The Glade 4.0

Diamondeye:

In case you have failed to pick up on this, Arafys thinks you're one of the "merciless fanatics" that Hunter S. Thompson mentions.

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Oh no. Whatever shall I do?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

How is it not true? We are At War. We have been since the towers fell. There are fanatics on both sides. It is fueled by religious hatred.

You're blind if you don't see that.

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Holy shitsnacks!

We aren't at war with some nameless Enemy, and it certainly isn't fueld by religious fanatics on our side... except in the mind of people that just want something to ***** about on the internet when they're bored at work.

There's always going to be enemies of some sort, but that does not mean there is some "nameless Enemy" we can't ever deal with. The sort of person who writes this article wants to pretend we're not really fighting anything because he just doesn't like it - he wants "something else" done, and it's easy to just sit back and say, "yeah well, there's not really an enemy; it's just this endless war because fanatics" because he's sure he'll never be affected by any of it.

He's a spoiled brat, like many others. Our enemies are not dumb enough to just get in one nice little package where we can conveniently smash them. Yes, it takes a long time and it's expensive. War is hard. Imagine that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The name of our enemy is "Terror"

You can't war against an ideology and win.

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Holy shitsnacks!

We are absolutely at war with a nameless enemy. Here's the text that authorized force in response to 9/11. Please point out where our enemy is named.



Further, this authorization is being extended to organizations that did not even exist at the time of the attacks. So yeah - nameless.

I don't need to. The fact that one particular resolution didn't name them doesn't mean they weren't called "Al Quaeda". It didn't limit it specifically to that organization mainly to avoid legal pedantry. Instead we're getting this sort of semantic pedantry.



The fact that these other organizations didn't exist at the time or weren't specifically named doesn't make them some nameless Enemy. The purpose of describing them that way is to create this impression of "oh no, we're fighting some nebulous Enemy! Oh woe is us! We're stuck in perpetual war, that isn't really necessary because reasons I can't actually articulate."

So no, you're wrong. There is no nameless "Enemy."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes you can. Communism is essentially a defeated ideology; remaining communist countries are either isolated paupers, or are merely wearing the trappings of communism while engaging the world economically. Nazi-ism and the Japanocentrism of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere were smashed so utterly that that the nations that adopted them cringe in fear at the mere suggestion of those ideologies, to the point of criminalizing them.

"Terror" also isn't an ideology. It's a strategy. Strategies can certainly be rendered untenable - that, in fact, was how Communism was defeated; the Soviets were placed in a strategic situation where they could not remain economically viable while pursuing their stated goals. They were forced to reform their strategic goals, and with it their system, to something else. That was our victory condition.

If you set as a victory condition "no more terrorism, ever" then no, you can't win. That, however, is a stupid victory condition to set. The goal of terrorists is to reach a point where they can transition to more traditional methods of fighting, or else gain political legitimacy within a system, and thereby begin to assert control. The difficulty there is that when you're just a terrorist setting of bombs, you can get away with just complaining about the current system. If you start to take over, people don't just want your ideology. They want the water and power to work, and the trash to get hauled away. That's why Saudi Arabia is able to get away with having oppressive religious laws - because they also make sure that power, water, trash, and a lot of other stuff that people want is taken care of. ISIS on the other hand, is just starting to realize that once you take over a city you have to do something with it other than just behead the inhabitants, and they don't seem to have had much plan for that beyond "1) Sell Oil 2)??? 3) Profit!!"

The other drawback to their situation, as I pointed out in another thread is that by coming out in the open to attack the Iraqi Army and the Syrian Army (which are relatively weak) and simultaneously antagonizing everyone else with the brutality they seem enamored of they've both demanded confrontation with the rest of the world AND exposed themselves to much more powerful air attacks - and they have no chance to stand up to other nations' ground forces if we or anyone else decides to do that.

So while you can't stop extremists being extreme, you certainly can neutralize them and alienate them from the populace to the point that they are no more than a (dangerous) criminal threat that can be dealt with as needed. That's the victory condition - render the terrorists irrelevant politically.

