afterwards due to radiation or some other reason (though I'm not sure about the latter). because it's not that effective against a modern, organized, well-supplied military, and by its nature it's pretty much an indiscriminate attack so we can't pretend that it doesn't hurt civilians. it just forces both sides to spend more money and resources on equipping everyone and everything with protective equipment, and pointlessly increases the damage to civilians without any real military purpose. so there's no point in using them in a real military clash, you just hold them in reserve MAD-style so that if the other side uses them on you, you can force that same cost on them too on the other hand, there's plenty of not-modern, not-organized, and not-well-supplied forces that don't have chemical weapons and can't easily mass-produce defenses. so chemical weapons are often seen in civil wars, rebellions, and insurgencies Ytlaya posted:Okay, so basically "there's just no reason to use them in most cases unless they're targeting civilians." That's a pretty good reason to ban their use, though I'm not sure it really makes using them against civilians morally worse than using conventional weapons against the same civilians (though I guess it at least erases all doubt that killing civilians was the intent of the attack). part of it is the MAD aspect, except that doesn't really fit because it's more like a mutually-assured annoyance than a mutually-assured destruction (unless you're a civilian who lives near the battlefield, I guess). for example, the US actually brought chemical weapons stocks with them when they invaded Italy in WWII. they didn't use them, but they wanted to have them in reserve so that if the Germans started using chemical warfare, the US would immediately be able to do the same. (incidentally, this led to a disaster when an Allied supply area was bombed, destroying a cache of chemical weapons that was kept secret even after hundreds of people started turning up at hospitals with mystery symptoms). meanwhile, the Nazi troops didn't use chemical weapons against the invading Allies because they knew that if they started using chemical weapons, the Allies would start doing it as well, and the Allies were already bombing the poo poo out of German cities at the time because of that kind of thing, the big, powerful countries that set the international rules have traditionally been reluctant to use chemical weapons against each other (WWI was a big exception). and since they're confident in their conventional military supremacy, they tend not to bother with chemical weapons against smaller foes or insurgent groups. and anything that isn't used by Russia, China, and the big Western countries is ripe for banning. chemical weapons are mostly used by small dictatorships using them against people who don't have the resources to develop chemical weapons of their own: i.e., insurgents and rebels.
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Apr 14, 2018 20:25
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is "believer in American Renewal" the most lib way to say MAGA
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Apr 14, 2018 20:30
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Ytlaya posted:Okay, so basically "there's just no reason to use them in most cases unless they're targeting civilians." That's a pretty good reason to ban their use, though I'm not sure it really makes using them against civilians morally worse than using conventional weapons against the same civilians (though I guess it at least erases all doubt that killing civilians was the intent of the attack). Conventional and chemical strikes against civilian areas are reprehensible, so to see people saying "actually it's good that Assad used chemicals against civilians" are loving odious.
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Apr 14, 2018 20:55
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Thug Lessons posted:It's worth noting that this is probably the dominant view in the Middle East. They don't think ISIS has anything to do with Iraq or Syria at all. They think it was created by America and Israel. mission accomplished! https://twitter.com/muhmentions/status/985245213441560576 Karl Barks has issued a correction as of 21:02 on Apr 14, 2018 |
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Apr 14, 2018 20:58
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civilians weren’t really the target of the attack, so even framing it in those terms is a misrepresentation of the issue. all those people gassed to death were just “collateral damage,” like all the people in that Yemeni village who were killed by navy seals when Trump became president.
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Apr 14, 2018 21:18
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:is "believer in American Renewal" the most lib way to say MAGA It's Radical Centrism, friendo.
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Apr 14, 2018 21:28
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https://twitter.com/jackmirkinson/status/985142772607971328?s=21
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Apr 14, 2018 21:45
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Ballistic missile strikes are just one of those things that presidents have to do every now and then.
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Apr 14, 2018 21:49
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:civilians weren’t really the target of the attack, so even framing it in those terms is a misrepresentation of the issue. all those people gassed to death were just “collateral damage,” like all the people in that Yemeni village who were killed by navy seals when Trump became president. If you believe everyone under your plane is al qaeda you'll never target civilians
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Apr 14, 2018 22:01
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also lol at literally arguing if they run theyre a jhadi and if they stand still they're a well diciplined jhadi
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Apr 14, 2018 22:05
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Bip Roberts posted:If you believe everyone under your plane is al qaeda you'll never target civilians I'm sure that's what American pilots thought when they dropped White Phosphorous onto Fallujah and seared the flesh off of women and children, but nobody bombed MIT over it.
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Apr 14, 2018 22:06
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Ballistic missile strikes are just one of those things that presidents have to do every now and then. How presidential!
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Apr 14, 2018 22:08
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Every year we can pick one American by lottery to be the ritualistic dictator that we blow up with the most expensive hardware available, or else the president is illegitimate and we have to do another election.
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Apr 14, 2018 22:10
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I'm sure that's what American pilots thought when they dropped White Phosphorous onto Fallujah and seared the flesh off of women and children, but nobody bombed MIT over it. whoa I was just saying that bombing falujah was good and proper
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Apr 14, 2018 22:11
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Bip Roberts posted:whoa I was just saying that bombing falujah was good and proper That's true. Only non-Western countries do war crimes.
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Apr 14, 2018 22:12
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:That's true. Only non-Western countries do war crimes. I know!
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Apr 14, 2018 22:12
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Thug Lessons posted:Well, people were horrified by their deployment in WWI, and moved quickly to ban them thereafter. That's about the long and the short of it. They were actually banned before WW1, Germany tried to get around the ban through a loop-hole that meant if you sprayed the gas, rather than dispersing it from a shell, it was legal.
