Balta1701

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 06:01 PM) Sad dose of reality ... should the U.S. just say we'd like to respond with bombs but we fricking can't afford it. Our government is about to be shut down again unless it's bailed out. We are in trouble HERE, folks, chemical weapons and atrocities to human kind aside for a moment. No, the U.S. should not say "We'd like to respond with bombs" because every time anyone sneezes around the world the U.S.'s response is "We'd like to respond with bombs" and responding with bombs tends to kill people and be a human atrocity.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 06:08 PM) I think if you trade someone, you trade Q of the two then. You could and should at least get equal value (that being very high) for him. With Santiago you are potentially selling low on him. I say it's impossible to value him right now due to the Sox mishandling of his career thus far. But no, I don't think you trade either. Given the death of Gavin Floyd, the uncertainty of John Danks, rookies who may not pan out, and the trading of Jake Peavy, our pitching depth gets GROSSLY overstated on this board. Yes, our pitching is a strength as we speak, but it's only that because Q and Hector are there. Take one of them out and all the sudden you have question marks. You can't just take out 3 decent to great major league starters in a year's time and still claim to have depth. It will catch up eventually. There are other ways to improve the offense, and we have the resources to do so. That is the path we should take. The problem with this pitching staff is we're going to have to "sell low" on someone. I put that in quotes in order to include one other option in the same phrase; sticking at guy at AAA/in the bullpen who could be in the rotation. You're 100% right that having 6 starters would be a great thing particularly to have backup for those guys, but the counterpoint is...keeping one of the 6 as a backup reduces the value the team could be getting out of him for next year. It might well be the right move to do if the right deal becomes available at other positions, but "wasting a year of Rienzo/Johnson in the bullpen" is selling low/not getting full value out of a guy in exactly the same way as "not getting quite a good enough deal for Santiago" is selling low/not getting full value out of a guy.

QUOTE (Joxer_Daly @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 04:44 PM) What weight would a "stick" of butter be in grams for this macaroni and cheese recipe? A standard block of butter here is 454g, but that sounds like a feck load of butter to be putting in anything. You lot and your crazy recipe measurements. http://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions..._converter.html

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 04:32 PM) Well then I guess we just let them die and send some money and condolence cards. Sorry, not our problem, but here is a bread basket. At least if we send enough bread baskets we'll keep some people alive. Missiles will not do that. That is literally the best of a bad series of options here. This civil war is going to happen and even 150,000 American soldiers on the ground wouldn't stop it. There are millions of people fleeing the fighting. Help them. There are millions more in jeopardy in the country's borders, help them as best as you can.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 04:09 PM) Well Iraq is complicated because I was against attacking over WMD, but they then changed it to humanitarian so whatever. Anyways, civil wars are going to happen, the price of freedom is blood is going to happen. But you have to set some sort of tangible consequence for chemical strikes. Otherwise why not keep using chemical weapons? (edit) I presume you agree that if a country nuked a civilian population there should be some consequence? Like the consequences suffered by the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population? Anyway, aside from that, coming up with consequences is a big part of the problem here. We drew this red line and we did so with very little ability to back it up if anyone crossed it. There's no way to fight this war from the air right now because it literally is house to house, there's no simple way to target these weapons without dispersing them, the command and control systems in the country are a mess anyway because it's a civil war. It's darn near impossible to seriously degrade their capacity with a limited number of strikes, but why would they stop using them if the response is only a limited and controversial set of airstrikes?

