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The huge false equivalence you are making is Obama is waging a war against a truly evil organization. But the college shootings are senseless violence purposely

The huge false equivalence you are making is Obama is waging a war against a truly evil organization. But the college shootings are senseless violence purposely used on innocent people. You can throw in the hospital attack. But that attack obviously wasn't purposeful. It also wasn't a drone. It was ground support strike, something Obama wouldn't be involved in. You can blame Obama for keeping us in the war. In that respect he is responsible. But the hospital was bombed during a major battle against the Taliban, who were attempting to take the 5th largest city in Afghanistan. Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better. People like the Umpqua shooter are killing good people to make the world worse, on purpose.

bambax 11y ago
You're right in that's a false equivalence; but the response of Obama about the two events that happened the same day was striking. He has no control whatsoever about crazy people who shoot other people on campuses; and yet that's what he chose to talk about. He has a lot of control about what targets US armies bomb, drones or no drones. And yet he has almost nothing to say about that. But my point is not even this. My point is Obama actually loves guns... when they're his own. Everyone who uses guns thinks they're doing God's work -- and nobody is. "Evil" is just a point of view when used as an epithet. The only thing that separates us from true evil is certainly not the assertion that one is right and the other, wrong. It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Obama talks about military issues all the time. He talked about them today, explaining why he's decided not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan for the time being (meaning during his tenure). To expect him to talk about the issues you care most about to the exclusion of all others is simply childish. It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all. The US is, by law, engaged in a militarized conflict with radical Islamic groups. If you actually care about this issue as you profess to do, then you could try urging Congress to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which legally invests the executive branch with the power to carry on such activities. Personally, even if the US withdrew into its own boundaries like a tortoise tomorrow I would not expect global peace to break out as a result. there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum (and arguably this is already happening in Syria, where Obama has opted to minimize US involvement). As military options go, our drone policy minimizes harm while being consistent with our existing objectives. Of course it minimizes harm for Americans more than for the populations of places where drones are deployed, which creates a significant political surplus that may actually worsen radicalism. On the other hand, if we were to eliminate that surplus by putting an equivalent number of American lives at risk by deploying them instead of drones, experience suggests it would result in significantly greater harm to non-combatants, based on how badly things have turned out for people in Iraq.
  - smokeyj 11y ago
    > there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum So the argument for perpetual and unwinnable warfare is - if we don't someone else will? You think that's worth the live's of US service members and the inevitable collateral damage inflicted in war zones? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture. Personally, a better way of combating radical islam has less to do with drones and more to do with education and opportunity.
    - hguant 11y ago
      Boko Haram - death to western education. Yeah, good luck with that.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      There are degrees of warfare, and the sort we are conducting at the moment is pretty mild compared to things like carpet-bombing Viet Nam ~50 years ago. I do favor a soft power strategy involving education and opportunity but civic societies are not things that come into being overnight, they can require decades or even centuries to take root. It would help, of course, if we didn't maintain alliances with semi-totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, I don't think that peace and enlightened democracy are necessarily the natural state of mankind - I favor Hobbes over Rousseau, and think the latter's glorification of primitive society rather facile, notwithstanding the fact that he meant well.
      - smokeyj 11y ago
        As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth. The benefit is not only zero, at the end of the day we have more enemies than we started with - along with all the human collateral. Obama could literally have taken that entire operations budget, spent it on hookers and coke, and we'd still be better off. I'm not sure what the natural state of mankind is, but the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally and remember we have a public reputation that may follow us forever. Accountability is quickly becoming forced on us by the internet and smartphones so it'll be interested to see how this all turns out.
