Causing extreme pain and suffering is apparently OK except whenadministered individually.
Uhm, you missunderstand me once again. The guys working at these facilities are not innocents. Despite, you get by with doing a lot of things if nobody can pin them on you. Accidents happen in nuclear facilities, you know...
My point was that the US and Israel, after 60 years of more or less open war, should consider changing their tactics. It is getting increasingly costy and the results are IMHO rather weak.
As Msimon said, internet and porn, which means a different lifestyle and new media, new information entering their world is one way to do it.
Purposely seeding missinformation (go viral on these new media with information that is against the Iranian government and helps the opposition) can also help. If you then have a few things that scare the Iranian public and that you can pin on the Iranian government (again, you could go viral with that), you could win more than by simply bombing the shit out of the Iranian people.
Causing extreme pain and suffering is apparently OK except whenadministered individually.
Uhm, you missunderstand me once again. The guys working at these facilities are not innocents. Despite, you get by with doing a lot of things if nobody can pin them on you. Accidents happen in nuclear facilities, you know...
You failed to explain what I misunderstood.
I was pointing out a moral inconsistency in your thinking. I was comparing your previous outrage against US human rights violations for water dunking to your plan of causing slow painful death to hundreds or thousands by rigging a nuclear accident that takes out miles around the facility.
Instead of explaining what I didn't understand, you just repeated yourself.
Except, now you seem to add that whether it can be pinned on you is important to the moral distinction.
I find this even more inconsistent with a self professed moral evolution.
Ok, let me try that again.
There is a difference between the people working at a Iranian nuclear facility that makes nuclear bombs (I am not 100% sure that this exists, but if it does...) and some civilian that was arrested somewhere and put into a prison without the right to a lawyer or a way to defend himself.
The people working at the nuclear plant clearly work there and were therefore cought in the act.
The person that was arrested on some street somewhere, could be a mixup, could be innocent, could have been arrested by mistake. And there is no way we will ever know.
Also, the alternative to what I was proposing is what others here have been proposing, which is an outright war, which will definitely kill many innocents, women and children.
I am hoping that it can be solved without either proposal, but IMHO my plan is preferable to an open war. An open war will not only have many innocent women and children die in the crossfire, it will also attract even more hatred towards the US and Israel. This would IMHO be counterproductive to the desire for a long term peace in the region.
Any father that looses his child to an american or Israeli bomb is a potential hire for Al Quaida or a simillar group. Dont you ever forget that.
You start an open war that will always have collateral damage, you pretty much play into the hands of the terrorists.
Why do you think they are so active in Iraq right now? Lots of angry people there, thats why. Wars kill people, wars kill innocents and wars will cause suffering. Suffering leads to hate, hate leads to anger and anger leads to more suffering (insert Yoda voice here).
In Iran you have the problem that people are taught from kindergarten that America and Jews are evil and must be destroyed, any debate is on how and not why.
There is an axiom with reforming criminals that either they decide to reform themselves or they must be psychologically broken. If the conditioning of the Iranian people is not dissipated in time by social media and increased access to the outside world, then large scale psychological shock treatment may be the only solution.
Otherwise you bomb the reactors and uranium enriching plants and they just rebuild them. They've learned from the bombing of Iraq and Syria's nuke sites, the targets in Iran are hardened.
Sorry, but the Iranians are not criminals by nature. They are "criminals" (if you really want to call them that and I think that this is a very far fetch for most of them) by nurture.
I have my serious doubts about being able to "fix" someone who is a criminal by nature. This is the socialist idea of being able to educate people into becoming better people. They try that in all walks of life, not just with criminals and they ALWAYS fail.
So being able to educate someone who is bad by nature to be a better person, even if you are trying to break them, is just bound to fail.
Most Iranians dont even know what is going on in the world. They are a prime example for Platos cave allegory. They only ever get to see a very limited and twisted part of reality, which they perceive to be true. There are a lot of people living in the west to whom the same applies, btw, just much less.
The internet and modern communication devices are rapidly changing this however. The internet is the democratisation of information. They can not really stop it either. The Chinese have been trying for decades with very limited success.
Iran does not have the same resources and all it would take is a strategically placed satellite that allows uncontrolled internet access over Iran to break any gripp the government there has. Still much cheaper than a war.
That does not mean that the Iranians would all of a sudden turn into a secular society full of science and open minded people, but it will help getting rid of the really bad guys in charge and make way for a more moderate government. That is already a big victory.
The rebuilding of the reactors would only happen if they believe that it was an attack and not an accident.
This is where you use the media to your advantage. You cause an accident and then you scare the general public so much, that they will not allow another facility to be built.
Hey it worked for Germany, who are scared of anything nuclear now because of Fukushima (which was a real accident, but given the circumstances Germanys reaction is ridiculous).
You want to see a government make 180 degree turn on the matter of nuclear power (or in Irans case nuclear facilities), take Germany as a lesson.
It shows how targeted missinformation by the media, combined with political movements and an already existing inertia into a certain direction can bring about a radical change in politics.
