Do I think you'll find 1M people in America who support Obama's administration? Um, yes... He was elected by about half the population, after all. I can easily find 1M people who still prefer to have him as President. Heck, right now with our current frontrunners, there's people who'd like to have another 4 or 8 years of Obama rather than Trump or Hillary.
Now with Mosul, we're talking about 1M people. That's far, far more than the number of active ISIS fighters and other staff in the city. Have you never heard of guerilla warfare? If a population revolts, there isn't much a poorly-led and ill-trained military force can do to stop them. The people there are not revolting, so they're either cowards or complicit (and likely both). The people always have the ability to fight back, even if it has to be done as a war of attrition (use makeshift weapons to ambush small numbers of ISIS troops). Even in Nazi Germany and occupied France, there were resistance efforts from the local populations. Ever hear of the Maquis? ISIS doesn't have anywhere remotely near the resources and training that the Wehrmacht had in occupied France.
Commenters are required to post civilly and substantively, or not at all. It's bad enough that you are uncivil to your fellow users, and worse that you start religious flamewars. But blaming a million people for their own prospective drowning because you say they're Isis supporters (a ridiculous claim about a group known to terrorize the populations it rules over), and therefore have it coming to them, is far outside any civil discourse, even about politics. If you do it again you will forfeit the right to post here.
dang, where is he being uncivil or unsubstantive in the parent post? I simply don't see it.
I don't see that he's 'blaming a million people for their own prospective drowning,' but rather blaming a million people for their current government, which is something very different.
I don't particularly agree with either his argument or his style of expression, but I believe that he's very much within the norms of HN, and certainly doesn't deserve to be banned for it.
Thank you. I'll admit I frequently tend to adopt an unconventional viewpoint out of left field and pose that; you can get some really good debates going that way.
Nice that you don't allow different opinions around here. Maybe you should make a FAQ listing which opinions are OK and which aren't.
And "religious flamewars"? All I did was point out the reality of religion.
My post was civil enough, I called his comment stupid because I misunderstood it. Another poster, far more helpful than yourself, pointed out my error to me.
You don't get to be rude because you misunderstand someone—if that were the rule, we might as well not have it.
> Nice that you don't allow different opinions
Half the people who break the rules here resort to that self-flattering defense (the other half simply correct their behavior), and one needn't read much of HN to see how false it is.
> All I did was point out the reality of religion.
That's what every religious flamewarrer says. You can't do it here.
I can't criticize religion here? Religion is sacrosanct and can't be cricitized in any way? I guess you're an ISIS supporter then, because criticizing them means you're criticizing their religion.
FYI, he meant if there were 1M people in a random geographic area with a dam that was going to collapse, would all of those 1M people be Obama supporters? The answer is no, there would be a mix.
Ok, sorry if I misunderstood, I thought he was one of these anti-Obama people trying to claim that Obama was that unpopular.
Anyway, sure, if 1M Americans were threatened by a failing dam, and Obama refused to fix the dam and instead took actions to prevent fixing it or worse, somehow aggravate the situation, then no, I doubt many of those 1M would be supporters of his. However, Obama is also not a religious leader. Throw fundamentalist religion in there and that changes the equation entirely. Just look at all the Americans who resolutely believe that climate change is a "hoax", or worse, that evolution is (and that the earth is 6000 years old), because their religious leaders tell them this. That's likely what's going on in ISIS-land. So we could try my leafleting campaign to educate the populace there as to the reality and direness of their situation, but I kinda doubt they'd believe it. Not only do you have a bunch of religious leaders telling them otherwise, but there's also a human tendency to circle wagons around their own people/leaders (no matter how awful) and fight against any outsiders.
This is a somewhat radical stance. When an armed group seizes the control of a city, the citizens don't always have the ability to fight back.
There are plenty of people who are risking their lives and have lost it in ISIS control territory, telling them they "deserved" it is really rash.
Let's reverse the point of view and let's take 1M of Americans. Do you think I will find 1M Obama supporter?
You have basically the ISIS stance, if you are living in the West, Muslim or not, you are an enemy and thus you deserve to be blown up.