Balta1701

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 05:57 PM) Your end result is still mass slaughter by Gaddafi and him retaining power. At least currently, as far as I can tell, it still resembles a civil war. I haven't heard reports of thousands of people being summarily killed. That is exactly what happened in Iraq when things deteriorated, that is exactly what happened in Kosovo once the bombing campaign started. Once you start bombing, you lose all international leverage. Hell, even the reporters get out of the way. If Qadaffi's forces are simply stronger than the opposition's forces, then this ends either with Qadaffi in power but a lot more people dead because of the bombing campaign, or this ends with international ground forces fighting Qadaffi's forces. Air power doesn't win fights like this. If you guys aren't ready to go all in, commit 50-100k U.S. troops to a multi-year occupation, Iraq-style, in Libya, then you're not ready to declare no fly zones and start airstrikes.

Let me again state...if I were Qadaffi, and a bombing campaign began, the first thing I'd order my soldiers to do when they got to Behghazi is level the entire place. Air power can't target friend from foe when they're walking down the street, and I could just as easily blame the air forces for the casualties. If the international community stayed out, I'd do enough militarily to retake the cities but no more. If they began bombing, I'd turn as ruthless as possible. The only way to prevent an uprising with a weakened military is to weaken the opposition even more.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 05:17 PM) Honestly I feel that if you aren't willing to save people's lives in desperate situations, the argument for social entitlement programs loses all of its muster. Protecting people from genocide should come before my unemployment check. If "Declaring war = saving lives" I might well agree with you. I long since stopped believing that.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 05:30 PM) I think the Kosovo comparison works but the Iraq one is s*** and you know it, Balta. Well, first of all, it's worth noting that the people we're siding with in Libya have their own checkered history, just like the Kosovars did. For example, cities in Eastern Libya sent more men to fight against the U.S. in Iraq than any other area in the Middle East. So there is plenty of chance that, just like in Iraq, we're stepping on a hornet's nest. Secondly...there's a big point of comparison...there are zero, and I mean zero plans for what to do if we declare war on Qadaffi and his government falls. There were just as many groups and organizations able to take control in Iraq after we took down Saddam, and the country damn near ripped itself apart despite 200k U.S. troops sitting there. But you really want to avoid me calling out an Iraq parallel? Don't tell me that Libya would be able to finance its own reconstruction with its oil. Just don't. That's damn near a direct quote.

In Kosovo, there was a searing ethnic conflict that dragged on for months. However, it was at a very low intensity; some people were being killed, but not enormous numbers. The U.S. and its allies tried diplomatic means to stop the killing and failed. Then, Bill Clinton launched his air campaign. It started off targeting Serbian military positions and quickly also began working to degrade Serbian infrastructure. The campaign, like all air-only campaigns, dragged on for weeks. Nothing seemed to happen. Except on the ground in Kosovo, where things got much, much worse. The forces that were in Kosovo, instead of showing restraint, turned everything loose. The death tolls went up by factors of 100 or more. Meanwhile, despite all the U.S.'s efforts, it really failed to significantly degrade the Serbian military capacity in Kosovo. The U.S. was forced to focus more and more of its efforts on the morale of the Serbian people...bombing civilian targets. Eventually, once Milosevic felt like he had broken the back of the armed Kosovar rebels, and once enough of his own people had died, there was a mutual agreement to end the bombing. According to casualty estimates on the Serbian side, the number of civilians killed in the U.S. led bombing campaign was nearly 1200. Furthermore, a huge majority of the people in Kosovo who were killed by the Serbian army were killed after the beginning of the bombing campaign, not before. The bombing campaign intensified the violence on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees from Kosovo after the bombing began. This campaign is the first one where I was old enough to pay attention to it, and it rapidly convinced me that humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms. More people died because of the bombing campaign than were saved by it. I'd imagine that the infrastructure of Serbia is still suffering to this day. On top of that, the Kosovar rebels committed their fair share of ethnic cleansing, killing a thousand or so ethnic Serbs as well. Finally, talking in raw dollars, the cost of the campaign was somewhere between $5 and $10 billion dollars, in 1999 dollars. If that's not a parallel setup to what we'd be looking at by taking sides in a Libyan civil war, I don't know what is.

Joakim Noah's going to be making an appearance on the March 29th episode of "Frontline".

