>>to get around the problem of “Because we live here”<<

Heh. Nice one.

The real villain of the film is the fat retarded looking bald guy at the end. You could tell by his facial expression and tone of voice that he really did not like Chris Kyle.

In reality, Arabs are the prototypical “spray and pray” shooters. All the Arab countries combined won only four of the 774 shooting medals awarded at the last Olympics.

Clarification: Arabs *today* are spray-and-pray” shooters because, I suspect, Arab fighters mostly come from cities now. Many desert Bedouins have a fine tradition of long-distance shooting and can be good hunters. The same goes for Afghans. Today they are mostly undisciplined spray-and-pray shooters but Kipling famously wrote of British officers falling to the Jezail of the Pathan tribesmen of yore in his poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier.”

In any case, in sniping, marksmanship ability is necessary but also secondary. Fieldcraft is far more important. While history celebrates longest distance kills prominently (the American record goes to the Marine Carlos Hathcock at around 2,500 yards in Vietnam, a world record until broken by Canadian snipers in 2002), many, perhaps the majority of, sniping battles took place in surprisingly short distances, because successful snipers have been chameleon-like masters of their environments.

By the way, mark me as a person who liked “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and found the success of “The Guardians of Galaxy” puzzling (I thought it was quite inferior to “Galaxy Quest” as far as the sci-fi comedy genre films go).

You talkingg about the wounded warrior guy at end of film? I kind of thought so too at first but didn’t he have a nice moment with him shooting at targets? Either that or you’re joking.

One odd scene to me was after a big shot by Kyle his marine “guard” with him on the roof never looked over or even acknowledged the shot. Almost like he was ignoring him. Weird. Maybe there was a reason for it but didn’t make sense to me.

I knew the Syrian sniper bit was made up but was a nice touch.
Bradley Cooper was phenomenal.

The real Chris Kyle: goyishe kopf meat puppet

The poor tormented soul , F**k him.

This antagonist is made a visiting Al-Qaeda jihadist from Syria rather than a native Iraqi, to get around the problem of “Because we live here” (to quote John Milius’s Red Dawn).

A lot of the jihadis killed in Sunni Triangle engagements with Marines were foreign born. But even if the antagonist in the movie were Iraqi, it seems to support the embarrassingly bogus idea that Al Qaeda was in Iraq and that’s the reason we went in there. Anyone with half a brain knows the Iraq war was undertaken for the security of Israel. One part of the movie I didn’t like, or I didn’t like about Kyle, was his criticism of a fellow Navy Seal who was killed. This Seal had questioned the reason why they were in Iraq and after his funeral Kyle suggested this is the reason he was killed.

I doubt very much that the thought process depicted in that trailer actually went on very much during combat situations. Of course, they only present the issue as concern over women and children. Never mind the lives of the sniper’s fellow soldiers. I’ll bet that’s what he was usually thinking about, however. The most true part of that scene is when the spotter says, “they’ll fry you if…”

All the Arab countries combined won only four of the 774 shooting medals awarded at the last Olympics.

I love iSteve for moments like this one!

Reviewers are already noticing the similarity of American Sniper to the nazi propaganda film in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The Nazi sniper was depicted as only shooting soldiers unlike the civilians in Eastwood’s propaganda flick.

American Sniper makes Tarantino’s over-the-top movie our sad reality

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/american-sniper-makes-tarantinos-over-the-top-movie-our-sad-reality/

+1. Of all sniping shots I’ve seen, none were at anything that might be considered extreme range. Many were taken with the standard M4, because the shooter didn’t want to unpack the big gun for a short shot. The single most necessary feature of the successful sniper is boredom management.

Much flak to fly through on our voyage to HOLLYWEIRD. Recently watched a Lance “THE BOIL” Armstrong documentary which Chrono’ed back and forth, was it lying or crafted narrative? an interesting blog on A. Sniper,, TRUTH,JUSTICE and THE CURIOUS CASE OF CHRIS KYLE by Michael Mc Caffery- does a sniper see mirages through her scope Lyudmila Pavelchencko.

“But the Academy gave six Oscar nominations to the movie last week even before its huge weekend (which means that for once many people will have a rooting interest in the Academy Awards broadcast). Why?”

Because Jews like Christians killing Muslims.