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Apr 14, 2018 22:37
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HorrificExistence posted:They were actually banned before WW1, Germany tried to get around the ban through a loop-hole that meant if you sprayed the gas, rather than dispersing it from a shell, it was legal. yeah, the idea of "war crimes" started really coming around in the late-19th/early-20th century when everyone noticed the beginnings of industrial warfare and the sheer degree of bloodshed that resulted, and decided that maybe it would be inhumane to use those weapons against Europeans. plus putting an end to various arms races and stuff except as it turned out, basically everyone broke the rules as soon as they became inconvenient. rules regarding things like blockades and how to start an invasion were immediately ignored, while stuff like the poison gas prohibition and most rules surrounding merchant ships were dumped as soon as everyone realized it wasn't going to be a quick or easy war the modern idea that "all these rules have been around and accepted for so long that we're just going to presume everyone's bound by them whether they signed the treaty or not" is largely a convenient piece of bullshit
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Apr 14, 2018 22:47
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it's like how sometimes when i park within 20 ft of the curb, the meter maid doesn't ticket me. but sometimes the city needs a little extra money and so they arbitrarily give me the ticket. bunch of bullshit
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Apr 14, 2018 22:55
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Main Paineframe posted:yeah, the idea of "war crimes" started really coming around in the late-19th/early-20th century when everyone noticed the beginnings of industrial warfare and the sheer degree of bloodshed that resulted, and decided that maybe it would be inhumane to use those weapons against Europeans. plus putting an end to various arms races and stuff My favorite story about trying to follow international law is that in 1916 Germany decided that it was going to re-start the policy of surfacing uboats and warning before sinking civilian ships. In response to this the British would just put a large cannon on the front of the ship and cover it with a tarpaulin, and as soon as the u-boat surfaced, they would rip off the cover and start shelling the uboat. The argument was that it wasn't their fault that the Germans couldn't tell it was a military ship.
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Apr 14, 2018 22:56
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I also like the part where the germans forgot that the wind blowed east 90% of the time before they decided to start chemical warfare.
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Apr 14, 2018 23:01
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foreverailly at war with syria and deliatized into cruise missiles and cheese...
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Apr 14, 2018 23:03
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SirPhoebos posted:foreverailly at war with syria and deliatized into cruise missiles and cheese... america empire foreverailly wrapped in police actions
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Apr 14, 2018 23:23
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https://twitter.com/trillburne/status/985248809730105344?s=21
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Apr 15, 2018 00:27
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Syrian Gen: Damascus to Respond to US-Led Strikes by Attacking Aggressors' Bases in Syria http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13970125000653
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Apr 15, 2018 01:06
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https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/985301110830215168
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Apr 15, 2018 01:12
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just dropping this here so people will know what this said after the inevitable delete https://twitter.com/guaph/status/985307002908930048
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Apr 15, 2018 01:14
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lmao
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Apr 15, 2018 01:16
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LinYutang posted:Wild how tankie and alt right commentary ends up looking the same Could that be because they’re literally the same people on different accounts perhaps
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Apr 15, 2018 01:16
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MIchael McFail
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Apr 15, 2018 01:16
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it's cool how even a deranged loving lunatic in the white house is identical to the democrats on foreign policy
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Apr 15, 2018 01:16
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us foreign policy operates within a very narrow sphere of acceptable choices constrained by the network of bureaucratic trumanite elites (MUH DEEP STATE), whose goal remains primacy and hegemony at almost any cost instead of managing an inevitable and inexorable relative decline just say this to yourself every day in the mirror and everything will feel a lot better
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Apr 15, 2018 01:25
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For some reason former Trump WH employees are having trouble finding work, even private sector revolving door work https://www.buzzfeed.com/tariniparti/as-trump-spirals-many-of-his-staffers-are-looking-to-exit?utm_term=.uh19YZavk9#.ssKvkY7P6v quote:Even for this chaotic administration, the last few weeks have taken a toll on President Donald Trump and his staff. A tragic mass shooting, big-name staff departures, and a series of scandals — all in the growing shadow of the investigation into Russia’s involvement in 2016 election — has left the White House under a dark cloud of low morale and constant frustration.
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Apr 15, 2018 01:46
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lmoeba saddam's wmds were in syria all along
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Apr 15, 2018 01:51
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Ytlaya posted:Okay, so basically "there's just no reason to use them in most cases unless they're targeting civilians." That's a pretty good reason to ban their use, though I'm not sure it really makes using them against civilians morally worse than using conventional weapons against the same civilians (though I guess it at least erases all doubt that killing civilians was the intent of the attack).
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Apr 15, 2018 02:06
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https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/985136687838883840
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Apr 15, 2018 02:22
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really could have used a "crack a few eggs to make an omelette" reference somehow. just something about eggs. that man is an egg
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Apr 15, 2018 02:23
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European powers also had an agreed upon interest in not purposely maiming without killing each other's soldiers, something that was once considered a valid tactic of war as it would remove the soldier from the field and also burden the enemy nation's resources in then providing for that soldier. WW1-era gas was significantly more likely to maim than kill (once soldiers were outfitted with gas masks and other equipment fatality figures for mustard gas dropped to about 2% by british estimates) incapacitating soldiers for several weeks with trouble breathing and painful blisters in the short term, and scarred throat tissue and neurological damage in the long term. Survivors were a financial burden on the military and the state compared to those who simply died to bullets or artillery, and people interacting with maimed survivors might be less willing to fight or support the state in a future conflict.
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Apr 15, 2018 02:36
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glenn greenwalds had some pretty interesting takes on immigration himself
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Apr 15, 2018 02:38
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