The problem with that, however, is people that want to ***** about what's necessary to make the terrorists irrelevant and keep them that way. It's very easy to sit back and complain about how that's being done when one A) has no responsibility whatsoever for making it happen and B) isn't being confronted with the reality of actually being on the receiving end of terrorism, partly from luck and partly from the very actions one is complaining about.

In that respect, there's not a lot of difference. Terrorists want a different society, but as long as they're terrorists they don't have to confront the realities of what it takes to actually run that society. Armchair generals and legal theorists want to sit back and whine about how things are done, but have no solutions of their own. If they do, those solutions are impractical in reality, and when that's pointed out it's handwaved away with simple scoffing.

It's not a whole lot different from MMOs. The MMO community is populated with all kinds of malcontents that want certain things done, regardless of the feasibility or practicality of it, and with scant consideration for playstyles other than theirs. There are reasonable suggestions and discussion out there but they're drowned out amid the noise of people pretending they have an idea of what they're talking about. Meanwhile the griefers sit around waiting to take advantage of the poorly-thought-out changes that come out either because of dev mistakes, or because the devs gave the players what they wanted, and now the players want to forget what they wanted because it isn't working out how they thought it would. That's the pitfall of a free society - everyone has the power of opinion and speech, but only a very few ideas are ever examined in the harsh light of reality. The average person is lazy; immunized from scrutiny and able to turn every disagreement into a horrible injustice of some sort.

So tell me, without complaining, what you think should actually be done at this stage, and bearing in mind that the past is what it is and can't be changed. If you can do that, I'll tell you to the best of my ability what's reasonable and unreasonable about what you want to do, and what the potential pitfalls are, without ridiculing them, and what ideas are actually good. This is not a trick question. I have no doubt you have the reasoning power to do so, but the question is do you actually care enough to put aside "I wish things were this way" and say "ok, this is actually a solution that really could work in the real world." Work in the real world, by the way, means one that is politically feasible, and doesn't rely on inconvenient viewpoints magically ceasing to exist.

I've been waiting for that discussion for ages, but it never happens. It's just so much easier for people to take internet umbrage and hurf durf. Once in a while we get a taste of it - Kaffis, in the other thead, was quite reasonable on the issue of the Israeli's ability to intervene. But any serious discussion just gets buried in "well, TL, DR, I don't want to have to think about this, so let me throw out an obligatory *****, and then hurry off to gaming." I really wish we had a separate subforum to discuss practical solutions to real (or for that matter fictional) problems sans ideology, but I doubt it can happen.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Minor quibble: Saudi Arabia does not "get away with having oppressive religious laws." The House of Saud pays lip-service to Islam, but their religion is the dollar and given a choice they'd have a much more socially free country. Saudi Arabia is forced to have oppressive religious laws because it's the only way the House of Saud can keep the people from rising up, displacing them, and installing an oppressive theocrat, instead. The people themselves are fundamentalist muslims, and the idea of secular law and freedom offends them. The "oppressive religious laws" actually help keep the House of Saud in power, they aren't something that they get away with because they govern well otherwise.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The people would not feel that way very long if their oppressive religious laws were keeping them from getting necessities like power and water. It helps as well that they have those things now. If you've never had much modernity, not having it is a lot less of a burden than having it and then losing it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

/facepalm

So the authorization does not name an enemy, and yet our enemy is not nameless? I don't even know how to respond to that.

The fact that the authorization has been used to justify action against both groups that did and did not exist at the time, but were not involved in the 9/11 attacks, on multiple continents, disagrees with you. It is not Al Qaeda, it is an ambiguous description that can be applied to a wide-ranging, nameless group of enemies.

Honestly, the real problem with the Middle East is pretty obvious. They have oil and everyone else in the world needs it. They don't need to produce anything of value to anyone else, because they can dig billions of dollars out of the ground. Thus, the fact that their absurd religious fundamentalism makes it impossible to produce any goods or services that anyone else might want doesn't burn them. If it wasn't for the oil, ISIS would be like North Korea, ignored by everyone else and left to starve to death.