I’ve posted this before but will again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4

That’s a hero!

Speaking of spray-and-pray shooters, one of the greatest puzzles of that galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, was why the Storm Troopers are such lousy shots. A whole flock of them blazing away at our heroes can’t hit a thing. It seemed a curious lapse for what are supposedly trained fighters.

Until the teaser trailer for the new Star Wars came out, and we learned that Storm Troopers are black. That explains everything.

“The auteur theory of directing holds that filmmaking is one man’s titanic struggle to create Art. Not surprisingly, the idea was made up by young critics who really wanted to direct, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.”

I think it was Rohmer more than Godard who was into the auteur thing. And Chabrol shared the passion for Hitchcock.

Godard rejected everything about early critic days by late 60s.

“The Eastwood theory of directing, by contrast, is that you find a decent script, hire movie stars who are also good actors, don’t waste too much time or money on how the movie will look, point the camera in the right direction, don’t make your cast do too many takes, and maybe you’ll get lucky.”

But Eastwood’s first big champions were French critics and the Francophile Dave Kehr(who praised just about everything he directed).

Many French critics were with Eastwood since HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER.

Paradoxically, the appeal of the auteur theory was to seek out, recognize, and praise the less obvious master-directors.
After all, one didn’t need the auteur theory to know that Bergman, Fellini, and Kubrick were auteurs. It was so obvious by every frame of their films.

It was more of a challenge to argue that a seemingly conventional director was really a master with a unique signature, albeit one that wasn’t showy.
So, Ford and Hawks were praised as auteurs when their films, if watched passively, might look like any other Hollywood films of the period.

French like to take pride in noticing and appreciating what others do not. And the appeal of auteur theory was in recognizing an auteur when most people did not. This sometimes led to scraping the bottom of the barrel as more and more old Hollywood directors were ‘rediscovered’ and claimed by critics as ‘auteurs’.

Eastwood thanked the French critics in his first Oscar acceptance speech.

http://youtu.be/GbtHohnjDdM?t=2m29s

PS. J Edgar has problems but it’s one of his most interesting. Changeling too.

PSS. This movie sounds more like Gun Golf than Gun Porn.

A hole in the head in one.

,

Marine Corps snipers love their rifles. There’s not a S/S alive who would take a shot with the M4 in combat so as to not “unpack the big gun for a short shot”. Perhaps the spotter might carry an AR, but then again he’s “spotting” and not typically a shooter.

What conflict were you involved in where you saw “sniping shots”, what branch and what unit?

I’m calling bullshit.

“In any case, in sniping, marksmanship ability is necessary but also secondary. Fieldcraft is far more important. While history celebrates longest distance kills prominently (the American record goes to the Marine Carlos Hathcock at around 2,500 yards in Vietnam, a world record until broken by Canadian snipers in 2002), many, perhaps the majority of, sniping battles took place in surprisingly short distances, because successful snipers have been chameleon-like masters of their environments.”

Right. It is kind of like pool. At first, you think, ah, I have to be a good shot, do all this fancy stuff. Then you figure, oh, the real trick is learning how to give yourself good leaves.

Snipers in the USMC spend at least as much (actually, tons more) time on concealment/infiltration than actually directly on marksmanship skills. That isn’t to say that ample time isn’t spent on marksmanship, but most USMC snipers, at least until recently and probably still the case, are typically in something called a STA platoon, which stands for Surveillance and Target Acquisition, i.e, battalion level scouts. Again, I don’t know how it works now, but traditionally, this was an S2 function, battalion intelligence, and typically the battalion intelligence officer was the platoon officer for STA platoon. In years past, these guys were referred to as S2 scouts or S2 scout/snipers (but frequently just scouts, the understanding that sniping was an opportunistic thing they might do, but the surveillance/scouting was actually a lot more important).

In recent years, they’ve emphasized the sniper side of this because it has gotten pretty sexy with the public, but it really wasn’t that big a deal for a long time, almost a collateral duty of s2 scouts.

