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A phrase, "Show me a 10ft tall fence and I'll show you an 11ft tall ladder." comes to mind. There will always be a cat and mouse game, it seems the trick is to
by bigdubs 11y ago
A phrase, "Show me a 10ft tall fence and I'll show you an 11ft tall ladder." comes to mind.
There will always be a cat and mouse game, it seems the trick is to not play the game in the first place.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoNo, the trick is to play the game, not perfectly, but well enough that the other side decides not to play. If you don't play and they do...
- bigdubs 11y agoWhy give them a reason to play? "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth makes us all blind and toothless." also then comes to mind.
- vectorjohn 11y agoI don't know the right answer as to how to defend against terrorism, etc. But this argument makes no sense. "They" (whoever they are) don't need a reason to play, they already have one. Choosing "not to play" is just allowing whoever they are to do whatever they want.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoCurrently they think they have a reason to play. If we stop playing, they aren't going to for some length of time, perhaps measured in generations. Given that "playing" means "attacking us trying to kill as many people as possible", I do not want to be in the situation where they are playing offense and we aren't playing defense.
- merpnderp 11y agoIf the West stops playing, it's not like Turkey, China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will stop too. And there's no reason to believe the war would become less bloody with even more refugees.
- ihsw 11y agoPlaying cat and mouse is different from ladder and wall. To breach a wall, you have to construct a single ladder. To protect against a ladder, you have to raise all of your walls. This escalation is in fact the basis of al Qaeda's anti-Western military strategy -- to engage in assymmetric warfare[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare