Cato Institute: Ladders pose greater risk than terrorism
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Toronto Sun cannot deal with rational behavior.
Mulcair ignores unconfirmed reports ISIS has chemical weapons | News | Toronto Sun
Mulcair ignores unconfirmed reports ISIS has chemical weapons | News | Toronto Sun
The funny part is, that in your fevered pitch to be all edgy and mocky, you made yourself look like an idiot, lol.
Maybe next time you'll read your article before you post it and look stupid, lolz.
For that you a greenie!
US war on ISIS sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home
WITHOUT question, ISIS is an abomination. However, it is unclear whether America is the right agent to see this through. Part of the trouble relates to the Obama administration's strategy, which seems likely to empower ISIS even as it undermines the security and interests of the Unted States and its allies - but there is an ethical dimension as well.
While ISIS poses a serious (although likely overstated) threat to the governments of Iraq and Syria, over the last two administrations, the United States has itself forcibly overthrown the governments of Iraq and Libya - each time in defiance of international law. And along with ISIS, the United States has spent the last three years seeking to undermine the Syrian government. Additionally, it has sheltered Israel from meaningful accountability to the international community, allowing the crisis in Palestine to fester.
It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS - not least because US policies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have largely paved the way for ISIS's emergence as a major regional actor.
But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by US troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society. Until these problems are better addressed, United States' efforts to undermine ISIS will be akin to using a dirty rag to clean an infected wound.
Sexual Violence
The initial driver of US involvement was the outrage over ISIS' capture of thousands of Yazidi women and the sexual violence subsequently exercised against them - horrors which provided moral credence to the war against ISIS in much the same way that the 2001 US war against the Taliban was justified in part by highlighting the plight of Afghan women living under their rule.
However, over the course of that war, and the subsequent 2003 war in Iraq, US soldiers and contractors repeatedly used rape as a weapon of war, both against prisoners and the local civilian population. But perhaps more disturbing than the crimes committed by US personnel against Iraqis and Afghans were the atrocities committed by servicemen against their fellow soldiers.
As many as one out of three female soldiers are raped over the course of their military careers. Up to 80 percent of these assaults go unreported, in large part because reported cases rarely result in convictions or proportional punishment. In fact, the victims are frequently punished socially and professionally for reporting abuse, and they are barred from suing the government for reparations even when wrongdoing is proven.
The stats are not much better in the broader population. As many as one in five women who attend college in America are sexually assaulted over the course of their academic career, often with no justice even when the crimes are reported. This is commensurate with the broader trend in America - according to White House estimates, roughly a fifth of all American women are raped at some point in their lives.
As in the military, most of these crimes are not reported to the police, and most reported rapes are never prosecuted - let alone result in convictions for the perpetrators.
If the crimes against thousands of women in Iraq and Syria justify a US mobilization that costs nearly $10 million per day, how much more militant should Americans be about resolving the tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence that go unpunished and largely unnoticed in the United States each year?
Astonishing Cruelty
In addition to sexual violence, there was widespread outrage over ISIS's uncompromising brutality and the pornographic way they record and broadcast these acts - which include beheadings, crucifixions, and occasional incidences of cannibalism.
Of course, US soldiers and contractors have and continue to torture their enemies, often taking obscene photos to brag about and reminisce upon their acts. The contractors who were implicated in these abuses have never been prosecuted. Instead, one whistleblower who initially exposed these crimes, Chelsea Manning, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
There are further reports of US servicemen committing massacres, desecrating the corpses of their enemies, or even hunting the locals for sport while collecting photos, and even body parts, as trophies. And these are just a sampling of the acts which have been picked up by war correspondents and detailed in the media - many more crimes have never received exposure abroad, with crimes committed against Iraqis and Afghans by US servicemen going largely under-prosecuted or altogether unprosecuted.
Because these atrocities are not sufficiently dealt with by the United States, the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded the right to try Americans in their own courts. However, as protecting US politicians and soldiers from international accountability formed the basis of US opposition to establishing or joining the International Criminal Court, the Obama Administration refused to cede anything to these nascent states.
As a result, concerns about accountability proved to be the main obstacle in the US reaching a security agreement with Afghanistan - and Iraq's refusal to grant US soldiers immunity was the reason the US ultimately abandoned the pursuit of a status of forces agreement there, contributing significantly to the security vacuum that allowed ISIS to rebuild in Iraq and expand into Syria. That is, ISIS's crimes were largely enabled by America's refusal to face up to its own.