I saw the movie last Friday in an upper middle class Chicago western suburb. The 2pm show was packed, so something got butts in the seats before the hoopla (like Steve said, the trailer was excellent, so that could be behind the crowds). The theater was quiet throughout the movie, and the final file footage scene of Kyle’s funeral had everyone still in their seats. No one got up until the screen went black, yet there were no tears and little emotion out in the lobby as far as I could tell

I wasn’t especially impressed with the movie, however. Black Hawk Down was far superior, and for me it is the standard bearer for modern military films. I thought Cooper carried the movie fairly well, but he didn’t knock my socks off with his acting. Sienna Miller did absolutely nothing for me as his wife. All the drummed up controversy around the film seems silly to me. But to be honest, the controversy is more riveting than the movie itself IMO.

I left the theater feeling entertained, but certainly not overwhelmed. It wasn’t a life changing film by any means. Before I saw the box office numbers I told my 18 yr old son the movie was 2 1/2 to 3 stars out of four. Younger people will probably like it more than older folks, who’ve seen the likes of BHD or Saving Private Ryan, et al. People will still go in droves to see the film, as much out of curiosity as anything artistic, because of the ginned up controversy. Left wingers will still bitch about Eastwood’s artistic license, which I’m sure Clint doesn’t give a shit about given controversy sells tickets. But as far as movie controversy goes, this is pretty much much ado about nothing.

I have not seen the movie yet. That wouldn’t be Michael Moore would it?

It’s too bad he didn’t get to perform his craft in Afghanistan, you know, where the guys behind 9-11 were.

Is it ‘war on terror’ or ‘war with terror’?

US, Saudis, and Syria supported terrorist groups in the dismantling of Libya and Syria.

Israel used terrorism against Iranian scientists.

So, it’s a matter of ‘boo, boom’.

This movie doesn’t sit well with me. Chris Kyle was not a very admirable figure. I get the strong impression that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if the government said I was an extremist.

This is a man who bragged about shooting 30 looters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He was making shit up, but it stills speaks to his frame of mind about killing Americans. His comments on the Iraqi people are also distasteful, given what we now know about that war.

A guy like Pat Tillman seems like a more worthy hero, since he was an actual thinking person who was capable of introspection and recognizing when he had been tricked, rather than just a robot who kills whoever he is told to kill.

We would be better off without “sheepdogs” like Kyle.

“While history celebrates longest distance kills prominently (the American record goes to the Marine Carlos Hathcock at around 2,500 yards in Vietnam, a world record until broken by Canadian snipers in 2002), many, perhaps the majority of, sniping battles took place in surprisingly short distances, because successful snipers have been chameleon-like masters of their environments.”

A little more on this. As you noted, the long shots get all the glory, and sniper training incorporates/emphasizes this.

But what really defines a sniper is not so much as how far he shoots from, but how few shots he takes. Ideally, it is one shot, one kill, from one position, then the sniper moves on.

While there is all sorts of technology now to locate where a shot came from (so I hear), traditionally, it was difficult/impossible to tell the direction from where a single shot originated using human hearing.

This is because, again, to locate the direction of a sound, people imperceptibly move/turn their heads slightly and the the brain processes the differential in sound between the two receptors (ears) in the two positions. A short crack of a rifle, especially if unexpected, doesn’t have enough duration for this phenomena to happen.

Maybe it is BS, but that is what I’ve been told and it makes sense. There are zillions of cases of a single shot ringing out and people pointing in all directions where they thought it came from.

When you start getting out to those extreme distances, the slightest variation in ammunition, weapon cleanliness/condition, not to mention more obvious things like windage, range estimation, and shooter steadiness, make those essentially luck shots. Yeah, you have to be good to get in the running to make such a shot, but it still is luck. Try doing a 2k yard shot 2 or 3 times in a row, one finds the repeatability of such a thing is very, very low.

Not to denigrate those shots, it is what a marksman lives for, but a lot of things beyond his direct control come into play. And the more you shoot, the more you have an opportunity to make such a shot.

http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-intelligentsia-reacts-to-american.html

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/interstellars.html

For a Few Medals More.

Btw, how does this compare with HURT LOCKER?

PS. Guns are often negative in Kurosawa movies.

Gun is at center of crisis in Stray Dog.

4 samurai die by snipers in Seven Samurai.

Villain has gun in Yojimbo.

Dersu is killed for his rifle.

Lord is hit by sniper in Kagemusha.

Son is shot by sniper in Ran.