Turkey and Indonesia are almost 100% Muslim, and you don't see this kind of crap coming out of there because they actually need to produce things of value to sustain their populations.

In addition, the people know that because they have oil, the West is obligated to keep their infrastructure functioning in order to facilitate extracting it. If one Muslim group trashes everything in its bid for conquest, the West will come in and fix it. They also know they can pull off a 9/11 and know there's no chance of them being nuked over it, because the West can't drill for oil in an irradiated wasteland.

You can respond by explaining why the lack of a name in that particular document somehow makes terrorists into a nameless Enemy rather than the groups they actually form, or invalidates the names they give themselves. If they didn't do that, how the **** would they get organized enough to do anything?

The reason they don't name them specifically in the document is so that terrorists (who understand our political system quite well) would simply change their name if a specific group was named. Isn't that what you'd do if you were running a terrorist group and a powerful nation authorized force against your group by name? Terrorist groups suffer internal splits and such, and new ones form and there's no need to go back for a new authorization every time that happens. Pretending that this somehow makes them into a "nameless Enemy" is the height of pedantry - not to mention that it's unbelievably arrogant to pretend that they're defined by the semantics of our documents rather than by their own self-identification.

This sort of mentality - that we define the enemy, and that they only do what they do in response to our actions rather than defining themselves and their own motivations, goals, and interests - is part of the underlying arrogance of the "we need to not fight so much!" crowd that thinks we can "nice" our way to peace. Maybe if you were less worried about looking cool by facepalming and actually gave a **** about the issue you'd give that some thought - but hey, the probability is vanishingly small that anything will happen to YOU, so why treat it as anything other than part of the hobby of internet *****?



Which does not somehow make these groups some nameless "Enemy". Al Quaeda was the name used, but the writers of the authorization, since they understood the nature of terrorist groups, foresaw that group might splinter or change it's name and that new groups might form or be discovered that were in some way related. They needed the authorization to have the flexibility to deal with that - since legal pedants would use any specific naming in the authorization to ***** about action taken against other groups as somehow "illegal" because it involves using the military to do bad things that we wouldn't have to do if only.. something or other.

Again, the question of whether extremists form into distinct, identifiable groups is not addressed by whether those names are used in a specific piece of legislation. If the lack of specificity in that one aparticular document is what that author is using to claim we're fighting some "nameless Enemy", then he's an agenda-driven hack using a pedantic complaint to basically whine about nothing... sort of like what you're doing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There's some truth in this, but remember that the extremists don't tend to be the same people profiting off of, (or even working in) the oil fields. There's also the fact that this sort of extremism really started appearing with the Mahdi in the late 1800's - before Britain created an oil-fired fleet and other nations followed suit, creating the demand for middle eastern oil. The Mahdi wasn't merely annoyed at British presence in the Sudan, either - much like ISIS wanting to come here and forcibly convert the entire US, he sent a letter demanding that the Queen convert to Islam. In both case, the grip on reality was tenuous, but it was not merely "go away"; it was "how dare you not be Muslim and yet be so powerful!?" The inability to defeat the major world powers is an affront to the idea that Allah will decide issues in favor of believers, much like some people in the United States think that the laws given to ancient Israel apply to us and we'll be punished if we don't follow them as a nation.

In any case, during WWI both the British and German navies were primarily coal-fired. It was only with the advent of the Queen Elizabeth class battleships that oil firing really became a thing, and there was serious debate if oil was a good idea, since Britain had abundant coal at home but had to rely on the middle east for oil, the North Sea not yet being developed at that time. America was even less interested in the Middle East at that time, since we could meet all our oil needs from internal sources.



Indoniesia produces considerable oil. Until 2009 it was an OPEC member. Increased domestic demand spurred their exit, and their slowed production and onlining of newly discovered reserves is a matter of aging infrastructure rather than lack of supply. In coal, they are the world's biggest exporter.

