Welcome to the greatest clusterfuck ever: humanity!

But it's ok because soon we'll all fight giant spiders together.

No we won't, we'll be fighting over who funds the veteran hospitals for the people who fight the giant spiders.

If you fight giant spiders and destroy their eggs, you deserve a good job when you come home. I can say that with all my heart.

maybe if we hadn't tried to replace the Spider Queen with a democratically elected government, we wouldn't have to deal with the lingering costs of daily anti-venom injections for our veterans

Thanks. I needed that right now.

Chris-chan just made me feel better about the world a little bit.

If anything this is the best argument for crushing your enemy, cause ChrisChan makes the give peace a chance argument, and he's a maniac who maces GameStop employees. So let's try the Donald Trump plan and bomb the shit out of them.

I don't want to save people that are actually members of ISIS, but while they're being hunted down and killed I'd like for conditions in the middle east to improve so that no one wants to join ISIS or any group like it.

Yeah. I'd like to kind of see the cycle of "train American soldiers to fly drones in and massacre people like they were playing a video game then commit PTSD-induced suicide en masse because turns out being compelled to commit amoral, detached mass murder is hell of traumatic."

I think and international ground war is what's needed to actually get rid of ISIS. But ideally a time machine to go back and murder all the dumb fucks that thought it a great idea to destabilize Libya, Egypt, Syria and other counties BECUASE DEMOCRACY. (secretly just wanting pro western leadership instead, don't really care if it's democratic)

Solro, if that's really your goal, you'd want to go back in time and annihilate the British Empire before it could fuck up 2/3 of the world's geopolitical landscape.

Then again, who wouldn't want to do that anyway?

Funny thing about drone strikes and missile strikes in general: we could have stopped ISIS from ever forming back in 2003, when we had ISIS's eventual founder in our sights on no fewer than three separate occasions. Bush opted not to pull the trigger because he felt it would hurt his case for invading Iraq:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4431601#.VklM5E2oEiV

And of course, had Clinton's attempt to take out bin Laden been successful, we probably would have been spared the 9/11 attacks. In fact, because irony, the Left would probably have chosen 9/11 to commemorate the day that the US committed amoral, detached murder against that nice Mr. bin Laden.

*sets down bong, leans back onto ubiquitously stained futon, bleary eyes agape with revelation*

WHOA dude

With the power of perfect hindsight, unlimited drone strikes DO sound pretty great!

Bort, I'm usually with you on all of your political opinions except for your insane support for drone strikes. They're to you what Baleen is to Israel, or SolRo to Russia. You're smarter than to think fixing the Middle East is as simple as assassinating a single member of decentralized coalition, or that the support for groups like ISIS and anti-US rhetoric wouldn't outweigh the nebulous benefit of dropping a smart bomb on said person (plus the dozens of others caught in the blast).

You're definitely smarter than that last strawman sentence.

I've lost count of how many #1s, #2s, #3s, etc, etc have been killed by bombing over the years...maybe if this next guy is killed the whole terrorist organization will finally fall apart!

Yeah, the world's not full of basically liberal people who think drones do more good than harm. But then again, the Left is convinced that Obama has told drone operators to blow up anything that moves; statistics say otherwise, and we actually do keep civilians out of harm's way much much more often than not:

http://securitydata.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan-analysis.ht ml

(The Left is in love with a statistic that 90%-95% of people killed in drone strikes aren't the people we're targeting. Which is probably technically true, but misleading: if we target a given Taliban figure and kill him plus nine people he's giving orders to, that's your 90% figure.)

Between our generally keeping civilians out of it, and the fact that the people we're going after are attacking mosques, marketplaces, and buses on an ongoing basis, I conclude that drones are probably saving more civilian lives than they're taking. I don't even see going after the Taliban as a national security measure for the US; I see it as helping rid the world of a group whose most positive activity is helping keep polio alive.

You didn't like my previous "strawman", so let me present another: it's remarkable how terrorists killing ~150 people in Paris is headline news all over the world, but killing ~150 people at a Pakistani school is not even a little bit newsworthy.