———

Best movie about sniper?

Enemy at the Gates was underwhelming.

Greatest sniper scene

It’s worse than that. In the film, on Kyle’s first tour in March 2003, his commander says that they are fighting AQI (“Al Qaeda in Iraq”). There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, outside of neoconservative lies. The film is nothing more than imperial propaganda. Adam Johnson explains.

Marcotte, in the Raw story piece, suggests Tarantino (of all people) sue Eastwood for plagiarism! Perhaps the makers of Enemy at the Gates(2001) could sue both, or how about Spielberg getting in on the action since he had an American sniper shooting German snipers through their own scopes in Saving Private Ryan(1998).

I have no doubt that Chris Kyle was a good man and a brave soldier, but he fell prey to some of the more extreme rhetoric of the gun rights movement, namely that guns can accomplish almost anything – like curing mental illness. Gun folks often seek simple assessments and solutions to complicated problems. This is why they sometimes forget that there are nine other amendments in the bill of rights. I’m a gun rights guy, and understand the 2nd Amendment, but I don’t ever get into the orbit of a mindset.

Welcome to the USSR, comrade. General Secretary Moore and Commissar Rogan welcome you!

Orwell updated for the 21st century American Empire:

“We sleep soundly in our beds because sociopathic, pathological liars who enjoy killing for fun stand ready to murder foreigners who have done us no harm, for no good reason whatsoever, in their own countries.”

Everyone always quotes Orwell’s writings on World War II. Somehow, I think his earlier writings on the British Empire are more relevant for this country today.

We get it bro, the left HATES this movie.

I think you’ll find most of us here would have rather had the US borders closed than go to Iraq, but I still loved this movie. Just because a war was not a good idea, that doesn’t mean there were no heroes.

Anyone with half a brain knows the Iraq war was undertaken for the security of Israel.

Then you must believe that Iraq had nukes. Because that’s the only way it could’ve been a threat to the security of Israel.

FoxNews has been heavily promoting “American Sniper” with the usual jingoistic angle. That probably helped the ticket sales last weekend.

National Review has a good article supporting Jesse Ventura in that lawsuit http://www.nationalreview.com/article/384176/justice-jesse-ventura-was-right-his-lawsuit-j-delgado/page/0/2

“Grand Budapest Hotel” is a very pleasant movie. It does seem like an odd “Best Picture” choice as it didn’t seem to be trying to mean anything at all.

In the late seventies there was a series called SuperStar Profiles some french woman did it One was CE. Clint is an American Chicken. He fell over himself to be swim coach (“did a sell job”) when he heard his unit was going to Korea. He was known for his daringly skimpy trunks. Don’t know what the medal is for that.

That was from memory, but it’s on YouTube.

Looked through quickly but can’t find where he talks about chickening out. Still, lotta golf at 15 minutes

A distant relative of mine went to Korea and when he came back guys were staring at him because he was a sergeant at 19-they made him sergeant because he was the best of what was left: everyone else was dead.

Your takimag piece says that Arabs won 4 of 774 shooting medals at the last Olympics, but I think 774 is the TOTAL number of medals awarded at those games. Following the link wikipedia in your article, it appears there were a total of 15 shooting events at the 2012 Olympics, so something like 45 total shooting medals.

It appears that Kuwait won 2 shooting medals and Qatar won 1 shooting medal and 1 high jump medal…

Just FYI…

Spielberg was an Eagle Scout which probably has more to do with his gun habits than Hollywood.

The people we faced in Iraq were truly horrible at shooting in general. A basically qualified Marine with a standard issued M16A2 without scope was far more of a sniper then their “snipers”. But they did have some capable snipers that did serious damage. See the “Fallujah Sniper” for example.

After seeing how much damage smart insurgents could do (for example sniping, helo ambushes, drawing US soldiers into buildings and then bringing them down) there’s no doubt in my mind that if our roles had been reversed–Americans had their weapons and they had our gear/technology–that we would have inflicted 10 times the casualties on them than they did on us.

“You talkingg about the wounded warrior guy at end of film? I kind of thought so too at first but didn’t he have a nice moment with him shooting at targets? Either that or you’re joking.”

He had a nice moment with the skinny wounded warrior guy. The obese guy was being an asshole to Chris Kyle when practicing shooting.