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 04:00 PM) If a war has escalated to where both sides are willing to use chemical weapons, you pretty much have to commit occupying forces. Otherwise people are going to start building biological and chemical weapons again and that poses to great of a risk to all society. You really have to respond disproportionately if it appears its going to continue to happen. Lets call a spade a spade, its not like I was saying much when 100k were killed in a regular civil war. But chemical weapons has to be a line in the sand... So then let's just assume that we're unwilling to commit an Iraq-sized occupation force to Syria. Do you see how there are very few options here? Syria is going to go through a decade long, maybe longer, civil war. Both sides hold substantial territory. Taking territory from fighters in fortified positions usually requires losses of 5 to 10 times the number of defenders killed if the forces are evenly matched tecnhologically. Neither side has the kind of strength it will take to gain an advantage and will not do so for a long, long time. It's a stalemate that will gradually grind down, killing probably millions before it ends. We even have experience with putting a substantial occupying force on the ground in a non-unified country in the Middle East like this, that's the exact thing that happened in Iraq to the letter, and our presence there wasn't enough to stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 03:51 PM) SS went after him for more than just skin color, which is why I responded the way I did. You guys, SS, the "-ism" police chief, in particular, just get on people for that s*** way more than is necessary. Do you honestly believe Alpha is a racist guy? I don't. So I didn't read what he said that way. Let me put it this way. I think that intervening in Syria sounds moronic. I can't think of a single way in which it will work out positively until we're prepared to put an occupying force in there. And I would never in 4.56 billion years have thought to cite differences in "skin tone" as a reason why. It never would have crossed my mind. Not in any way, shape, or form.

QUOTE (knightni @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 03:40 PM) How may of those cuts make it through waivers and end up on the practice squad? Since the practice squad has a size of 8, I'm guessing 8.

There is an enormous canyon, longer than the Grand Canyon (though not as deep) buried under the Greenland ice sheet.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 03:04 PM) OMG! Someone prefers their country over another. The horror! Zomg! Someone wants Middle Eastern people to deal with Middle Eastern problems! How awful! Jesus Christ SS this holier-than-thou crap from you is so over the top sometimes. edit: apologies in advance for invoking a religious figure. Don't accuse me of being a religious bigot please!!!! edit 2: oh s***, Jesus was a male. Please don't call me sexist either! edit 3: but Jesus was most likely brown, so that's probably racist against white people, but eh, who the f*** cares, amiright? It's impressive how you could write all of this and completely ignore the fact that we jumped on him for justifying staying out because of the color of people's skin. Both SS and I seem to have little interest in joining this conflict, seemingly in agreement with you, but both of us were disgusted by the person who justified staying out by noting the differences in skin color. Apparently you couldn't defend that either so you didn't pay any attention to it. Because yeah, it was that disgusting.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 02:40 PM) I don't know. Did Kerry just ignore that conveniently? This latest attack clearly was another scale beyond anything seen in this particular conflict before, but both sides have been accused of chemical weapons use before. The intelligence assessment released by Secretary Kerry clearly states they believe the Syrian government has used chemical weapons before this event. The U.S. has been content to allow use of chemical weapons in Syria as long as it was on a small enough scale that it didn't flood the Youtubes. The only difference here is the scale of the attack.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 02:19 PM) Did you read Kerry's comments? Pretty compelling. The use of chemicals weapons truly is horrible. Heaven forbid if this is the world's future. How the hell are we going to prevent the use of those weapons in big stadiums, etc? I don't even want to think about it. So what do we do about the fact that the rebels almost certainly used them too?

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 01:50 PM) Not everyone in this world is worth the same to me, or to most sane people. If it was between saving your mom or some random stranger, would you just coin flip it? Since you said it I assume it would matter a lot if the pigmentation of your mom's skin was different from yours?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 01:38 PM) Looking at the guys near the bottom of some previous T100 lists, I think Semien could get consideration. If this were a different organization sure.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 01:24 PM) They are worth less to me because they are not me, my family, my friends, my tribe (country). That whole area over there is messed up. There will need to be a lot more deaths before anything is even near being normal. Let them kill themselves and stay out of it. I just don't care enough to want to do anything. Somebody else can do it. Somebody closer. Somebody with the same religion or skin tone or ideals. Just not us. Did you have to make this sound so racist that it makes me want to agree with SB?

