[ExI] riots again

[Charlie Stross]

On 27 Sep 2012, at 16:28, Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:
> 
> My humble opinion is, if the US Army, USMC, USAF want make a desert and call it "peace", they have all the tools and the power to do so in few weeks

No. They have the tools to do so in *half an hour*. What they don't have is the orders to do so. They're a tool of state policy, and the state policy wants to reduce jihadi recruiting and pacify a very remote region in the arse end of nowhere, not detonate a thousand H-bombs.

> What Charlie Stross and others are arguing is the US is evil and powerful, but, like Israel, it is unable to exterminate a people unarmed and under their total control. They would like to do it, they try to do it, but someway they are unable to do it.

Straw man.

To do the job they really need to put a million pairs of boots on the ground -- a full-scale occupation army. But they can't do that. So they're essentially using terror tactics as a proxy for manpower.

(The British Empire started this game back when Churchill was in the foreign office, post-WW1; "policing with bombers" is your key search term. Want to know where they tried it? Iraq!)

> Let me be skeptic.

I'm accusing you of arguing in ill-faith. Straw man positions ascribed to your opponents, cherry-picked extracts from someone else's religious texts ... I've seen this before.

If we replace "muslim" with "jew" in your previous screed, and replaced the surahs with talmudic extracts, you'd be a dead ringer for Joseph Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Propaganda, i.e. it'd be obvious that you were blatantly, axe-grindingly anti-semitic. But switch to a different religious target and folks give you a free pass. You're disgusting.


-- Charlie