- rhino369 11y ago
  >Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all. Ok. Bambax why don't you serve Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour a summons to the S.D of NY. I'll send your parents flowers at your funeral. Due process has no process in combat.
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    > Due process has no process in combat The problem with that attitude is how quickly the term "enemy combatant" will be (or was) redefined to mean 'any person we don't like'
    - rhino369 11y ago
      That's just a slippery slope fallacy.
      - PavlovsCat 11y ago
        It's a description of what is already happening. But even the first step on that allegedly fallacious slope is an unacceptable one, so that's kind of moot.
      - sangnoir 11y ago
        Fallacy, eh? Remember when the DOJ had a secret interpretation[1] of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act: A federal court and even the author of the Patriot Act itself have revealed that the meaning of “tangible things” was not quite as the NSA had interpreted it, and the massive data collection was not the purposed of the provision[2] 1. https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot-act https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot-act 2. http://www.purplepolitics.com/articles/LTKEbLaSxJrMo9cRj http://www.purplepolitics.com/articles/LTKEbLaSxJrMo9cRj
- Shivetya 11y ago
  Because the campus killings score political points and that is the only game he plays. He certainly isn't going to hand points to opponents; here or at home. He portrays a random shooting as an epidemic while totally ignoring the violence in minority areas of US cities where far more die than in the college shooting. Its all politics. Obama loves guns when they serve his political interest. He doesn't love those he owns, he uses those which support his position.
  - sooheon 11y ago
    Yeah, I don't see how this is even a question. Politicians will pander.
timmytokyo 11y ago
"Obama is trying to kill people to make the world a better place." I wonder if that's why he was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
DominikR 11y ago
Why is it obvious that the attack on the hospital wasn't purposeful? This article by associated press indicates that they attacked the hospital on purpose. http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e699149aef93595e49 http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e69... > Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better... I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me.
- e40 11y ago
  >> Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better... > I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me. reply Let's apply your lost of words to WWII. Do you believe it was unjust or unfair to kill Germans in the service of stopping that war? Are you still at a loss for words?
  - whatafarce 11y ago
    You don't torture. Torture is wrong and evil. Defending it is wrong and evil. I'm at no loss for words, but you may be in need of a soul.
    - e40 11y ago
      Nice straw man (or change of subject). No one, until now, has said anything of torture. And your final sentence... just wow.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  They attacked the hospital purposely, but (it is claimed) because their Afghan allies were taking fire from there, not because it was a hospital. Now if they (or anyone) bombed a hospital in order to lower morale and inconvenience enemies by preventing any medical activities from taking place, that would indicate a very different purpose.
  - themgt 11y ago
    If we are to believe the US government, they should release the recorded video from the AC-130 gunship so we can all make up our own minds.
the-dude 11y ago
That is just your opinion. Almost all US military intervention since 2001 has resulted in a lot of evil and this evil is continuing to this day and will do so for a very long time. You actually created the power vacuum which IS is exploiting. This is just my opinion.
- rdancer 11y ago
  Never mind creating & funding both Taliban and ISIS in the first place.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    The US has fought ISIS from day one, and before Obama left Iraq they had been reduced to nothing more than a few armed mafioso collecting protection money and robbing banks. And if anyone created the Taliban, it was the ISI. The worst the US did was join a Middle Eastern and Pakistani coalition to arm and train them against a brutal Soviet occupation.
    - ccvannorman 11y ago
      >The US has fought ISIS from day one http://www.infowars.com/you-do-realize-that-the-u-s-funded-and-trained-isis-right/ http://www.infowars.com/you-do-realize-that-the-u-s-funded-a...