What you say is true in regard to Turkey, but it isn't simply a matter of "have oil = source of Islamic extremism, no oil = not". Afghanistan isn't a major source of oil either, and its other natural reserves of important minerals are discoveries in very recent years - since 2009 or so.



There's sources of oil besides the Middle East. Most of our oil these days comes from Canada. They aren't going to get nuked because of political taboos, not because of "irradiated wastelands", which wouldn't result anyhow from any realistic limited nuclear attack. Afghanistan has no oil production to speak of but didn't get nuked either. It would not be all that hard to develop a targeting plan on any given Middle Eastern nation that would inflict serious national damage but leave the oil facilities mostly intact. B61s have selectable yields, down to the single-digit-kiloton range, and airbursts avoid the vast majority of fallout and contamination, while being suitable for destroying most targets.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

EXACTLY. They are a nameless, nationless, mobile, transformative, impossible-to-pin-down enemy. It basically boils down to a "group of loosely affiliated individuals that don't like us". That is a nameless, undefeatable enemy. All you have done in the above post is explain why they are nameless.



a /facepalm is warranted when you are complaining about pedantry, while referencing authorization for military action in which the enemy is not named, whilst explaining why they cannot be named, and at the same time claiming they are not nameless.

In the above, you're arguing against yourself. I say the enemy is nameless, you say it is not - then complain that I'm trying to define the enemy? Instead of playing word games, accept the enemy for what it is - it's a group of loosely affiliated organizations that subscribe to varying degrees of the same ideology. It's not an easily defined enemy. This is problematic in that it frequently doesn't make much sense to spend lives and treasure on unknown endeavors. We need to accept that defeat of a nameless enemy is not feasible, or at least likely. That doesn't mean we don't fight, but it changes the game.



It's not pedantry to be concerned about limiting the authorization of the military to make war. Give me a break. Creating legal documents that are "flexible" is problematic in a number of ways. In this case, it cedes authority from one branch of the government to another.

Except that they aren't nameless, formless, or impossible to pin down. They've been repeatedly pinned down and successfully attacked over the years. They haven't been completely annihilated.

They aren't all that "loosely affiliated" either. They seem loose to us because they hide those affiliations and have no codified requirement in making them, but they're quite real. This is a childish understanding of the thread that severely underestimates the capabilities and organization of these people. How do you think they got organized enough to take over northern Iraq and Syria? How do you think those videos you see on the news happen of them training people at camps happen if they're just a loose group of individuals.



Whether or not they are specifically named in one document is not the same thing as whether they are nameless. The discussion was not about the use of force authorization itself; it was about the nature of the enemy, which is not determined by the use of force authorization.

The pedantry was you referencing that document when it is not authoritative on the matter at hand, then claiming "well they aren't named here so obviously they must be nameless!" Turning around and then /facepalming as if pointing out this obvious legal pedantry is somehow a problem is yet another example of you trying to use your intuition to pretend you're informed on issues you clearly know nothing about.



The fact that you are trying to tell me what the enemy is, itself, is positively hilarious. You don't know. No one is playing word games here except you. The enemy forms into groups that are organized in such a way as to facilitate their methods of fighting. The fact that you aren't privy to what those are because they don't make that **** public is part of their method of doing business. We aren't spending lives and treasure in unknown endeavors; we're fighting the war based on the nature of the enemy. The enemy does not roll over and die easily because they don't want to lose.

No one "needs to accept" anything; certainly not the people that are actually figuring out what to do about it. You don't even know what "victory" or "defeat" means; you have no clue what "changes the game" is. You're talking like you have some insight that all the petty little idiots that actually work on this stuff don't have. You don't. You're part of the problem - a public that thinks that because it's allowed to have a viewpoint on everything that therefore that viewpoint is valid. You haven't begun to even ask the right questions; and you're so concerned with scoring points because you just can't stand it that someone else is better informed than you and is telling you stuff that doesn't mesh with your intuitive ideas.



Quit moving the goalposts. We weren't talking about the authorization of the military to make war; we were talking about whether there's a "nameless Enemy" or not.