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 04:43 PM) 1) Its not free, but I am not going to put a price on stopping a potential genocide. If you think billions arent worth spending to stop Gaddafi from killing his own people, that is a perfectly legitimate view. I disagree, I think that lives are more valuable than money. As for where we will get the money, same place we always do, borrow it. 2) This isnt true. Military has said a "No Fly Zone" wont stop Gaddafi, but I assure you that if we start bombing tanks and Gaddafi's troops, this war will end quickly. Libya fighting the US is the equivalent of the rebels fighting Libya. Theyll be at a gun fight with sticks. 3) Rebuilding financially? Libya has billions of assets that will be turned back over once Gaddafi steps down. Further they have a lot of oil. The air strikes arent gong to destroy infrastructure, its just going to prevent Gaddafi's troops from moving into the cities. Libya is wide open area between cities, it will be extremely easy to destroy military positions that are not in cities. Libya's army isnt big enough to hold the cities, so most likely they will retreat from their advance positions to Tripoli. Or many will defect knowing that the end of Gaddafi is soon. Wow...the repetition of arguments from Kosovo and Iraq is staggering.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 04:25 PM) Huh? The WHO estimates for Chernobyl are the Chernobyl Group 4k estimates. My mistake, I didn't realize UNSCEAR was speaking for the WHO. Alphabet soup. Cough.

The fact that they'd use the WHO estimates for one type but deliberately not use an available WHO estimate for another type of electricity makes me more than a little uncomfortable, even if I think they're right regarding the fossil (cough) fuels.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 04:10 PM) even if we want to drop nuclear from the debate on that graph, we can use it as a good argument against coal/oil. How are they counting deaths from coal? Are they counting the fact that I can't stop coughing right now, or just mining accidents?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:37 PM) I dunno, I'm trying to find the source. FWIW the official reports from UNSCEAR and the IAEA have 56 direct deaths and about 4,000 cancer deaths. But a million? Even Greenpeace's reports are something like 250k. And we all know how generally terrible and ignorant Greenpeace is when it comes to nuclear power. edit: I personally think the UN/IAEA/WHO number is laughably low. A book from a couple of Eastern European Scientists which came out last year from the New York Academy of Sciences estimated 986,000. Whether their procedure is accurate or not I'm not going to speak to, I only cite them as a way of noting the 2.5 orders of magnitude that could be missing from that chart.

Which estimate for deaths from Chernobyl is being used there? The 4000-ish direct deaths or the estimates of up to a million cancer deaths in Europe, or something in-between?

With Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks have effectively had the league's best offense and worst defense.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 12:23 PM) Senate Rule 93. Special or extraordinary sessions. Unless otherwise provided by the senate for a specific special or extraordinary session , the rules of the senate adopted for the biennial session , with the following modifications, apply to each special session called by the governor and to each extraordinary session called by the senate and assembly organization committees or called by a joint resolution approved by both houses: Senate Rule 93 (2) (2) A notice of a committee meeting is not required other than posting on the legislative bulletin board, and a bulletin of committee hearings may not be published. So not even the 2 hour notice was required but as a courtesy. You timed this well. Charges were filed today.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 10:16 AM) Would we all be sitting here saying "The Decision was awesome, I loved watching him punk out Cleveland like that" or would we be saying "man, that was cold. I like him a little less right now."? I think if he'd gone anywhere, we'd still have sat there and said "The Decision" was pretty f***ing obnoxious.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 10:08 AM) Isn't that pretty much true in any earthquake though? You are moving stresses from one place to another. Yes it is certainly true...the reason to point it out in this case though is that the section you're stressing is near a population center.

I have nothing to add.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 09:51 AM) It is interesting you have come to the conclusion that some peoples lives are worth less than others. Do you disagree? (Anyway...on principle, I simply reject the concept of a "Humanitarian war" in all but the most extreme cases. The only case in the last 25 years I think genuinely would qualify is Rwanda, and really, the scope of that wasn't understood until most of the damage had been done. You go into Libya with guns blazing, you kill plenty of people anyway.).

One other valid point...the location and length of this rupture probably means that this earthquake has significantly increased stresses on the segment of the subduction zone off of Tokyo.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 09:12 AM) I'm buying it. The difference between Teahen at third and Omar at third defensively was a chasm. It makes a huge difference. The question is...how long would the team have tolerated it if Omar was hitting .180 instead of .280. Or if he was a rookie instead of a 20 year veteran. If Omar went to the wrong party...

Genuinely improving but still not good numbers,.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 09:07 AM) I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but I clearly wasn't referring to the toilets part of the discussion. That's what I got from the post you replied to.

Ok guys...if you all are so gung ho about military force here... First, where do we get the tens of billions of dollars to pay for it? I know it's fun to pretend that military spending is free, but seriously, stop playing that game. Which do you want to cut to pay for it, the nuclear regulatory commission, the tsunami warning network, or both? Second, where do we get the ground forces to move against Quadaffi's ground forces? The number of examples of air strikes alone failing to change the situation on the ground without ground participation is more than I can count on my hands. If I were in Quadaffi's seat and air strikes began, I'd order my ground forces to do everything they could to level Benghazi, because that's the only way I could fully break the opposition, and because I could just blame the airstrikes. Exactly what happened in Kosovo. Third, who takes responsibility (financially) for rebuilding the country whose defenses we just shattered? Have y'all learned nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan? Fourth...how much blood is it ok to spill in the airstrikes?