Moonbat alert: Chomksy condemns Bin Laden kill.

I've got one:

He called Robert Faurisson, the Holocaust denier he defended, "a relatively apolitical liberal".
 
Captain.Sassy said:
Whether or not I demonstrate anything about OBL wanting to surrender, I still have a point: if someone is clearly trying to surrender (as per your post), then shooting them is a war crime- it is not one of several equally defensible options.
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He said publicly he'd never surrender and was taken at his word.
 
Captain.Sassy said:
You're silly.

Here's the post I commented on:

Quote:
"If it is clear that the enemy is not armed or booby-trapped, and is in fact surrendering, then capture might be the correct course of action, depending on the totality of the circumstances."


So in your own example it is "clear the enemy is not armed nor booby-trapped". In this case, it is a war crime to shoot the surrendering combatant. It is not, as you implied, one of several equally defensible actions, along with accepting the combatant's surrender.
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Like I said. It depends on the totality of the circumstances.

For example, you and your recon team is deep inside enemy territory. The area is crawling with Taliban. You are trying to work your way to a relatively safe LZ where you can board a chopper and sky out. Suddenly you unexpectedly encounter two Taliban who immediately throw up their hands without a fight.

You have choices to make. You can release the Taliban, allowing them to reveal your presence to the others. You can take them with you, in which case they will be a distraction, slow you down, and may contrive to alert the ohers. Or you can blindfold them and quietly slit their throats.

What do you do? I would slit their damn throats. There is no ink on any paper anywhere that can force me to unnecessarily risk the lives of my team for the benefit of an enemy.

It is stupid to make up a set of dogmatic rules of war and then follow the dogmatic rules religiously. The enemy will simply read your dogmatic rules and work out how he can use your dogmatic rules against you. He will present you with situations not covered by your dogmatic rules. He will present you with situations in which following your dogmatic rules will get you killed or defeated.
 
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Pardalis said:
The great Christopher Hitchens hits hard on Chomsky:

http://www.slate.com/id/2293541/?from=rss

Right on! :bigclap
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Yes.
Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?
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Toontown said:
Like I said. It depends on the totality of the circumstances.

For example, you and your recon team is deep inside enemy territory. The area is crawling with Taliban. You are trying to work your way to a relatively safe LZ where you can board a chopper and sky out. Suddenly you unexpectedly encounter two Taliban who immediately throw up their hands without a fight.

You have choices to make. You can release the Taliban, allowing them to reveal your presence to the others and/or ambush you later. You can take them with you, in which case they will be a distraction, slow you down, and may contrive to alert the ohers. Or you can blindfold them and quietly slit their throats.

What do you do?
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I would tie the taliban up and blindfold and gag them, and tell them to count to 1000 before trying to leave or I'd snipe them with my silenced sniper rifle. Then I would use my +5 cloak of concealment and sit right there hidden in plain sight. When the Taliban counted to 5000, I'd wait for them to run off to alert their buddies, and THEN I'd head north, using the stars to guide me.

I love playing D&IED.
 
In all seriousness though, while I do agree with you that following the rules of war may be costly, those rules aren't necessarily there to make waging war easier, just like rules governing the actions of domestic police forces aren't necessarily there to make it easier for cops to catch criminals. Both sets of rules are designed to place limits on how we as a society authorize those who use force to use force on our behalf. Kinda.
 
He's no role-player Sassy. He fought in Vietnam against the Red Plague. The Communists were a far more dangerous advisory than bumhead Arabs and Afghans.
 
Toontown said:
He is intelligent, but his prodigious memory of all his tediously-collected factoids and snippets and how they can be pieced together in dishonest debate is more an indication of his insanity than anything else.
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It's just the old "Blizzard of [bovine feces]" technique.
 
Toontown said:
Like I said. It depends on the totality of the circumstances.

For example, you and your recon team is deep inside enemy territory. The area is crawling with Taliban. You are trying to work your way to a relatively safe LZ where you can board a chopper and sky out. Suddenly you unexpectedly encounter two Taliban who immediately throw up their hands without a fight.
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I think they'd have been shot before throwing up their hands. But if not, immediately after.
 
Chomsky contributes to the disturbing trend of Westerners being brought up to hate themselves. If we no longer believe in our culture, we'll fall to someone who isn't shackled with guilt and self-loathing.
 
Toontown said:
There is no ink on any paper anywhere that can force me to unnecessarily risk the lives of my team for the benefit of an enemy.
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The problem is you can use this argument, or an argument very similar to it, to justify anything from using human shields to raping women so enemy soldiers desert to protect their families back home to sawing the head off of a captured American soldier on Youtube to try and sap the will of America to fight.
 
Virus said:
Chomsky contributes to the disturbing trend of Westerners being brought up to hate themselves. If we no longer believe in our culture, we'll fall to someone who isn't shackled with guilt and self-loathing.
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There's a difference between 'hating' Western culture being critical of the actions Western countries take.
 
There's a difference between being critical of Western states and saying they're no better than the Third Reich and Soviet Union. Which is pretty much Noam Chomsky's schtick.
 
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Come off it Sassy, he compared Vaclav Havel to a Soviet commissar. Not only ridiculous but poor taste.
 
WildCat said:
I think they'd have been shot before throwing up their hands. But if not, immediately after.
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Perhaps we shouldn't give the bleeding hearts too straight a dose of reality all at once. You know how they get.

But since you've already let the truth slip out, you're right. It doesn't take long to look at a Taliban before opening up. Study long, study wrong, he who hesitates is toast, etc. But in the scenario I dreamed up, you really don't want to make any noise, so it would be convenient to "capture" the Taliban before quietly slitting their throats.
 
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Captain.Sassy said:
In all seriousness though, while I do agree with you that following the rules of war may be costly, those rules aren't necessarily there to make waging war easier...
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Obviously not.

Looking to turn a 6 month dust-up into a 10 year quagmire? That, we can do. Hamstringing the troops by irrationally demanding strict, mindless adherence to dogmatic rules of war which were never meant to be followed religiously with complete situational indifference is a good way to start blowing it. Then you can snowball the debacle from there. Turning it into a political football is the obvious next step. That should do it. We'll be turning tail to the rag-tag Taliban after an excruciatingly long politically-charged bumble-funk.

And don't worry. It won't be easy for the troops. Losing a war while concentrating on saving enemy lives is a difficult and thankless task. And there won't be any victory parades and hoo-raws. Don't you lefties worry your pretty little heads about that.

That'll teach us to try to fight an enemy. We won't try that again. Only problem is...well, you let them whip you once, they want to whip you again. It's fun for them. They enjoy it. They'll want more of it. Obviously you can't make life too difficult for them if your primary directive is to save their lives. So our enemies will be all happy and sassy and looking for some more of that.

Captain.Sassy said:
Both sets of rules are designed to place limits on how we as a society authorize those who use force to use force on our behalf. Kinda.
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Thanks for the information. And what comforting assurances would you want Obama to impart to the families of Seal Team 6 if they had been blown away by a bomb while trying to live-capture the enemy leader? "They all died heroicly following my rules of engagement to the letter...They died trying to take him alive...We think UBL is dead, but we can't know for sure, because...well...we didn't get a good look at him before he set off the bomb...but we're sure that was him..."
 
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