Flexible documents are not problematic and don't cede any authority. What they do is prevent our ability to address the threat from being tied up in legalisms exploited by the enemy or people with ulterior motives who are more concerned with their political motivations than the good of the nation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE, the authorization from Congress does not name, or define, the enemy. It therefore cedes authority to the executive to define who the enemy is. Further, in this conflict, there is no group, or nation, that can say uncle. It won't happen. Do you honestly believe that at some point in time, the President is going to stand before the American People and declare victory, and end this conflict?

Of course not. The "enemy" will keep evolving, and it will be new people, new groups, all loosely affiliated - like Al Qaeda -> Al Qaeda in Iraq -> ISIS - versions of the same organizations and people, in continuing progression forever. We will be at war forever. The President will simply redefine the enemy as needed and this will go on and on.

There is no named enemy in the authorization. There may be a named enemy today, but the authorization can then be used to justify whatever action the President seems appropriate, within the scope of "terror". Thus, nameless, endless conflict.

The original issue in question was the article posted by Mus, which referred to the "namless Enemy."

As for the rest, none of that needs to ever happen. Victory looks like the threat eventually fading down to a readily managed level because people grow disillusioned with throwing themselves uselessly at our military might. The idea is basically to just keep them at arms length for ever; ineffectual and eventually irrelevant.

We don't need to have a 1945-esque "moment of victory" or big parades and speeches. This isn't that war. No it won't end that way, but that stuff is superficial. Thinking its important is exactly a sign of not having a grasp on the issues.



As long as the enemy keeps morphing, we will need to keep fighting them. They will always be definable though. "Being at war forever" has nothing to do with whether the enemy can be identified, or has a name. you just listed 3 different names. They change that name because of various internal issues, and they'd do so even more redily if they thought it would politically paralyze us.

Get used to being at war forever though. If the enemy is willing to fight forever, we will have to. We don't reach some point where we get to just say "oh, well, it's been too long so we need to stop fighting. Would you guys please stop bothering us now?" Threats are what they are.



Except that it is very much not nameless. It does not matter whether it's named in the authorization - the groups are not nameless and are not nearly as loosely affiliated as you think.

Endless doesn't matter. So what if it's endless? There is no arbitrary point that this conflict should end, and if it never does then it never does. Ideally it gets knocked down to merely being a law enforcement matter, but this idea that we should just not fight people that want to harm us because it might go on for too long, whining about "forever war.." People just need to get over it. There is nothing we can magically do to just never have to fight anymore.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I understand that full well. That's what I've been saying all along, if you read my posts. There will be no victory, there will be no end. Like you say, the best we can hope for is to reduce their effectiveness. Now, compare that to the quote you are arguing against:



On at least that point, it seems that you, Mus, me, and Thompson all agree.



At any given time there's a name for what the President (who now has that authority) determines is the threat. When I say "nameless" I'm discussing the fact that under the authorization, it can be redefined/renamed/etc. at any time and still fall under the authorization. Yesterday it was Al Qaeda, today it's ISIS, tomorrow it could be Elmostan.



Exactly the point that I, Mus, and Thompson are making.



It's a dramatic shift. We have given the Executive Branch the authority to decide who we are at war with, and adjust that definition as the President feels is appropriate. This, in an operation that everyone knows will never end. Only a handful of isolationists believe we should not be fighting; however, there are some legitimate concerns over this shift in power structure.

And on another note, if there's ever a legitimate reason to "whine" about something, I would think "never ending war" would be near the top of the list.

Which is not the same as them being some "nameless Enemy". The "nameless enemy" is a euphemism for "there really isn't an enemy, and we're going to be at war for the sake of being at war." That's why he capitalizes "Enemy". Furthermore, as I already stated, once we knock it down to the level of being mostly a law enforcement issue, or an issue that remains overseas, we've effectively won. Part of the reason terrorists do what they do is to exploit the wants of the public. The public wants the government to deal with the terrorists (this is the public in any given country, not necessarily the US) but does not want to be affected by the methods. The terrorist tries to ride that line, staying too dangerous for normal law enforcement, but making the military seem like an extreme response. People that are constantly suspicious of any government action, are, ironically, exactly what the terrorist wants. Terrorists, or at least their leaders, are very adept at grasping the fault lines of western society. They often overestimate the severity of those fault lines, but not so much the nature of them.

