IMMIGRATION thread

[Montmorency]

Things don't ever get proved; all one ever have is evidence that point in certain directions.

To point anywhere at all, evidence must have some prior grounding.

[Viking]

To point anywhere at all, evidence must have some prior grounding.

There's no dichotomy here, but a scale on which evidence range from poor/weak to good/strong. I don't possess any good evidence (not that I have searched thoroughly), but I dispute that there is no evidence at all.

[Montmorency]

No, it's even worse - I was making an abstruse philosophical point out of radical scepticism.

Carry on.

[Papewaio]

No, it's even worse - I was making an abstruse philosophical point out of radical scepticism.

Carry on.

That is a posh way to sum up the schlong measuring contests of the Backroom...

[Viking]

What do you have to go by? There is little to no reason to believe that more people would have died. Why are the chances GREAT??? I dodged because this is not an argument, I have no interest in these philosophical responses. Give me numbers and the details of the conflicts, the state of Libyans during and post-intervention that show me you actually care about Libya and not your responsibility to protect fantasy.

Adequate or not, this is not enough to justify a humanitarian intervention like the one NATO conducted. If you are not entirely committed and are driven by the sole motive of removing a renegade head of state, you are not presenting a model humanitarian intervention or a good precedent for anything. It set a bad precedent and reveals how they are not to be trusted, because they evidently don’t place a country and its population's interest in high regard.

I do not call it a 'humanitarian intervention'. When I said that the chances were great, I was referring to another point.

Namely the point that whether or not there is an intervention has an effect on who dies and what for. Without an intervention, civilians opposing the regime would have a greater chance of dying (and those associating with them in whatever way) than other civilians. With the intervention, the civilians most likely to die are supporters of a brutal dictatorship (plus local factors).

In sum: different people die with and without an intervention. So when you oppose the intervention, you OK that these people who would otherwise not have been killed end up dead.

And how many did die? Good luck finding out.

The operation itself was hardly promising. It was a bloodbath and brought suffering on a wider scale than Qaddafi’s crackdown. It’s easy to see “promising” from your tv set or the quick google search hoping for a new democratic country to emerge.

If the fighting made a "bloodbath" after the intervention had started, it would be just as much because Gaddafi refused to give up. And why would he - I am sure his conscience was very far from clean. Good things weren't waiting for him.

It’s easy to see “promising” from your tv set or the quick google search hoping for a new democratic country to emerge.

Fiction.

But I got to ask how many Libyans you've asked about whether or not the intervention was a bad thing, and for those who say it was a bad thing: if that's the opinion they've held all the time or if it is based on hindsight.

You have repeatedly been morally indignant on behalf of Libya(ns), so I wonder how many Libyans you've actually heard the opinion of. Not nearly enough to be able to reasonably claim to speak on the behalf of a majority of Libyans, I suspect.

[AE Bravo]

Thus, in total, the Libyan government’s high-end estimate of the conflict’s death toll, as of January 2013, is 11,500.
These two estimates of 8,000 and 11,500—by the U.S. and Libyan governments, respectively—conceivably bound the actual number killed in the conflict. If so, and if the counterfactual analysis above is correct, then NATO intervention magnified the death toll in Libya by about seven to ten times. This would be consistent both with city-level data provided by the rebels, indicating that the intervention multiplied the number of deaths in Tripoli and Misurata, and with NATO’s broadening of the geographic scope of fighting within the country. It also would confirm the speculation of knowledgeable observers, such as Seumas Milne, who opined at the war’s end that “while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000–2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure.”59

If the fighting made a "bloodbath" after the intervention had started, it would be just as much because Gaddafi refused to give up. And why would he - I am sure his conscience was very far from clean. Good things weren't waiting for him.

No, no not just as much.

But I got to ask how many Libyans you've asked about whether or not the intervention was a bad thing, and for those who say it was a bad thing: if that's the opinion they've held all the time or if it is based on hindsight.

Hindsight.

[Fragony]

lol, way to make yourselve popular. A petition to ban the unislamic oktoberfest in Munich. Germans just got to love that. Votes are really marginal, a few hundreds, but these few hundred really should go somewhere else. I wonder how marginal these votes really are, as only naturalised refugees can vote, there are thousands more in Munich. Demands already they just arrived.

[Viking]

No, no not just as much.

There is a fundamental disagreement here on how to do the moral calculus (or, rather, on whether there exists more than one "valid" way to do it).