From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Sep 18 2001 - 07:29:20 MDT
Zero Powers wrote:
>
> >From: "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net>
>
> >Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>
> > >Killing twenty thousand Afghani as *revenge*
> >
> >Nobody knows for sure of course but I doubt it will be that high,
> >I'll bet this will turn out to be the first war where the American
> >deaths were higher than the enemy's.
>
> I think killing 20,000 people (of any nationality) would be overkill and
> would cast us as the "bad guys" in this thing in the eyes of the world. I'm
> with you John. I don't see us killing any more than a few thousand people,
> even if this "war" drags on a few years. Regardless of all the rhetoric I
> think we're likely to see a lot more of the surgical types of strikes we saw
> in Desert Storm. They may not be *quite* as surgical as we were 10 years
> ago, but you're fooling yourself if you expect to see any sort of "carpet
> bombing" campaign.
Yet I'll be that the muslim world gets far more worked up about the
assasinations of a few terrorists they read about but never met than it
did over the collateral damage in Iraq. See, nothing gets a person more
willing to reexamine their preconceptions about life and the world than
being stuck in a foxhole getting the crap bombed out of you. It's called
by many names: shellshock, thousand yard stare, Stockholm Syndrome, etc.
It's a rather dynamic form of mind control and psychwar, the old "There
are no athiests in a foxhole" routine...
THere is also 'carpet bombing' and 'carpet bombing'. You can carpet bomb
a military base or a city. One is good, the other is not.
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