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[smjjames]

I wouldn't call the ipod gift a shitty gift. Maybe to her royal sensibilities, yes, but nowhere near as shitty as something from a tourist gift shop.

As for whether it's a running joke, I have no idea.

[Shadowlord]

Putin was not the one, who started middle east mess. And, well, you cant drop bombs on targets in city without hitting civilians.

http://time.com/4577994/aleppo-hospitals-syria-airstrikes/

You definitely can't drop bombs on hospitals without hitting civilians. 

There are currently no functioning hospitals in the rebel-held section of the Syrian city of Aleppo following days of heavy shelling and airstrikes by Syrian government and Russian warplanes, medical officials say.

Airstrikes took out the last remaining hospital on Friday, according to the Health Directorate in the rebel sector, medics, and several nongovernmental organizations working closely with Aleppo’s hospitals. Warplanes bombed five separate hospitals in the rebel enclave in the span of a few days.

The shutdown means there are no facilities left to aid wounded civilians in eastern Aleppo, where as many as 300,000 people are living under a siege imposed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Medics may continue to work in makeshift clinics elsewhere in the city, but as of Friday there were no fully equipped hospitals still operating.

[Sergarr]

The rebel soldiers were, reportedly, using hospitals as bases to live in, for storing equipment and also as firing positions for "rockets", which would've made them, by all measures, legitimate war targets. Despite them having civilian patients.

Yes, that sucks for the innocent people caught in the battlefield - but that's a nature of a war against an opponent who thinks that using human shields is a totally cool thing to do.

Which shouldn't be all that surprising, considering that they're all, well, from Middle East. They tend to not play by the rules of civilized world.

[Neonivek]

Which shouldn't be all that surprising, considering that they're all, well, from Middle East. They tend to not play by the rules of civilized world.

Perhaps that isn't the best... way to put it.

Well unless some sort of time warp happened and the middle east was shunted back in time so we are dealing with BC Middle East.

[Sergarr]

Which shouldn't be all that surprising, considering that they're all, well, from Middle East. They tend to not play by the rules of civilized world.

Perhaps that isn't the best... way to put it.

Well unless some sort of time warp happened and the middle east was shunted back in time so we are dealing with BC Middle East.

How would you put it better? I mean, they consider using suicide car bombers and anti-population air strikes as legitimate war tactics! Do you know a single civilized-world country that would accept those?

[Neonivek]

Which shouldn't be all that surprising, considering that they're all, well, from Middle East. They tend to not play by the rules of civilized world.

Perhaps that isn't the best... way to put it.

Well unless some sort of time warp happened and the middle east was shunted back in time so we are dealing with BC Middle East.

How would you put it better? I mean, they consider using suicide car bombers and anti-population air strikes as legitimate war tactics! Do you know a single civilized-world country that would accept those?

Off the top of my head: Ireland

[Max™]

The various superpowers that have been using different groups in the middle east to fight proxy wars for them?

[Frumple]

How would you put it better? I mean, they consider using suicide car bombers and anti-population air strikes as legitimate war tactics! Do you know a single civilized-world country that would accept those?

... the US, if it was kept far enough down the low (how many terrorist groups did we provide the core training to one or more of its members, again?)? Russia, China. Japan was only so long ago, and have been rumbling a bit on the nationalism side of things lately. You're not really looking at ideological mismatch for those so much as different resource situation -- less likely to resort to that sort of behavior just because it's a smaller portion of available choices. Probably more that those countries, it's not really that difficult to get a modern population to roll with an atrocity or fifty.

Thaaat said, no, no they don't. Sentiment against suicide bombers and civilian aimed bombings is actually both fairly high and fairly pervasive in the middle east. Shit's not really considered legitimate, it's just there's a fair few folks that are fine with being illegitimate as all hell.

[Sergarr]

Off the top of my head: Ireland

...I don't think they've actually used suicide bombers, though? And I recall they've specifically warned people so that they could evacuate the area beforehand?

I mean, in the Middle East, they just don't give a shit about civilian casualties, as far as I can see. The only reason why Sunni ain't in the process of being ethnically cleansed from Iraq by Shia militias is because of USA insisting that they won't take part in assault on Mosul, after all.

[Neonivek]

Off the top of my head: Ireland

...I don't think they've actually used suicide bombers, though? And I recall they've specifically warned people so that they could evacuate the area beforehand?

I mean, in the Middle East, they just don't give a shit about civilian casualties, as far as I can see. The only reason why Sunni ain't in the process of being ethnically cleansed from Iraq by Shia militias is because of USA insisting that they won't take part in assault on Mosul, after all.

