Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3
wired.com
wired.com
Giving up your own life in combat is not the same as tossing a bomb into a crowded supermarket when not under any immediate danger.
That way the firebombing of Dresden and use of the a-bomb doesn't qualify, as there was nothing stealthy about it. Likewise inadvertent civilian casualties, like the four thousand French civilians who were killed in D-day, are not counted. No doubt having a bomb kill your whole family during a large sea invasion is pretty terrifying, but it's a different concept for _society_ than somebody sneaking up to you in a market with a suicide vest on.
But choose your own. Definitions are very important when talking about terrorism. Some people think everything is terrorism. For those folks, it's really hard to discuss.
I really hope I didn't start a political discussion. Nothing to see here, please move along.
"Stealth" as used here is a pathetic weasel word. Such rhetoric comes up all the time in order to demonize the tactics used by the poorly-equipped, in contrast to the expensively-equipped.
But, FYI, the Japanese had an air-raid system which normally functioned whenever bombers were detected. In the case of the atomic attacks, the alarms weren't set off because one bomber does not signify a bomb-run. Hence, they were as "stealthy" as anything could be.
EDIT: To head off the argument "But we warned them," it is pretty clear that no one is going to evacuate entire cities on mere warnings. Completely impractical.
We killed a lot more Japanese civilians in conventional bombing than we ever did with the A-bomb, not that most people know that. I guess it was fine to continue killing them with one kind of bomb, but not with another?
Glad to use a weasel word. It was called for. It's a tricky definition, but I'm happy with it. I'm sure that others will disagree, hence my concern at even posting it. But I'm a fan of the way language works, both in politics and user interaction, so I thought it was germane.
For those wishing to engage in a good political debate (probably not me, as people have a tendency to down-mod me for days after I express political opinions as a way of "paying me back"), the use of force in wartime is a good one. There was an interesting editorial along those lines in the Wall Street Journal yesterday commemorating the death of one of the pilots that flew the A-bomb missions. You can check it out here:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bstephens/?id=11001...
We should understand at minimum that it is not more honorable somehow to attack from a greater distance, using more elaborate machinery, using different words to describe the same results, etc. None of those is morally positive.
Yes I can make up whatever definition I want, not in some effort to "get my way" in the argument, but simply as a way to disambiguate the conversation. Words with overly broad meanings lead to sloppy analysis (hence the relationship to hacking)
War is not honorable at all in my opinion, and it's not a game that should be played fairly like some inter-collegiate hockey game. It's a messy and horrible business and no amount of weaseling or moralizing can make it any better. The goal, as best I can tell, is to make the other side want to stop fighting before they do the same to you.
Having said all of that, it only takes one party willing to use force to make all parties use counter-force, so war is going to be with us for a long while. So it's simply not enough to throw our hands up in disgust and cast a pox on the whole affair -- we need to be intimate with it. The same way we are intimate with cancer, or terror, or death, or any number of other cruel realities in life.
There is an explicit branch of strategic bombing which is explicitly terrorism. No ambiguity involved.
If you are using the Wiki article as an argument that due to international treaty terror bombing was illegal/immoral/defined as terror, etc then I disagree. As far as I know, the word "terror" was not used in the treaty and even if it was, it does not describe the same thing as what I'm describing. Once again, my definition is nothing but thin air, but it does describe a unique thing that this does not.
Other treaties such as the Kellog-Briand Pact did all sorts of things, like outlaw the use of war in the furtherance of national policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg-Briand_Pact
Reviewing the pact (and several others) is a good reference for the difference between diplomacy and reality, the difference between treaties that make the populations feel better and treaties that actually accomplish something. If I remember correctly, terror bombing was conducted by all sides in WWII. The Washington Post article makes a great case for utilitarianism in warfare -- trying to see fifty years down the road and doing the thing that causes the least harm overall. Does this require a conviction that you are right and the other person wrong? Absolutely. But I can't imagine conducting a war in which both sides agree that, hey, it's all kinda relative anyway. Sort of a struggle of the apathetic. There are some deep issues here, and I'm opposed to anybody that claims to be able to handle them all in a soundbite.
When I think of terrorism and western civilization, I think the best analogies are the American Civil War and the struggle on the plains with the American Indians. While I understand we have somewhat cartoonish views of both conflicts now, they have great parallels to the current situation.
You're welcome to pursue various definitions of terrorism. Another overloaded fuzzy word is the word "war", which has lost all sense of meaning in the last 100 years. It's reached the point where "war on terror" could mean anything from a land invasion of Iraq to a bake sale to collect money for preventing a motorcycle convention from coming to town. You can't have any kind of discussion without first a definition of terms, as old Socrates understood.
The interesting thing about his strategy is that it might increase his chance of survival. He is playing a variant of Tit for Tat. If other skilled players knew that he was doing this, they would actively avoid him. Are there stats in Halo for "Kills from beyond the grave"? If so, he would benefit from making as many people as possible aware of the strategy. In theory, at least.
Good luck against a seasoned Quake player (if they dare to enable that option). XD