In this Renderosity thread in the “Off Topic” section a number of basically whining sky-is-falling types found yet one more thing to complain about. It seems the US hasn’t decided to ban the use of land mines and this apparently makes us evil. (mines thread)

The following post contains a “Rant” and a copy of my thread post. The rant is just that, an off the cuff commentary intended to express my mood and has not been over-analyzed by me in it’s details.

The Rant

<RANT>

You know what? Fuck them.

It is probably nice to live in some country with memories of a failed empire in some dim and misty past or some small player with no importance on the world stage and armchair quarterback about how evil the last superpower is.

• Never mind that it’s us that do all your police work.
• Never mind that if one of the many insane dictators on the planet puts his hand on the button it will be us who has to save your sorry asses.
• Never mind that you keep coming to us for money whenever you need a hand out.
• Never mind that many of you come to us for feed, medicine and “aid”.

No, you just enjoy the blissful lack of tough choices that comes from being irrelevant. Keep on botching at us, whining about us and continuing to be trivial. We’ll just hold the fucking planet together.

Just remember you all had to come to us to save your asses twice now.

</RANT>

Re: The U.S. is the only country in NATO that hasn’t banned this weapon by soulhuntre on 3/2/04 04:13

“It may have escaped people’s attention but the military are not generally supposed to put themselves before civilians, nor, for that matter are they supposed to kill civlians if possible.”

The first priority of the military is usually to achieve the strategic and tactical goals set forth in their deployment orders. Second to that is the idea of minimizing friendly civilian casualties, then friendly military casualties… only THEN do enemy civilian and last on the list is enemy military.

The idea that we should toss hundreds of “our” people into the meat grinder to save the lives of those citizens of a country we are at war with is… umm.. crazy. That being said the military usually will go out of their way to minimize enemy civilian casualties for a wide range of reasons.

Not the least of which reason for valuing your own military above enemy civilians is because to do otherwise is to absolutely invite defeat. Take a enemy like Saddam, Stalin, Hitler et al… they would have had no problem using (and did) their own civilians as a shield for their military. To shrink from striking would have been to lose.

“The ‘it’s more cost effective’ idea is obscene..”

Welcome to the real world. To build, deploy, maintain, train and feed a large standing army is already a strain on most countries – to do so without benefit of every force multiplier you can find is irresponsible.

Often the use of force multiplying weapons (land mines, artillery, machine guns, air power and so on) is the difference between being able to succeed or fail. If you cannot afford to keep your army in the field then they cannot win on it.

“‘Hey, it’s ok to nuke civlians, it’s cheaper..’ Now imagine if a country had dropped nukes on a civilian target to save soldiers…oops, sorry, forgot about Japan..”

I have not the slightest qualm at all trading the lives of my enemy to save tens of thousands of lives of those who are defending my own nation. A invasion of Japan would have been long, costly, and have a heaver price in human life. In short, someone was going to lose a lot of people … and if I have to pick between my people and the people of the country I am at war with? They lose without a seconds hesitation.

Hell, overall there is every reason to believe that those two bombs saved Japanese lives when you add it all up. It certainly allowed Japan to continue and thrive in the post war years because we did not have to dismantle their industrial and food production abilities down to the ground to gain a surrender.

“My, my, don’t you have an inflated sense of your country’s significance in the scheme of things.”

Yet you spend so much time and energy whining about us. I wonder why that is? Oh wait – for the same reason people bitch and whine about Microsoft… the guy on top always draws the fire.