Americans should bear this in mind as the Obama Administration loosens its already overly permissive standards vis à vis collateral damage and targeting civilians in its current campaign. The killing of innocents is not somehow morally superior if committed remotely by a drone or missile rather than the tools at ISIS' disposal.
US war on ISIS sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home - Stop the War Coalition
WITHOUT question, ISIS is an abomination. However, it is unclear whether America is the right agent to see this through. Part of the trouble relates to the Obama administration's strategy, which seems likely to empower ISIS even as it undermines the security and interests of the Unted States and its allies - but there is an ethical dimension as well.
While ISIS poses a serious (although likely overstated) threat to the governments of Iraq and Syria, over the last two administrations, the United States has itself forcibly overthrown the governments of Iraq and Libya - each time in defiance of international law. And along with ISIS, the United States has spent the last three years seeking to undermine the Syrian government. Additionally, it has sheltered Israel from meaningful accountability to the international community, allowing the crisis in Palestine to fester.
It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS - not least because US policies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have largely paved the way for ISIS's emergence as a major regional actor.
But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by US troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society. Until these problems are better addressed, United States' efforts to undermine ISIS will be akin to using a dirty rag to clean an infected wound.
Sexual Violence
The initial driver of US involvement was the outrage over ISIS' capture of thousands of Yazidi women and the sexual violence subsequently exercised against them - horrors which provided moral credence to the war against ISIS in much the same way that the 2001 US war against the Taliban was justified in part by highlighting the plight of Afghan women living under their rule.
However, over the course of that war, and the subsequent 2003 war in Iraq, US soldiers and contractors repeatedly used rape as a weapon of war, both against prisoners and the local civilian population. But perhaps more disturbing than the crimes committed by US personnel against Iraqis and Afghans were the atrocities committed by servicemen against their fellow soldiers.
As many as one out of three female soldiers are raped over the course of their military careers. Up to 80 percent of these assaults go unreported, in large part because reported cases rarely result in convictions or proportional punishment. In fact, the victims are frequently punished socially and professionally for reporting abuse, and they are barred from suing the government for reparations even when wrongdoing is proven.
The stats are not much better in the broader population. As many as one in five women who attend college in America are sexually assaulted over the course of their academic career, often with no justice even when the crimes are reported. This is commensurate with the broader trend in America - according to White House estimates, roughly a fifth of all American women are raped at some point in their lives.
As in the military, most of these crimes are not reported to the police, and most reported rapes are never prosecuted - let alone result in convictions for the perpetrators.
If the crimes against thousands of women in Iraq and Syria justify a US mobilization that costs nearly $10 million per day, how much more militant should Americans be about resolving the tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence that go unpunished and largely unnoticed in the United States each year?
Astonishing Cruelty
In addition to sexual violence, there was widespread outrage over ISIS's uncompromising brutality and the pornographic way they record and broadcast these acts - which include beheadings, crucifixions, and occasional incidences of cannibalism.
Of course, US soldiers and contractors have and continue to torture their enemies, often taking obscene photos to brag about and reminisce upon their acts. The contractors who were implicated in these abuses have never been prosecuted. Instead, one whistleblower who initially exposed these crimes, Chelsea Manning, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
There are further reports of US servicemen committing massacres, desecrating the corpses of their enemies, or even hunting the locals for sport while collecting photos, and even body parts, as trophies. And these are just a sampling of the acts which have been picked up by war correspondents and detailed in the media - many more crimes have never received exposure abroad, with crimes committed against Iraqis and Afghans by US servicemen going largely under-prosecuted or altogether unprosecuted.
Because these atrocities are not sufficiently dealt with by the United States, the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded the right to try Americans in their own courts. However, as protecting US politicians and soldiers from international accountability formed the basis of US opposition to establishing or joining the International Criminal Court, the Obama Administration refused to cede anything to these nascent states.
As a result, concerns about accountability proved to be the main obstacle in the US reaching a security agreement with Afghanistan - and Iraq's refusal to grant US soldiers immunity was the reason the US ultimately abandoned the pursuit of a status of forces agreement there, contributing significantly to the security vacuum that allowed ISIS to rebuild in Iraq and expand into Syria. That is, ISIS's crimes were largely enabled by America's refusal to face up to its own.
