Targeting

(fm the BC thread "The Third Nuclear Age")

sol vason,
Iran already has the smuggling routes

Hezbollah is all over Northern Mexico and America's Southern border is an open sore.

Rosinante,
the obvious target is Moscow

Maybe but the Russians have created this monster. If the target was Tel Aviv then the Israelis should listen to Alexis and then target Moscow. In fact the logical thing for them to have done already would be to bury a nuke deep in the sewers beneath the Kremlin. If I was Netanyahu I would want one hidden in each city on this list.

Some people think that we are helpless to prevent an attack by a non-state actor because there is no one to retaliate against. That is not true for two reasons;
1. the state involved is a matter of definition,
2. non-state actors cannot marshal resources without the aid of a state.

The Ummah considers itself a state. They just question the legitimacy of everyone else. A decision not to attack members of the Ummah because they are labeled as citizens of some state is a projection of our values and identities onto them. To do so is a profoundly imperialist construct. We should treat the members of the Ummah with more respect and take their construct of the division of the world into the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Harb seriously. The Ummah can be targeted.

Nuclear weapons are not manufactured in a garage by a mad scientist from Central Casting and his hunchback sidekick. The components are not safely stored in High School lockers. The funds needed are not gathered, stored and transferred by men with cleft sticks. The weapons are not transported across oceans and continents by students with book-bags. All of these tasks use a legal and commercial infrastructure that demands a system of state power to support it. Governments and the communities that they embed in can be targeted.

This is the strongest argument against the libertarian ideal that I have encountered. In the real world it turns out that it is impossible to do complicated tasks without the support of a government. Governments may be of greater or lesser effectiveness and they may be penetrated and subverted to serve private interests but even bad guys depend on some functions of government.

For the record I prefer the less apocalyptic vision of Armageddon Rex to the potential extermination of the Ummah. Costly reeducation plans would have to be included.

-------
Marie Claude @37,
If you were not looking to stick a knife in people by promoting the idea of (presumably Jewish) racist views to the compilation of a wiki list of all things, especially ridiculous given that NYC, LA and London are on that list, you would have noticed that Paris proper at only 2.2 million does not make the cut. Sorry but you are just not that important. Yes, I know that Paris Metro is over 11 million in population. However I grant that if I was making up a real list for Netanyahu I would be sure to include Paris, Lyon and Marseilles. Targeting the inner cities with the Enarchs is easy, the hard part would be targeting the Ummah in suburbs.

We are dealing with very serious and difficult issues here. It is not my wish to be gratuitously offensive or threatening to anyone. When you see an opportunity to twist something, under the cover of a joke, into a charge of racism you bring to mind echoes of racist charges of divided loyalties. Remember Dreyfus? So the joke was not funny. My formulation can be attacked on many grounds, as immoral or impractical or even with a straight statement that Israel cannot attack the countries on that or any likely list because of what it would do to the Jewish people but not by saying that the almost random list I pulled off the wiki is missing one place because that place has Jews. Some idiot someplace is going to pull your comment up on the Internet and go "Aha, more proof of the International Global Jewish Banking Conspiracy."

As is my custom I decline to enter into an extended colloquy with you on such a topic.

Perhaps we can now hear of the criticality of Paris, Texas.