"Yeah, the world's not full of basically liberal people who think drones do more good than harm. But then again, the Left is convinced that Obama has told drone operators to blow up anything that moves; statistics say otherwise, and we actually do keep civilians out of harm's way much much more often than not:"

Not true.

***
https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-comple x/
***

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-people-k illed-by-us-drone-strikes-in-afghani/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/civilian-deaths-drone-stri kes_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff

http://www.ibtimes.com/nearly-90-those-killed-us-drones-were-n ot-intended-targets-during-five-month-span-2142183

You have to be beyond climate change denier to avoid the news thoroughly enough to not know this.

Like just about every single American, you have the "KILL NOW KILL KILL KILL IL:JDJKzcbg bmjldh" reaction to tragedy.

Terrorists press X, Bort goes full blown Waugh.

And again, stuff like "nearly-90-those-killed-us-drones-were-not-intended-targets-during -five-month-span" is technically true but misleading.

Did you know that, when Allied Forces were going after Rommel in North Africa, they didn't kill Rommel a single time? The only people they killed were not the intended target.

"Terrorists press X, Bort goes full blown Waugh."

Not true, I'm this way just about every day.

Then again, the Taliban and ISIS are killing innocent people every single day, and I'm mindful of that. Of course, I'd also be happy if they simply quit their jobs as murderers, so droning wouldn't remain the least bad option for dealing with them.

By the way, in case you would like an inconsistency of mine to tear into: right about now I'm halfway of a mind to let the Taliban hold its territory in Afghanistan. Why? Because I've read that the Afghani government is so hopelessly corrupt and useless, people currently under Taliban rule actually prefer the job the Taliban does. I don't know that they're thrilled with the Taliban -- Sharia law and all -- but if the Taliban is basically letting the people go about their business, then maybe that's the best situation that can be brought to bear right now.

So that's me being inconsistent. Except for the part where I'm fairly consistent about doing whatever works out best for the civilians.

I'm still not seeing how drone strikes fix the overall regional conditions that lead to groups like ISIS. Would the Middle East have magically transformed into a secular socialist state had we blown up that one guy in 2003?

You would think the hindsight solution to stopping terrorists would be "stop military ventures in the Middle East" o_O

"I'm still not seeing how drone strikes fix the overall regional conditions that lead to groups like ISIS."

I never said that they do. I also feel like that's an unrealistic standard: guys with guns and bombs are threatening local civilians and/or US security, and you're going to simply ignore them as you use your Western magic (I guess) to transform the Middle East into a secular socialist state? (Hey, you're the one who brought up magic.)

"Would the Middle East have magically transformed into a secular socialist state had we blown up that one guy in 2003?"

No, but ISIS may well not have formed, and that would have been a good thing.

"You would think the hindsight solution to stopping terrorists would be "stop military ventures in the Middle East" o_O"

Yeah, I'm in favor of that. But in the meantime, people similar to bin Laden and Zarqawi exist, they too are making their choices, and if they opt for a needlessly destructive path, I won't lose much sleep if we destroy them (and on average nine of their less famous coworkers in the process).

I haven't forgotten that there are issues of sovereignty, transparency, and accuracy that are all negatives in the use of drones, but I still don't see a better option on the table against groups like the Taliban or ISIS, and I'm not counting the frustrated "... well we should have" that the Left favors. Among Obama's many possessions that he doesn't actually have, such as the magic wand, crystal ball, and Green Lantern ring, is the Presidential Time Machine that allows him to implement the "we should haves".

Bort you're a god dammed idiot if you really think that terrorists would not exist if two guys were killed 15 years ago.

Also you're definitely a retard for swallowing that "everyone killed by a drone is an enemy even if we got the wrong target". On top of that being total horseshit, the us military has a policy of labeling any male between a certain age range killed in an airstrike an enemy combatant.

High value targets may also move around from house to house of non-combatants. If those people do so willingly or under duress is kinda fucking hard to tell from thousands of feet away (not that it should be a death sentence either way)

Then I guess it's fortunate that I'm not making the simpleton arguments you're capable of refuting.

Yes.

Not being sarcastic when I say this, but I miss the equivalent of channel surfing and landing on a documentary when nothing else on interests me.