Americans should bear this in mind as the Obama Administration loosens its already overly permissive standards vis à vis collateral damage and targeting civilians in its current campaign. The killing of innocents is not somehow morally superior if committed remotely by a drone or missile rather than the tools at ISIS' disposal.
US war on ISIS sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home - Stop the War Coalition
Moral equivalence! Tracking that rubbished thinking leads back to Israel and it's legion of minions. Since ISIS/ISIL/AL-KADHU and Uncle Sham/Israel/ Angleterre/Banking Buggers are all the same organism you are as usual FOS.
Speaking of stupid, maybe you should actually attack the contents of my posts, instead of something you pulled out of that vast wasteland you call a head, simply because I've hurt your feelings, lol.Moral equivalence! Tracking that rubbished thinking leads back to Israel and it's legion of minions. Since ISIS/ISIL/AL-KADHU and Uncle Sham/Israel/ Angleterre/Banking Buggers are all the same organism you are as usual FOS.If you need and want consistent and reliable terrorists you would naturally grow them yourself, waiting for the wild variety is stupid, stupid.
I can only imagine the mental midgetry that thought your babbling was worth a thumbs up. But I'm sure I've probably hurt their feelings terribly so, too.
Because the bulk of them, are nonsense.
You'd need to deep fry your head in honey oil, or try and stop a train with it, to believe every claim made is 100% truthful.
Most of them are just that, stories. If you ever trace the roots of these theories, you most often find, in some dark corner of the web, a few people that take very tiny pieces of a large number of news reports and sort of jumble them together and then call it '"truth".
Bottom line, the main reason I don't believe in conspiracy theories is that no one has ever proven that good at keeping a secret. People are, for the most part, notorious blabbermouths.
The real threat of terrorism to Australians, by the numbers
How serious a threat is terrorism to Australians? We devote billions of taxpayer dollars to it, impose economic costs on ourselves and our industries and sacrifice some of our most basic freedoms for it. So it must be a huge threat to Australia, correct?
Since the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney, there have been 113 Australian victims of terrorism. That includes Australians killed overseas in terrorist attacks as well as non-Australians killed here, such as the Turkish consul-general murdered in Sydney in 1980.
For the purposes of comparison, we’re going to cheat a little and only look at more recent data on what kills Australians from the last 10 years, from 2003-12, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Cause of Death data. But we figure that’s a reasonable comparison because the terrorism threat is perceived to have increased in the last decade-and-a-bit. And we’re focusing only on the causes of death, not on injury — not because being injured in a terrorist attack is trivial, but because the numbers are clearer that way, and people are also wounded and made ill by many of the other threats that we’re going to discuss here.
During the period 2003-12, there have been 2617 homicides in Australia, or around 23 times the number of all victims of terrorism since 1978. There have been over 8500 victims of car accidents (just car accidents, not pedestrian deaths or accidents involving other types of vehicles). There have been over 22,800 suicides in that time. So clearly terrorism isn’t comparable to common threats to the lives of Australians — even the extraordinarily rare fate of being murdered is vastly more common than terrorism.
So let’s scale it down to find some specific threats to life that are comparable to terrorism. For example, 230 people died falling off ladders from 2003-12; 190 Australians died from accidental gun discharges; 137 rural workers and farmers died falling off or rolling in tractors; 206 died from electrocution, which like tractor accidents is a tragically all-too-common form of workplace fatality. That’s starting to get close to terrorism, but you have to get very specific to find a cause of death that has claimed fewer lives than terrorism. Lightning, for instance, has killed 10 Australians in the period 2003-12. There were around 66 deaths of indigenous people in custody in that period. Whooping cough, mostly due to the murderous stupidity of anti-vaxers, has claimed 20 lives; chicken pox six (shingles has claimed 228 people; gastro and diarrhoea, 168). Social problems like the high rates of arrest and incarceration of indigenous people, and preventable diseases, get us closer to the sorts of numbers terrorism has claimed in the last 30-40 years.
Now that we have a sense of scale, let’s get some sense of what the numbers mean given the resources we throw at terrorism. In the period 2003-12, nearly 1700 indigenous people died of diabetes at a rate, on average, about seven times higher than non-indigenous Australians. If we’d invested a little of the money we spent going to war in Iraq or inflating the budget of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on programs that lowered indigenous diabetes to just twice that of non-indigenous Australians, around 1200 lives would have been saved, or around 10 times the death toll of terrorism. Then again, there’s nothing sexy for the media in saving indigenous people from dying of diabetes.
