Tuesday, February 7, 2017

One of Those Ugly Reminders of Poor Choices

ISIS is really evil.  But so are their enemies in many cases. 2/7/17 New York Times:
BEIRUT — The prison north of Damascus was known to detainees as "the slaughterhouse" and in it, as many of 13,000 people were hanged in only four years after a series of sham trials, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.
The report, issued on Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a "calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution."
The report covers the period from 2011 to 2015, but Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's regional office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.
"These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority," including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defense minister, she said.
How do you deal with a struggle between two brands of monstrousness?  

5 comments:

  1. > How do you deal with a struggle between two brands of monstrousness?

    You put a big REALLY strong fence (literal or figurative) around them let out only women, children of non-military age, and old men.

    Just INSIDE the fence you build a compound for the military age men who claim they don't want to fight.

    Next you put big piles of surplus military everywhere and let them have at it.

    CAGE MATCH
    TWO TEAMS ENTER, ONLY DEATH LEAVES.

    Not really joking here.

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  2. You do not deal with them, or anyone else for that matter. It is not our circus and they are not our monkeys.

    You create a extremely formidable military, and use it solely for domestic defense. You stay completely out of foreign states, and let them fight with each other.

    Let them know that you are categorically OUT of any of their affairs, with one codicil: Touch us in any hostile manner and you and your entire country will become a footnote in history.
    Total annihilation to a degree and extent that the onlookers will recoil in horror and terror. Without exception.

    No cat sits on a hot stove twice.

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  3. Billy: love your solution. rfb: Not likely tolerable to most Americans because of no escape hatch.

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  4. Yes Clayton, you are correct: intolerable.

    Because while they are trying to kill us, we try to be nice.

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  5. A lot of Americans (especially Jews) have been equating this refugee crisis to 1939. It would be more accurate to compare it to 1949. There were lots of refugees seeking entry to the US in 1949. They were fleeing tyranny - but many had blood on their own hands, having collaborated with Germany during WW II. Scum, right? But many of those had been tyrannized by the USSR first, or attacked by its Communist pawns.

    It can be really hard to separate the sheep from the goats. When thugs and gangsters run wild, it can become impossible, because otherwise good people do drastic things to survive.

    (Incidentally - recently I read a 1954 mystery in which the secret is illegal immigrants being smuggled through Florida swamps. They are European DPs, and they regard staying in Europe as certain death. In 1954.)

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