“any desert Bedouins have a fine tradition of long-distance shooting and can be good hunters”

Sheikh Ahmed bin Mohammed bin Hasher Al Maktoum of Dubai won gold in Athens in 2004, then coached (free of charge) the British winner in the same discipline (double traps shotgun) in 2012.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/shooting/9448296/London-2012-Olympics-Shotgun-Sheikh-shares-secrets-of-success-with-double-trap-shooting-champion-Peter-Wilson.html

“The real Chris Kyle: goyishe kopf meat puppet”

Spoken like a true beta male. You are not 1/32 the man that Chris Kyle was. I bet you would literally crap your pants if the U.S government brought back the mandatory draft and forced you to go to Syria or Afghanistan. You would probably act like a little bitch and escape to Canada or Europe in order to avoid going to war.

So Chinese dudes make good snipers?

[All the Arab countries combined won only four of the 774 shooting medals awarded at the last Olympics.]

You mean the 774 shooting medals awarded at all the Olympics together. At the London Olympics, they won as many men’s shooting medals – two – as the US.
There’s a passage in “Arabia Deserta” where Doughty describes an Arab who had seen moons of Jupiter, without ever having heard about them. He could shoot pretty well.

I assumed that the tension in the trailer was bullshit when I first saw it–those guys don’t not know what to do when a kid plays the part of a soldier– and of course it turns out that the real guy is pretty bloodthirsty. He said something like they all deserved it and that he hates all of them because they’re all barbarians or whatever. I haven’t seen the film so maybe they capture that aspect of him but it sounds like Cooper plays the guy you have to like from start to finish. If that discrepancy gets more play than 12 years a slave’s unremarked upon spin, well, all the better, since having that argument might actually affect someone. Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism (2005) has some really insightful things to say about the seemingly obvious subject of Hollywood’s War Movies. Whatever’s its intended message, I suspect American Sniper is the most Hollywood can do to make more dumb wars more likely. Oh well, its probably a hell of a ride and I’ll see it this weekend.

…according to NBC the total for all events in the 2012 Olympics was 962 — 302 Gold, 304 Silver, and 356 Bronze…

warners didn’t want to give speilberg a big budget to make that movie?

are they insane?

I notice Steve didn’t mention the sniper movie “Enemy at the Gates” in his review. That would have set off the Jooo klaxon over at Taki though. The opening wolf shoot and final sniper vs. sniper battle are very well done though. Like the way any football fan from LA watches a game, I don’t care who wins as long as its a good game until the end.

Ten years later and ten trillion more in debt…

Maybe if we replay the greatest hits of the war on terror we’ll put more bums in seats instead of on benches. In the depression 30’s they figured out fast that writing about crime paid better than crime. Maybe writing about war will do the same. It cost $1 million a year per deployed sniper. You could pay them $500K a year to sit home and shoot targets and be $500K ahead. All the war did was create more terror. It didn’t create more wealth unless you were selling rifles and ammo. The cheap gasoline finally has arrived.

The single most necessary feature of the successful sniper is boredom management.

“Boredom management” is very important (it takes a lot of mental discipline to stay half submerged in a swamp for, say, 12 hours without moving). But it’s not “the single most necessary feature.”

It’s fieldcraft: understanding minute details of one’s environment, merging/blending with it and being able to move near silently in and out of it.

But you are right that patience plays an important role in it. Every single snipers I’ve known has been extraordinarily calm and patient, and exceptionally perceptive about their environments. They are seemingly aware of every blade of grass and every gust of wind around them. Frankly, putting bullets on an X is the easy part.

“warners didn’t want to give speilberg a big budget to make that movie?
are they insane?”

Isn’t Spielberg in a position to finance his own movies?

War is a racket. You might actually be safer deployed than not. The operating bases have more security than the newspaper offices, schools and malls. US created battlefield France. After WW2 France was fairly secure. We sent James Taylor! Sorry for wrecking the economy and creating such a dangerous world. America

Most people now think that “character assassination” is bad because murdering someones character is disproportionate to whatever the target did. But the definition hasn’t changed–our conception of a sniper’s intrinsic honor has. Character assassination is bad because its unfair to ruin someone’s reputation without assuming any risk to your own. So I was glad someone made the obvious point that has entirely dropped out of public conception, but I regret it was that radioactive clown Michael Moore who made it.

