4 ms·

and is there a list of children murdered by Muslim extremists in the Middle East? in the world?

munin 13y ago
it's not like, a competition ...
zerr 13y ago
You know, you got a point - Drone attacks are just yet another form of terrorism (but officially approved, with a stamp).
thex86 13y ago
So just because that happens, we should overlook the fact that there are drones killing innocent children everyday sanctioned by the United States? You seem to be the type of person that says, "What if X is bad? Look at Y, which suits my agenda." Things like this creates more terrorism and more extremism. You may not realize, but it's not a nice thing to see your children and loved ones being killed by planes from the sky.
- omonra 13y ago
  You are missing an important point - the reasons drones are up in the sky in the first place is to fight the muslim extremists. So the number of people they kill is an important variable to countenance the number of accidental drone kills. The two are not unrelated.
  - mayanksinghal 13y ago
    Yes, I think it is quite appropriate to discuss what these drone strikes prevented as much as it is important to discuss what they caused. Elsewhere in the this thread, it is argued that drone strikes also create enough anguish that they end up creating more extremists than they have killed. For instance, killing of children is not even the only cause of growing anger towards these drone strikes. It also hurts the sovereignty of these states and fuels to Anti-American patriotism in them. If I live in a failed state, it is still my state. Unless it is abundantly supported from people outside my country (and yours) and almost universally acceptable from people within mine, your government shouldn't be interfering.
- prius770 13y ago
  Terrorists who launch attacks from neighborhood schools should be ignored, right?
  - thex86 13y ago
    Funny how you created a fake account just for these comments. I am in no way defending terrorism. I am saying we should look at all of it, instead of saying, "What about X?"
  - consonants 13y ago
    The reasonable solution to the problem of terrorism is creating more terrorists.
csense 13y ago
That's the wrong comparison to make. AFAIK we're not launching those drone strikes to kill some Middle Eastern children in retaliation for our children that died on Sep. 11. Instead, we're taking actions in the Middle East, which we know will result in the deaths of a few [1] children today, in hopes of disrupting terrorist capabilities to prevent the future deaths of a lot [1] of children in terrorist attacks tomorrow. In other words, you should really be comparing to the children who would have died from terrorist actions if we hadn't launched those wars. It's like calling doctors murderers for providing a vaccine that kills one in a million, but prevents a disease that, left unchecked, would kill one in a thousand [2]. In either case, which people die are real and knowable as individuals, but which people are saved are hypothetical and statistical. You choose the best course of action from the alternatives available, but sometimes it's not possible to choose a course of action that saves everyone. In other words, choosing the greatest good for the greatest number may result in some disquieting sacrifices -- we wish the world didn't work that way, but we must base decisions and actions on the way the world actually works, not the way we wish it worked. [1] "A few" and "a lot" are relative terms. [2] The scenarios aren't exactly comparable, because there are presumably plenty of well-designed studies which rigorously establish the number of children who would have died in the disease scenario. The number of children who would have died in terrorist attacks in a different foreign policy scenario is much more difficult to estimate, and much dependent on your assumptions of human behavior: A hawkish viewpoint might say that if we hadn't counter-attacked with the war in Afghanistan and our drone activities, the terrorists would have been able to build strength and launch more major attacks; a doveish viewpoint might say that our military activities in the Middle East are a big reason the terrorists hate us, and if we don't attack them, they won't attack us. We can observe that, having launched the wars and drones, the US has not suffered another attack of the same magnitude as 9/11 in the decade-plus since; the hawkish scenario is supported, or at least not ruled out, by the evidence. The doveish scenario is also not ruled out by the evidence, but we can't know for sure what would have happened on the road not taken. Presidents have to make world-altering decisions on the basis of equivocal evidence and their best guesses of the future interactions of humans with wildly different cultures and sometimes-irrational thought processes. This is why I stick to math and science.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Murder for murder is the way that vendettas and feuds continue for decades, centuries, and even millenia. It's how one death turns into ten then a hundred then thousands then millions. That's not how civilized people should approach violence or warfare, even when violence may be justified. Look at the aftermath of WWII, for example, many of the most bitter enemies (such as the US and Japan) forged bonds of friendship and alliance and today live in peace with each other, contributing more towards each others' prosperity and happiness than anything else. That's how conflicts are truly ended, the chaos of the battlefield is merely a tool that allows you to get to a point where such things are possible, and if that opportunity is wasted then you have done little other than to perpetuate or create yet another vendetta.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The difference is that the US, Japan, and Germany were civilized and had something to lose from continued war. Tribes in the mountains of Pakistan don't.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    So instead of continuing to fight them, we should give them more to lose.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      We tried that in Egypt (just sending multi-billion checks every year). It wasn't exactly a resounding success.
  - mayanksinghal 13y ago
    That quite a narrow definition of what it means to be civilized and what it means to understand other cultures. The tribes in mountains of Pakistan value their way of living, their religion, their ideologies, their decentralized governance, their barter economy, their local food production, their way of dressing and their way of dealing with internal feuds as much as you love your civilization. To claim that their ways are outdated or unfair to certain sections of their society is fine. But to claim that they have nothing to lose is so effing narrow sighted that I wonder if you being sarcastic. And I say this being citizen of a country that has suffered from terrorism longer than most civilized countries and paid significantly higher costs.
DanBC 13y ago
America claims to believe in the rule of law, and thus should hold itself to higher standards than extremist terrorist organisations. It's not a particularly high bar. Children should have special protection. (http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/children/index.jsp http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/childr...) (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/international-law.php http://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/international-law.p...) The US didn't stop dropping cluster bombs on civilians, but they did change the colour of foodaid - which had been the same yellow colour as bomblets and also delivered by air drop. (http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html) These munitions can last for many years. (http://www.irinnews.org/Report/78463/LAOS-Deadly-cost-of-unexploded-cluster-munitions http://www.irinnews.org/Report/78463/LAOS-Deadly-cost-of-une...) Here's an image of an oldstyle food aid package, and a cluster bomblet. (Also images of wounded children.) (http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm) It's not as if the food drops were always any use. Sometimes the food had spoiled, becoming potentially dangerous to eat. (Dropped from too high, damaging the package.) Or collected and sold for profit. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0326-02.htm http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0326-02.htm)
gngeal 13y ago
You could follow the list of attacks at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks, look up more information for the individual attacks, and filter out the adults. But as far as I'm aware, nobody's doing that right now.
bcoates 13y ago
I'm gonna make my standard objection here: there is a popular western conception that terrorism is caused by "extremism" but the evidence for this is lacking. Relatively devout Muslims who practice stricter interpretations of Islam are not more predisposed to violence than those who are more casual about the whole thing. In a randomized controlled trial, sending Pakistanis on Hajj made them both more devout in practice and less supportive of conflict with non-Muslims. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659699/Kremer_EstimatingImpact.pdf?sequence=2 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659699/Kremer_Es...