Skipjack wrote:Ok, let me try that again.
There is a difference between the people working at a Iranian nuclear facility that makes nuclear bombs (I am not 100% sure that this exists, but if it does...) and some civilian that was arrested somewhere and put into a prison without the right to a lawyer or a way to defend himself.
The people working at the nuclear plant clearly work there and were therefore cought in the act.
The person that was arrested on some street somewhere, could be a mixup, could be innocent, could have been arrested by mistake. And there is no way we will ever know.
Your distinction above is the potential of innocence. But, that supposes that the ONLY reason not to allow for water dunking is the potential for innocence. Previous conversations seemed to indicate that you would not support enhanced interrogations even on guilty people. If this is true, then the potential for innocence cannot be used as the distinction.
For example, would capturing and enhanced interrogating one of these guilty plant workers be OK?
FYI, I guess I have derailed this thread. It is OK if you just ignore my random moral musings.
But, that supposes that the ONLY reason not to allow for water dunking is the potential for innocence. Previous conversations seemed to indicate that you would not support enhanced interrogations even on guilty people. If this is true, then the potential for innocence cannot be used as the distinction.
I am not in favor of torture in general, but I am pretty sure that I was always talking about it in context of potential innocense. If you torture him enough, even a catholic priest will admit to being a Al Quaida terrorist.
It is simply not a good method to aquire information, which is why most civilized countries have abandoned the concept decades ago.
For example, would capturing and enhanced interrogating one of these guilty plant workers be OK?
Again, torture is not a good way of gathering intelligence. IMHO, there are better and more subtle ways to do that. I dont condone torture in general, because there is no guarantee that the information you get is real.
Anyway, with those plant workers, if they are cought actually working at the plant, you would at least know who they are. I would still like them to have a fair trial though.
I don't mean to imply Iranians are criminals, just that the technique to alter ingrained thinking is the same. The axiom comes from a report on criminal reform in the Canadian prison system I read years ago.
I've spoken to warm, friendly, very educated Iranians in N. America who have expressed the very same views to me as Iran's leaders. What to do?
The axiom comes from a report on criminal reform in the Canadian prison system I read years ago.
Well it is a socialist ideal that does not work. You can not turn a wolf into a lamb.
I've spoken to warm, friendly, very educated Iranians in N. America who have expressed the very same views to me as Iran's leaders.
And what does that proof? Only that you can still be brainwashed, no matter where you live. I have spoken to some warm and friendly (non iranian) north american citizens that had pretty outrageous views on the world too. Most of them were republicans
JK.
Anyway the problem is that an open war in the region will be costy and it will not achieve anything for you in the long term.
The axiom comes from a report on criminal reform in the Canadian prison system I read years ago.
Well it is a socialist ideal that does not work. You can not turn a wolf into a lamb.
I've spoken to warm, friendly, very educated Iranians in N. America who have expressed the very same views to me as Iran's leaders.
And what does that proof? Only that you can still be brainwashed, no matter where you live. I have spoken to some warm and friendly (non iranian) north american citizens that had pretty outrageous views on the world too. Most of them were republicans
From the perspective of a socialist-friendly foreign liberal, I consider the remark to be a compliment.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —
For the record the Canadian penal reform system doesn't use the breaking method on prisoners, that was merely the second method quoted in a study, nothing more.
One problem is that we hope that exposure to the internet and pornography will weaken the aggressive impulses of the Iranian regime, however porn addiction hasn't stopped the Taliban. In some ways they're much worse for it, likewise the Iranian regime is already quite corrupt.
The thing is, everybody thinks well, Iran explodes a nuke, but then they don't use it, no worries. Then they build ten more and put them on missles in range of Israel, and everybody says, well they still aren't doing anything, people adjust their thinking to the new reality.
Then they get up to fifty, and they have them on missles that can reach western Europe. Still everybody just gets used to it. Finally they have three hundred to five hundred nuke tipped missles, most of which can reach N. America, everybody just adjusts again.
At this point they're giving a few to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hezbollah decides to launch conventional rocket strikes backed up by the threat of a nuke strike if Israel retaliates, and Iran backs them up even more. Maybe Israel finally gets sick of being shelled all the time from Lebanon.
Choff, you are getting ahead of yourself. So far they dont even have ONE nuke and they have not tested one yet either.
And again, ONE nuke test does not make you a nuclear power. You need to have the capability to make more than the one nuke you just tested for that and that again requires the same amount of enriched fissile material as the first one did. And then they just have ONE additional nuke, which again is not really going to achieve much, other than giving the rest of the world a reason to turn Iran into a glass crater. Which is IMHO not what they want to do.
Also if Iran gives a nuke to Hezbollah, the rest of the world would know and they would punish Iran accordingly (see glass crater).
If a terrorist nuke goes off somewhere, would we be able to tell if the nuke was made in Iran? I know we can generally tell where the fissile material came from, but I am not sure how true this is generally and with newer members/potential members of the nuclear club.