“My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders r worse”

And Steve, he followed it up with that noble “Because we live here” sentiment:

“But if you’re on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who’ve come 7K miles, you are not a sniper, u are brave, u are a neighbor.”

Dicounting Captain Phillips-type scenarios, Snipers qua snipers on the battlefield are intuitively less honorable than foot soldiers, and all else being equal, snipers are dishonorable relative to the targets they snipe. Even if they occasionally take special risks, their modus operandi is to be when and where the men they kill can’t kill them. No one has any conception of that obvious judgment anymore, and I bet 99 % of the guys my age never considered it before Michael Moore tweeted it. That’s natural. Being a sniper seems really cool in a lot of ways, and snipers make great movie characters, and the talent understandably earns them a mystique.

But the judgement still stands, and if we’re going to think about war as much as we do in this country, it can’t help but be morally healthy to remind people that.

Just because a war was not a good idea, that doesn’t mean there were no heroes.

You’re right. The Iraqis who defended their country from aggression were heroes. I’m glad somebody finally said it.

“warners didn’t want to give speilberg a big budget to make that movie?

are they insane?”

I’m sure the movie was much better with Eastwood at the helm.

Has Spielberg even made anything memorable in the last twenty years? His reputation seems to be based almost entirely on things he did during the Carter-Reagan years. I keep forgetting he’s even considered to be officially still around.

http://clinteastwoodproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/high-plains-drifter.html

Wayne didn’t like HIGH PLAINS. Too nihilistic.
He declined the role of Dirty Harry too.

Interesting that Eastwood over the years came to genuflect on violence.
Did he become a moralist like Wayne?

Not quite. Wayne wanted movies to emphasize the good side of the West.
Eastwood sought to unearth the darker side but in greater reflection than celebration of violence.

Wayne wanted violence to be limited by faith in morality. Eastwood wanted violence to be dampened by moral doubt. UNFORGIVEN is violent but not in the fun way of HIGH PLAINS or MAGNUM FORCE.

PS. I read somewhere long ago that some French critic said the midget in HIGH PLAINS was meabt as an homage to Wayne. He sort of looks it.
Eastwood took umbrage at that.

http://youtu.be/VcV-ZLbd-pk?t=1m52s

https://books.google.com/books?id=71UHMC4f9wIC&pg=PR10&lpg=PR10&dq=eastwood+interview+kehr&source=bl&ots=hbwuuLXdbl&sig=YVgwx7kjOd4_xBWZRSjyxq4T7dI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2hjAVN3FM8WrggS3u4DICw&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=eastwood%20interview%20kehr&f=false

http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/writing-the-book-on-clint-eastwood

http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/clint-eastwood-pulls-no-punches

http://www.listal.com/list/cahiers-du-cinema-90s

Cahiers chose BRIDGES as one of best films of the 90s.

I still havent seen it and don’t want to. Sounds so Oprahish.

http://1linereview.blogspot.com/2010/01/cahiers-du-cinemas-films-of-decade.html

“War is a racket. You might actually be safer deployed than not. The operating bases have more security than the newspaper offices, schools and malls. US created battlefield France. After WW2 France was fairly secure. We sent James Taylor! Sorry for wrecking the economy and creating such a dangerous world. America”

Yeah tell that to all of the dead victims at Fort Hood. Anyways don’t blame America for the terrorist attacks in Paris, blame the French’s retarded ass immigration system.

France had a shitty ass immigration that let in millions of Muslims even before 9/11 and the war on terror started.

Ridiculous. The Sniper is the most effective and most important special forces unit on the battlefield. He is no more cowardly than the pilot flying an A10 Warthog.

Everyone loves their sniper.

The most over-rated are the SEALs and other units. Their training amounts to nothing more than a hazing ritual and their effectiveness is due largely to the fact that Muslims hate dogs and, thus, do not use them in combat zones.

If you watch Zero Dark Thirty and Acts of Valor, you will notice that most special forces units are most effective either against isolated, poorly defended targets or, if they stick to their original mission, acting as scout units painting targets and gathering intelligence. Had the targets used dogs and kids with radios, SEALs would’ve been rendered ineffective. The dogs would’ve sniffed them out. The kids would radio for reinforcements and 300 guys with rpgs and ak47’s would enter the area. The SEALs would need rescuing at that point.

