IMMIGRATION thread

[Viking]

You seem to have difficulties understanding the difference between evidence and a hypothesis.

Nothing of that is proven (even today, and the article is from 2011). It is based on a testimony of a (brace yourself) one, single inmate who admitted he didn't see a single man being shot.

Then a mass grave was found, which was supposed to hold the remains of those 1270 people (the bones showed in the picture). DNA testing showed it was animal bones.

The topic was not Abu Salim, but indiscriminate killing by the regime. You can find two people in that article who do not know where one of their relatives ended up - relatives who were imprisoned. Chances are that they were killed during imprisonment. And yes, those are pieces of evidence, until invalidated.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Explain yourself.

[Sarmatian]

The topic was not Abu Salim, but indiscriminate killing by the regime. You can find two people in that article who do not know where one of their relatives ended up - relatives who were imprisoned. Chances are that they were killed during imprisonment. And yes, those are pieces of evidence, until invalidated.

No one said it was Disneyland, but those were not indiscriminate killings.

For future reference,

Indiscriminate killings - killing people without regard who they are, what they do, their age, sex, ethnicity, religion, physical appearance...
Killing political opponents is not indiscriminate.

Something has been proved when a relevant impartial authority makes that decision based on all available evidence. Evidence itself is neutral. So far, only thing that has been proved is that prisoners were fed beef.

Explain yourself.

I can't. That's why I said it makes no sense.

[Viking]

No one said it was Disneyland, but those were not indiscriminate killings.

For future reference,

Indiscriminate killings - killing people without regard who they are, what they do, their age, sex, ethnicity, religion, physical appearance...
Killing political opponents is not indiscriminate.

This makes assumptions about the victims that might not be correct. Ultimately, no action is 100% indiscriminate with regards to its victims (most killers have people they do not want to kill). If the regime casts the net sufficiently wide when trying to catch 'political opponents', their approach can be said to be indiscriminate.

Ultimately, though, the point is that people who have done nothing wrong, and who might not in any way have expected that the regime would imprison them, might end up dead thanks to the security services.

Something has been proved when a relevant impartial authority makes that decision based on all available evidence. Evidence itself is neutral. So far, only thing that has been proved is that prisoners were fed beef.

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

I can't. That's why I said it makes no sense.

What a pity.

[Fragony]

Not something I came up with, it's called diffusion of responsibity, everbody is just as guilty or innocent, you have a better chance of being saved when you are in trouble and only 4 people see it, if 200 people see it you are more likely to be screwed as nobody feels responsble. If everybody kills it isn't your responsebility either. It's a social mechanism that doesn't need defence.

[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.

[CrossLOPER]

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

So, none of what you said actually matters?

[Viking]

No, it is to say that we're dealing with probabilities rather than a proven/not proven dichotomy. In general.

[AE Bravo]

Worse? What's worse: you (presumed innocent) getting mowed down by a bulldozer, or 10 other innocent people instead? Is either of the two cases worse than the other? Worse with respect to what?

With respect to the number of innocent lives, with respect to the stability of the country, with respect to the basic social services destroyed for nothing.

Hard to verify, either way - one of many problems with closed countries.

It would not have been in the regime's best interest to target civilians. Misrata, Zawiya, Zuwara, Ajdabiya - no bloodbaths when retaken and those were the ones that were actually retaken by the government.

Neither did the weapons outsiders provided.

Air support and crippling the regime certainly did.

And what do you base this on? Why shouldn't the Gulf states fund the rebels, anyway?

Because they lack that sovereignty. It is only because of Saudi Arabia and USA's aligned interests in the region that makes the funding of Islamists a common foreign policy initiative.

Blame for what, exactly? If the Libyan militias wanted prosperity for their country, they could move towards it rather swiftly - NATO is not holding them back.

Entrusting these militias to pull the country back together after bombing the hell out of it and kicking the regime that held it together for decades aside is the stupidity here. NATO shouldn't have done anything.

This:

Though as can bee seen in other sources, regime forces had attacked Zawiya much earlier than 7 March; like on 4 March when they even claimed to have retaken it:

Is enough to see through how the coverage of the war as it unfolded is propoganda. Same goes for Syria.

[Sarmatian]

No, it is to say that we're dealing with probabilities rather than a proven/not proven dichotomy. In general.

Funnily enough, your probability evidence was proven completely false. In all probability, you probably have no idea what you're talking about but are probably repeating what you read on the probably first internet site that comes up in google. You should probably devote some more time befory you're caught again with low probablity of probable evidence.

For someone who admits he is dealing in probabilities, your posts are amazingly full of certainties. One would think a little more caution would be used if you were aware of that.

[Viking]

With respect to the number of innocent lives, with respect to the stability of the country, with respect to the basic social services destroyed for nothing.

If you can choose between having 100 people killed and those 100 people + 900 other people (=1000 in total) killed, the first scenario is trivially preferable. If you can choose between 100 people killed and 1000 people different from the first group of 100, it's not trivial any more. That's why I asked the question that you dodged. Chances are great that many Libyans who currently are alive would have been killed by the Gaddafi regime if it had not lost.

Given how many Libyans felt like revolting, one wonders how adequate those social services were.

It would not have been in the regime's best interest to target civilians. Misrata, Zawiya, Zuwara, Ajdabiya - no bloodbaths when retaken and those were the ones that were actually retaken by the government.

Misrata was never completely recaptured by the regime. One might not have expected a bloodbath in any of the recaptured cities, but innocent/peaceful people getting sucked in by a crackdown on regime opponents is highly likely.

And of course, taking up arms against a dictator is, regardless, normally considered heroic and not something to get executed for.

Air support and crippling the regime certainly did.

That's another topic.

Because they lack that sovereignty. It is only because of Saudi Arabia and USA's aligned interests in the region that makes the funding of Islamists a common foreign policy initiative.

Not buying it.

Entrusting these militias to pull the country back together after bombing the hell out of it and kicking the regime that held it together for decades aside is the stupidity here. NATO shouldn't have done anything.

The militias weren't really entrusted with anything. Invading Iraq and Afghanistan didn't turn out all that great, so there was some hope and/or expectation that not using ground forces would yield a better result. Thus far, the results do not look particularly promising; although a more complete understanding of the consequences of the intervention is probably still many decades away.

The chaos Libya has seen thus far might make politicians weary of trying similar interventions in the future, but then they'd have to deal with negative consequences of not intervening, like a steady flow of people applying for political asylum (in the weirdest of ways), so-called human rights abuses, and whatever else is on the dictator's CV.

This:

Is enough to see through how the coverage of the war as it unfolded is propoganda. Same goes for Syria.

Huh?

Funnily enough, your probability evidence was proven completely false.

No, the animal bones were not the evidence (it was mentioned in the article that bones there didn't look human); but long-standing claims of a massacre at Abu Salim (claims backed up by several individuals who were in the prison at the time). I initially considered linking to Wikipedia, but thought it better to use an actual news source.

Even if you presume that no massacre did occur at Abu Salim, you have the people searching for relatives that went missing during the Gaddafi regime - two of them interviewed in that very article. This contradicts the "no evidence" line, which was all I indented to.