bambax 11y ago

You're right in that's a false equivalence; but the response of Obama about the two events that happened the same day was striking. He has no control whatsoever about crazy people who shoot other people on campuses; and yet that's what he chose to talk about. He has a lot of control about what targets US armies bomb, drones or no drones. And yet he has almost nothing to say about that. But my point is not even this. My point is Obama actually loves guns... when they're his own. Everyone who uses guns thinks they're doing God's work -- and nobody is. "Evil" is just a point of view when used as an epithet. The only thing that separates us from true evil is certainly not the assertion that one is right and the other, wrong. It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all.

anigbrowl 11y ago
Obama talks about military issues all the time. He talked about them today, explaining why he's decided not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan for the time being (meaning during his tenure). To expect him to talk about the issues you care most about to the exclusion of all others is simply childish. It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all. The US is, by law, engaged in a militarized conflict with radical Islamic groups. If you actually care about this issue as you profess to do, then you could try urging Congress to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which legally invests the executive branch with the power to carry on such activities. Personally, even if the US withdrew into its own boundaries like a tortoise tomorrow I would not expect global peace to break out as a result. there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum (and arguably this is already happening in Syria, where Obama has opted to minimize US involvement). As military options go, our drone policy minimizes harm while being consistent with our existing objectives. Of course it minimizes harm for Americans more than for the populations of places where drones are deployed, which creates a significant political surplus that may actually worsen radicalism. On the other hand, if we were to eliminate that surplus by putting an equivalent number of American lives at risk by deploying them instead of drones, experience suggests it would result in significantly greater harm to non-combatants, based on how badly things have turned out for people in Iraq.
- smokeyj 11y ago
  > there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum So the argument for perpetual and unwinnable warfare is - if we don't someone else will? You think that's worth the live's of US service members and the inevitable collateral damage inflicted in war zones? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture. Personally, a better way of combating radical islam has less to do with drones and more to do with education and opportunity.
  - hguant 11y ago
    Boko Haram - death to western education. Yeah, good luck with that.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    There are degrees of warfare, and the sort we are conducting at the moment is pretty mild compared to things like carpet-bombing Viet Nam ~50 years ago. I do favor a soft power strategy involving education and opportunity but civic societies are not things that come into being overnight, they can require decades or even centuries to take root. It would help, of course, if we didn't maintain alliances with semi-totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, I don't think that peace and enlightened democracy are necessarily the natural state of mankind - I favor Hobbes over Rousseau, and think the latter's glorification of primitive society rather facile, notwithstanding the fact that he meant well.
    - smokeyj 11y ago
      As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth. The benefit is not only zero, at the end of the day we have more enemies than we started with - along with all the human collateral. Obama could literally have taken that entire operations budget, spent it on hookers and coke, and we'd still be better off. I'm not sure what the natural state of mankind is, but the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally and remember we have a public reputation that may follow us forever. Accountability is quickly becoming forced on us by the internet and smartphones so it'll be interested to see how this all turns out.
rhino369 11y ago
>Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all. Ok. Bambax why don't you serve Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour a summons to the S.D of NY. I'll send your parents flowers at your funeral. Due process has no process in combat.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > Due process has no process in combat The problem with that attitude is how quickly the term "enemy combatant" will be (or was) redefined to mean 'any person we don't like'
  - rhino369 11y ago
    That's just a slippery slope fallacy.
    - PavlovsCat 11y ago
      It's a description of what is already happening. But even the first step on that allegedly fallacious slope is an unacceptable one, so that's kind of moot.
    - sangnoir 11y ago
      Fallacy, eh? Remember when the DOJ had a secret interpretation[1] of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act: A federal court and even the author of the Patriot Act itself have revealed that the meaning of “tangible things” was not quite as the NSA had interpreted it, and the massive data collection was not the purposed of the provision[2] 1. https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot-act https://www.eff.org/foia/section-215-usa-patriot-act 2. http://www.purplepolitics.com/articles/LTKEbLaSxJrMo9cRj http://www.purplepolitics.com/articles/LTKEbLaSxJrMo9cRj
Shivetya 11y ago
Because the campus killings score political points and that is the only game he plays. He certainly isn't going to hand points to opponents; here or at home. He portrays a random shooting as an epidemic while totally ignoring the violence in minority areas of US cities where far more die than in the college shooting. Its all politics. Obama loves guns when they serve his political interest. He doesn't love those he owns, he uses those which support his position.
- sooheon 11y ago
  Yeah, I don't see how this is even a question. Politicians will pander.

timmytokyo 11y ago

"Obama is trying to kill people to make the world a better place." I wonder if that's why he was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

DominikR 11y ago

Why is it obvious that the attack on the hospital wasn't purposeful? This article by associated press indicates that they attacked the hospital on purpose. http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e699149aef93595e49 http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e69... > Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better... I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me.

e40 11y ago
>> Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better... > I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me. reply Let's apply your lost of words to WWII. Do you believe it was unjust or unfair to kill Germans in the service of stopping that war? Are you still at a loss for words?
- whatafarce 11y ago
  You don't torture. Torture is wrong and evil. Defending it is wrong and evil. I'm at no loss for words, but you may be in need of a soul.
  - e40 11y ago
    Nice straw man (or change of subject). No one, until now, has said anything of torture. And your final sentence... just wow.
anigbrowl 11y ago
They attacked the hospital purposely, but (it is claimed) because their Afghan allies were taking fire from there, not because it was a hospital. Now if they (or anyone) bombed a hospital in order to lower morale and inconvenience enemies by preventing any medical activities from taking place, that would indicate a very different purpose.
- themgt 11y ago
  If we are to believe the US government, they should release the recorded video from the AC-130 gunship so we can all make up our own minds.

the-dude 11y ago

That is just your opinion. Almost all US military intervention since 2001 has resulted in a lot of evil and this evil is continuing to this day and will do so for a very long time. You actually created the power vacuum which IS is exploiting. This is just my opinion.

rdancer 11y ago
Never mind creating & funding both Taliban and ISIS in the first place.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The US has fought ISIS from day one, and before Obama left Iraq they had been reduced to nothing more than a few armed mafioso collecting protection money and robbing banks. And if anyone created the Taliban, it was the ISI. The worst the US did was join a Middle Eastern and Pakistani coalition to arm and train them against a brutal Soviet occupation.
  - ccvannorman 11y ago
    >The US has fought ISIS from day one http://www.infowars.com/you-do-realize-that-the-u-s-funded-and-trained-isis-right/ http://www.infowars.com/you-do-realize-that-the-u-s-funded-a...