I definitely would like to know where you got the idea that the middle east doesn't care about civilian casualties.

It definitely seemed like a pressing issue.

[Culise]

Off the top of my head: Ireland

...I don't think they've actually used suicide bombers, though? And I recall they've specifically warned people so that they could evacuate the area beforehand?

I mean, in the Middle East, they just don't give a shit about civilian casualties, as far as I can see. The only reason why Sunni ain't in the process of being ethnically cleansed from Iraq by Shia militias is because of USA insisting that they won't take part in assault on Mosul, after all.

They didn't go for suicide attacks as much, but anti-population strikes (not air strikes, to be fair) were definitely a thing with them.  They also didn't typically go in for warnings, though that probably varied depending on who in the IRA was attacking and the actual intent.  F'rex, the intent of the Brighton hotel bombing to decapitate the Conservative Party and kill Thatcher would have made it entirely self-defeating to warn the Conservatives in advance.  As far as I know, the Baltic Exchange truck bomb didn't come with a warning, either.  Bishopsgate, on the other hand, did have a telephoned warning an hour in advance.  The Birmingham pub bombings were probably a screw-up; a direct attack against civilians, but the warnings came in late and did not identify the specific places to be evacuated. 

[apiks]

From what I know of the guerilla warfare between north Ireland and Ireland, there was a lot of civilian casualties, including things like car suicide bombers.

On the other hand, you absolutely cannot deny that today fanatics are the ones using these tactics. The ones in the Middle East seem to be currently taking that role quite well with civilian killings, culture monument destruction, immoral war tactics and a host of other war crimes.

Fanatics will be fanatics. The current ones happen to be in the Middle East.

[Grim Portent]

Off the top of my head: Ireland

...I don't think they've actually used suicide bombers, though? And I recall they've specifically warned people so that they could evacuate the area beforehand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombings_during_the_Northern_Ireland_Troubles_and_peace_process

They were quite willing to blow up people and indeed most of their bombs were intended to do so. There were some no-fatality pre-warned bombings as I recall, but they were far outweighed by the bombings intended to kill people. I don't think they ever really used suicide bombings though.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Everything is for a reason. The tendency towards using civilians and "sacred places" as shields, as well as suicide bombing, isn't because Islamic radicals are crazy. I mean, they are crazy and that certainly helps, but that isn't the why. It's a fundamentally practical strategy.

The only form of war that can be meaningfully waged against the big leagues, the West, Russia, China, is psychological. Physically defeating any of them is far beyond the capabilities of any dedicated Islamic group, and any group that got big enough for that to become practical would inevitably be culturally infected and turn away from the task (this, for the record, is the real reason why the Islamic State is so utterly draconian towards everyday practices in the territories they control).

Forcing world powers to bomb hospitals and massacre civilians is the real tactic. They're not protecting themselves with it, and it's not "cowardice" like some people insist. It's stacking the deck. You don't bomb the hospital, they live and keep operating. You bomb the hospital, they spread pictures of splattered children all over the internet to gain more recruits and demoralize the general public in nations where that's a serious danger to politicians.

That's the bind, and it's also why so many people seem to want to embrace Islamophobia: it's an easy out. If they're just barbarians and howling lunatics you can justify killing them all to the public anyway. Point-Counterpoint. The darkside is real, is what I'm saying.

What we should really probably do is try to find a paradigm-breaker. I'm sure if you gathered a wide group of people both in and out of the War on Terror echo chamber, you could find something. As long as we're caught up in the trolley dilemma of Bomb Hospital or Don't Bomb Terrorists we will always lose. Stop playing the Islamic State's game.

[Reelya]

How would you put it better? I mean, they consider using suicide car bombers and anti-population air strikes as legitimate war tactics! Do you know a single civilized-world country that would accept those?

Yes. America is a single country that accepts anti-population air strikes as legitimate war tactics. People will still swear blind today that America bombing cities in the past was legitimate. e.g. the era from WWII to Cambodia/Vietnam.

America also doesn't use "suicide bombers" because they have actual bombers and drones that fill that need. If America was invaded and fighting house to house you can damn well bet they'd booby-trap everything they could.

But you know, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. etc etc. They fit what you said exactly:

- anti-population air strikes
- legitimate war tactics
- a single civilized-world country that would accept those

Plenty of Americans continue to justify those as legitimate war tactics even today, even though all of those were designed to shock the enemy by killing large numbers of civilians (those cities did not contain military targets).