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 12:56 PM) But in MY opinion if it can be proven that a govt is using chemical weapons against its people, you need to do more to immediately stop it. So what do we do about the high likelihood that both sides in the civil war have used chemical weapons and the rebels might well have done so first?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 30, 2013 -> 10:08 AM) So if I drew up a formula and excluded Iraq and Afghanistan, that would be OK? The equation is rigged by excluding things that don't fit the formula. Depends on if you could give a reason. If someone was asking whether a short to moderate length bombing campaign, as is being hypothesized here, can save lives, and you used Iraq and Afghanistan as counter-examples, then you'd be biasing the data by including 2 wars that weren't short-term bombing campaigns but instead long occupations and civil wars fought with foreign presence.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 09:53 PM) lol. You can't be serious. If aid shows up, the rebels stop rebelling even if they don't get fed? I have no idea how you could read what I wrote and come up with that.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 06:12 PM) I dont trust anything but myself. Im not advocating for intervention in Syria, Im arguing against the idea that you shouldn't intervene because people may die due to intervention. Its just historically absurd. No one has said that. What we've said is that we shouldn't intervene if intervening kills a lot more people than not intervening. If you can give me an outline of a succesful way to pull this off, I'm listening. Bombing Assad's capabilities in a small attack doesn't do anything. A large attack a-la libya doesn't seem to have any expectation of success since so much of the fighting is house to house and there aren't concentrated forces that can be knocked off, and even if we tried there's no reason to think it would produce anything but a debacle like Libya is today. An attack on the chemical weapons themselves is no better than just spraying the gas ourselves since the bombs would disperse the chemicals. A long term occupation didn't save lives in Iraq or even slow down the civil war, it killed hundreds of thousands and intensified the civil war. How do you do this? What do you hit with these grand freedom bombs to save lives?

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 06:05 PM) Really? Might want to check into the International Red Cross and World War II. They did a bang up job of helping all those Jews. T http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsourc...t/redcross.html The ICRC maintained that there was no inequality of treatment of Jewish prisoners, Yeah, Im really going to trust them. So why do you trust war when it also did nothing to help the Jews?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 05:58 PM) How can you say that even? How is that working in North Korea? There is nothing to stop a scenario where the government just steals it all and keeps it for the loyalists anyway, just like in NK, while they keep slaughtering anyone who isn't "loyal". If you're sending in food aid and the government "steals it all", then the civil war has pretty much ended because the government won, and at least people start getting fed. Otherwise, food and medicine will wind up being used by people who need food and medicine because neither side controls the country. Saying that somehow the government will steal it all really shows a complete lack of understanding of the situation. You might not be able to get food aid into downtown Homs, but there are millions of refugees within and outside of the country who desperately need aid and the price of a single missile could save hundreds.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 05:57 PM) Are the Jews using chemical weapons? Because if both sides are using chemical weapons you need to stop them both. Chemical weapons really just are not okay since WWI. No one is saying that it guarantees less casualties. Im pretty sure Ive consistently said "There is no way to predict the outcome", but that doesnt mean Ill sit on my hands while people are being murdered. You take risks in life, you make decisions based on the facts available. Sometimes they work, sometimes they dont. yes, there seems to have been evidence that both sides have used chemical weapons in this conflict already. The largest attack was the one last week, conducted by Syrian forces but possibly/probably not with orders from Assad to do so. So people are being murdered left and right by both sides. You say you won't sit on your hands while people are being murdered, I say that you're advocating murdering a lot of people using Tomahawks.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 05:54 PM) And you can't say that standing on the sideline watching absolutely works either. But there is one thing you can say definitively. Spending money on humanitarian aid in these cases absolutely works to save lives. It's the only thing that actually works.

British parliament has voted against endorsing military action in Libya.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 29, 2013 -> 05:46 PM) I think in your last paragraph you make the best argument of all for that research being pretty worthless. In there you are comparing conflicts that probably aren't really comparable, but yet the line can be drawn at one place, but not at another place historically? I don't buy it. You can conduct the same conflict with two different reactions to really see what the difference would have been. But it ought to tell you one thing..."humanitarian intervention" is absolutely not guaranteed to reduce casualties and to say otherwise is to ignore evidence. It could in some circumstances do so...but that means you need to absolutely sit down and detail the circumstances. Even in the supposed case of preventing an imminent massacre in Libya, all we've left is a multi-year simmering sectarian conflict with no leadership and a failed state.