munin 13y ago

it's not like, a competition ...

zerr 13y ago

You know, you got a point - Drone attacks are just yet another form of terrorism (but officially approved, with a stamp).

thex86 13y ago

So just because that happens, we should overlook the fact that there are drones killing innocent children everyday sanctioned by the United States? You seem to be the type of person that says, "What if X is bad? Look at Y, which suits my agenda." Things like this creates more terrorism and more extremism. You may not realize, but it's not a nice thing to see your children and loved ones being killed by planes from the sky.

omonra 13y ago
You are missing an important point - the reasons drones are up in the sky in the first place is to fight the muslim extremists. So the number of people they kill is an important variable to countenance the number of accidental drone kills. The two are not unrelated.
- mayanksinghal 13y ago
  Yes, I think it is quite appropriate to discuss what these drone strikes prevented as much as it is important to discuss what they caused. Elsewhere in the this thread, it is argued that drone strikes also create enough anguish that they end up creating more extremists than they have killed. For instance, killing of children is not even the only cause of growing anger towards these drone strikes. It also hurts the sovereignty of these states and fuels to Anti-American patriotism in them. If I live in a failed state, it is still my state. Unless it is abundantly supported from people outside my country (and yours) and almost universally acceptable from people within mine, your government shouldn't be interfering.
prius770 13y ago
Terrorists who launch attacks from neighborhood schools should be ignored, right?
- thex86 13y ago
  Funny how you created a fake account just for these comments. I am in no way defending terrorism. I am saying we should look at all of it, instead of saying, "What about X?"
- consonants 13y ago
  The reasonable solution to the problem of terrorism is creating more terrorists.