In the same period, between 700 and 1000 women and children have been killed by their partners or parents in domestic homicides. We offer such a vague figure because we can only estimate it — getting specific numbers of domestic homicides is, for some reason (we could never guess why), impossible in official statistics compared to other forms of crime. Even assuming the lower figure, reducing the number of women and kids murdered in domestic violence by just 20% would save far more lives than have ever been lost to terrorism.
Terrorism numbers compared to causes of death | Crikey
How serious a threat is terrorism to Australians? We devote billions of taxpayer dollars to it, impose economic costs on ourselves and our industries and sacrifice some of our most basic freedoms for it. So it must be a huge threat to Australia, correct?
Since the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney, there have been 113 Australian victims of terrorism. That includes Australians killed overseas in terrorist attacks as well as non-Australians killed here, such as the Turkish consul-general murdered in Sydney in 1980.
For the purposes of comparison, we’re going to cheat a little and only look at more recent data on what kills Australians from the last 10 years, from 2003-12, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Cause of Death data. But we figure that’s a reasonable comparison because the terrorism threat is perceived to have increased in the last decade-and-a-bit. And we’re focusing only on the causes of death, not on injury — not because being injured in a terrorist attack is trivial, but because the numbers are clearer that way, and people are also wounded and made ill by many of the other threats that we’re going to discuss here.
During the period 2003-12, there have been 2617 homicides in Australia, or around 23 times the number of all victims of terrorism since 1978. There have been over 8500 victims of car accidents (just car accidents, not pedestrian deaths or accidents involving other types of vehicles). There have been over 22,800 suicides in that time. So clearly terrorism isn’t comparable to common threats to the lives of Australians — even the extraordinarily rare fate of being murdered is vastly more common than terrorism.
So let’s scale it down to find some specific threats to life that are comparable to terrorism. For example, 230 people died falling off ladders from 2003-12; 190 Australians died from accidental gun discharges; 137 rural workers and farmers died falling off or rolling in tractors; 206 died from electrocution, which like tractor accidents is a tragically all-too-common form of workplace fatality. That’s starting to get close to terrorism, but you have to get very specific to find a cause of death that has claimed fewer lives than terrorism. Lightning, for instance, has killed 10 Australians in the period 2003-12. There were around 66 deaths of indigenous people in custody in that period. Whooping cough, mostly due to the murderous stupidity of anti-vaxers, has claimed 20 lives; chicken pox six (shingles has claimed 228 people; gastro and diarrhoea, 168). Social problems like the high rates of arrest and incarceration of indigenous people, and preventable diseases, get us closer to the sorts of numbers terrorism has claimed in the last 30-40 years.
Now that we have a sense of scale, let’s get some sense of what the numbers mean given the resources we throw at terrorism. In the period 2003-12, nearly 1700 indigenous people died of diabetes at a rate, on average, about seven times higher than non-indigenous Australians. If we’d invested a little of the money we spent going to war in Iraq or inflating the budget of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on programs that lowered indigenous diabetes to just twice that of non-indigenous Australians, around 1200 lives would have been saved, or around 10 times the death toll of terrorism. Then again, there’s nothing sexy for the media in saving indigenous people from dying of diabetes.
In the same period, between 700 and 1000 women and children have been killed by their partners or parents in domestic homicides. We offer such a vague figure because we can only estimate it — getting specific numbers of domestic homicides is, for some reason (we could never guess why), impossible in official statistics compared to other forms of crime. Even assuming the lower figure, reducing the number of women and kids murdered in domestic violence by just 20% would save far more lives than have ever been lost to terrorism.
Terrorism numbers compared to causes of death | Crikey
I read all that tripe as clear proof that anti terrorism efforts are clearly working.
You would be wrong then.
The problem is, history says terrorist attacks are, by and large, bad at killing people. The global terrorism database (which is downloadable) contains details of every terrorist attack since 1970, from Northern Ireland to South Sudan, from al-Qaeda to the ANC. It shows that around half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 haven’t inflicted any casualties. The average casualties of all terrorist attacks, including perpetrators, is 2.25. And that number hasn’t significantly escalated in the era of al-Qaeda — since 2000, the average death toll, including perpetrators, has been 2.27. So four terrorist assaults in Australia would not, on average, have reached double figures.
All terrorist acts, so no it does not exclude WTC.
I believe yesterday's attack didn't even make the average.
I believe yesterday's attack didn't even make the average.