There's also the ugly truth that we probably COULD make this a lot shorter.. but the public is not that ruthless. People want it all. They want war to be a sanitary affair where targets are easily identified and "innocent" people are never hurt. Actually, the military would like that too. The military is designed to hit organized enemies with a weighted mass of combat power. But the military does not want to be ruthless either.



Not really, since it won't be and hasn't been a "Christian Jihad" nor fueld by fanatics on our side. We are not at war with an enemy that's particularly mysterious, either. We understand the nature of terrorism and why the terrorist behaves the way he does pretty well. The specifics of who is where and doing what at any given moment can be very unclear, but the picture always improves over time because the enemy makes mistakes and we exploit them.



If Elmostan actually existed, it would be an enemy as well. Elmo advocates executing people without trial because they have violated a political sense of ideology he has. Elmostan also wouldn't fall under the authorization because it specifies INTERNATIONAL organizations (in the portion you cited) and Elmo is very clearly a US citizen.



Not really. The willingness of the enemy to keep fighting or split into new entities does not make them some "nameless Enemy" that can just be anyone, or that doesn't really exist.

The problem is not all that different from various forms of organized crime. These organizations constantly adapt and change to avoid detection and exploit the letter of the law. That doesn't make them some nameless enemy that was just invented and doesn't really exist.



The nature of the conflict is what it is. Aside from the fact that the Executive was always really limited only by funding, not by the power to declare war, if only a "few isolationsists think we shouldn't fight (ignoring the large number of people that think we're just not being nice enough), if we do need to fight, then we need to fight the enemies that exist. They aren't going to decide to conform to our domestic sensibilities about what an enemy should look like or how long a war should last. Essentially this complaint amounts to "but doing what's necessary to deal with an enemy of this type has implictions I don't like!" Yes it does, but the enemy knows that and that's why they do what they do. Keeping the conflict going long enough for the western public to tire of it is one way they think they'll eventually succeed. We're talking about people that are perfectly willing to commit suicide attacks - they take a very long view of things, and aren't necessarily concerned about winning any time soon, since they expect to be dead anyhow, either from suicide attack, getting killed in the process, or even just old age.



Not really. War always has and always will be a part of human experience. The idea that permanent, lasting peace is achievable, anywhere near at hand, or for that matter even desirable is among the most asinine examples of wishful thinking in our history. It's right up there with people bemoaning that "we" haven't learned to just not fight, or whatever - inventing some standard of behavior and then lamenting that people don't adhere to it. Wars happen over real issues that affect real people. Even our enemies, as unreasonable and fanatical as they are, are real people and fight over things that they perceive as really affecting them. People who want to whine about the futility and pettiness of war simply create a shield of ideas for the cynical and exploitive to hide behind.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This line of thinking is why so many were upset about the assasination of Anwar al-Awlaki. It boils down to "what are the limits of power?"

There must be limits.



That's exactly right, but "implications I don't like" is underselling it a bit. The concerns, and it is legitimate, regarding any authorization for increase in power are several:

1) Is this permanent?
2) Are there sufficient checks on this power?
3) Is the shift in power a danger to our democracy?

Then, of course, the following question must be answered:

"Do the ends justify the means?"

Which we covered at the time.



There are.


They may or may not depending on what the ends and means are. The question itself is an oversimplification, and a result of the principle that a good end does not automatically justify any and all means to achieve it. Unfortunately, it's become perverted by some people who think it means "no good end, however great, can justify even the most minor unpleasant action", or even more frequently "This end does not justify this means because I don't like the means and don't want to accept that it's necessary."

It's also further aggravated, like I said, by people that have unrealistic ideas about what the "end" is the first place, and don't want to accept that if you don't pursue one end, another will ultimately result.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."