csense 13y ago

That's the wrong comparison to make. AFAIK we're not launching those drone strikes to kill some Middle Eastern children in retaliation for our children that died on Sep. 11. Instead, we're taking actions in the Middle East, which we know will result in the deaths of a few [1] children today, in hopes of disrupting terrorist capabilities to prevent the future deaths of a lot [1] of children in terrorist attacks tomorrow. In other words, you should really be comparing to the children who would have died from terrorist actions if we hadn't launched those wars. It's like calling doctors murderers for providing a vaccine that kills one in a million, but prevents a disease that, left unchecked, would kill one in a thousand [2]. In either case, which people die are real and knowable as individuals, but which people are saved are hypothetical and statistical. You choose the best course of action from the alternatives available, but sometimes it's not possible to choose a course of action that saves everyone. In other words, choosing the greatest good for the greatest number may result in some disquieting sacrifices -- we wish the world didn't work that way, but we must base decisions and actions on the way the world actually works, not the way we wish it worked. [1] "A few" and "a lot" are relative terms. [2] The scenarios aren't exactly comparable, because there are presumably plenty of well-designed studies which rigorously establish the number of children who would have died in the disease scenario. The number of children who would have died in terrorist attacks in a different foreign policy scenario is much more difficult to estimate, and much dependent on your assumptions of human behavior: A hawkish viewpoint might say that if we hadn't counter-attacked with the war in Afghanistan and our drone activities, the terrorists would have been able to build strength and launch more major attacks; a doveish viewpoint might say that our military activities in the Middle East are a big reason the terrorists hate us, and if we don't attack them, they won't attack us. We can observe that, having launched the wars and drones, the US has not suffered another attack of the same magnitude as 9/11 in the decade-plus since; the hawkish scenario is supported, or at least not ruled out, by the evidence. The doveish scenario is also not ruled out by the evidence, but we can't know for sure what would have happened on the road not taken. Presidents have to make world-altering decisions on the basis of equivocal evidence and their best guesses of the future interactions of humans with wildly different cultures and sometimes-irrational thought processes. This is why I stick to math and science.

dragonwriter 13y ago

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Murder for murder is the way that vendettas and feuds continue for decades, centuries, and even millenia. It's how one death turns into ten then a hundred then thousands then millions. That's not how civilized people should approach violence or warfare, even when violence may be justified. Look at the aftermath of WWII, for example, many of the most bitter enemies (such as the US and Japan) forged bonds of friendship and alliance and today live in peace with each other, contributing more towards each others' prosperity and happiness than anything else. That's how conflicts are truly ended, the chaos of the battlefield is merely a tool that allows you to get to a point where such things are possible, and if that opportunity is wasted then you have done little other than to perpetuate or create yet another vendetta.

rayiner 13y ago
The difference is that the US, Japan, and Germany were civilized and had something to lose from continued war. Tribes in the mountains of Pakistan don't.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  So instead of continuing to fight them, we should give them more to lose.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    We tried that in Egypt (just sending multi-billion checks every year). It wasn't exactly a resounding success.
- mayanksinghal 13y ago
  That quite a narrow definition of what it means to be civilized and what it means to understand other cultures. The tribes in mountains of Pakistan value their way of living, their religion, their ideologies, their decentralized governance, their barter economy, their local food production, their way of dressing and their way of dealing with internal feuds as much as you love your civilization. To claim that their ways are outdated or unfair to certain sections of their society is fine. But to claim that they have nothing to lose is so effing narrow sighted that I wonder if you being sarcastic. And I say this being citizen of a country that has suffered from terrorism longer than most civilized countries and paid significantly higher costs.

DanBC 13y ago

America claims to believe in the rule of law, and thus should hold itself to higher standards than extremist terrorist organisations. It's not a particularly high bar. Children should have special protection. (http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/children/index.jsp http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/childr...) (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/international-law.php http://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/international-law.p...) The US didn't stop dropping cluster bombs on civilians, but they did change the colour of foodaid - which had been the same yellow colour as bomblets and also delivered by air drop. (http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html) These munitions can last for many years. (http://www.irinnews.org/Report/78463/LAOS-Deadly-cost-of-unexploded-cluster-munitions http://www.irinnews.org/Report/78463/LAOS-Deadly-cost-of-une...) Here's an image of an oldstyle food aid package, and a cluster bomblet. (Also images of wounded children.) (http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm) It's not as if the food drops were always any use. Sometimes the food had spoiled, becoming potentially dangerous to eat. (Dropped from too high, damaging the package.) Or collected and sold for profit. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0326-02.htm http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0326-02.htm)

gngeal 13y ago

You could follow the list of attacks at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks, look up more information for the individual attacks, and filter out the adults. But as far as I'm aware, nobody's doing that right now.

bcoates 13y ago

I'm gonna make my standard objection here: there is a popular western conception that terrorism is caused by "extremism" but the evidence for this is lacking. Relatively devout Muslims who practice stricter interpretations of Islam are not more predisposed to violence than those who are more casual about the whole thing. In a randomized controlled trial, sending Pakistanis on Hajj made them both more devout in practice and less supportive of conflict with non-Muslims. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659699/Kremer_EstimatingImpact.pdf?sequence=2 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659699/Kremer_Es...