Americans were given a false choice over the Iraq war. It was either go to war or engage in left-wing self-loathing and navel gazing. Remember the “root cause” nonsense we kept hearing from the home-frown Fifth Column?

Nobody was suggesting modifying immigration policy.

What people forget about Jesse Ventura is he is the one largely responsible for the Iraq War.

When Paul Wellstone died, Minnesota wanted Ventura to appoint a Democrat Senator. instead, he appointed a Republican. That Republican was the deciding vote in favor of the Iraq War in the Senate.

Yes, that one Vote is what started this mess.

“Isn’t Spielberg in a position to finance his own movies?”

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, “THE PRODUCERS”)

NATHAN LANE: (As Max) Bloom, the two cardinal rules of being a Broadway producer are: One, never put your own money in the show.

MATTHEW BRODERICK: (As Leo) And two?

LANE: (As Max) Never put your own money in the show! Get it?

BRODERICK: (As Leo) Got it.

LANE: (As Max) Good.

…

BROOKS: And it’s true, I believe it. I’ve never put my own money in the show

Dicounting Captain Phillips-type scenarios, Snipers qua snipers on the battlefield are intuitively less honorable than foot soldiers, and all else being equal, snipers are dishonorable relative to the targets they snipe. Even if they occasionally take special risks, their modus operandi is to be when and where the men they kill can’t kill them. No one has any conception of that obvious judgment anymore, and I bet 99 % of the guys my age never considered it before Michael Moore tweeted it. That’s natural. Being a sniper seems really cool in a lot of ways, and snipers make great movie characters, and the talent understandably earns them a mystique.

Kyle and other snipers are used mainly in force protection by eliminating actual imminent threats to U.S. military personnel. By your logic Apache pilots picking off Taliban amassed in a mountain passage or fixed-wing aircraft taking out even larger groups of enemy is even less honorable than sniping. I think your problem is with modern warfare.

Check out this video of an Apache pilot systematically liquidating Taliban fighters through FLIR camera.

Note to self, should I ever find myself a member of the Taliban and while out on a midnight maneuvers we come under fire from above, hit the deck and play dead. Do not get up and try to run.

So Chinese dudes make good snipers?

Shooting in general requires good visuo-spatial IQ and superb mental discipline. So, yes, Northeast Asians make good raw material for shooters.

In the 2012 Summer Olympics, the top country for shooting was South Korea (1), followed by the US (2). China was fourth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics#Medal_summary.

And this, despite the fact that neither South Korea nor China has had any tradition of widespread firearms ownership. And South Korea has a population of only 50 million.

On the other hand, South Korea has had a long tradition of marksmanship with bows, and has completely dominated the Olympic sport of archery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archery_at_the_Summer_Olympics#Medal_tables.

Even the Chinese themselves called their northeastern neighbors (Mongols, Manchus, and Koreans and their ancient ancestors/cousins the Xianbei) “Dongyi” (“Eastern Bowmen”) from time immemorial.

This is a dated footage of Korean National Police SWAT doing small arms drills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vGxeMrau3w.

You can tell these guys are very smooth and have excellent muzzle control.

You’re right. The Iraqis who defended their country from aggression were heroes. I’m glad somebody finally said it.

I hope you get to spend a lot of time with your heroes real soon.

all else being equal, snipers are dishonorable relative to the targets they snipe.

You know nothing about sniping and know even less about honor.

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards.

We were taught their snipers were cowards, not snipers as a class. One of the reasons the Americans defeated the British in the Revolution was that the former employed snipers quite liberally while the latter wanted to put their soldiers in a line opposite our soldiers in a line and let the two lines shoot at one another. I suppose the British might have considered the Americans “cowards”, but it’s a concept without much meaning in war – where the object is to win, not to engage in a contest of bravery.

BTW, I hope everyone here knows that Chris Kyle is a very controversial figure.

Traditionally, the archetypical sniper is someone like the revered Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Hathcock

That is to say, low key. Snipers, by nature, aren’t and can’t be peacocks. Because peacocks make easy targets. Hathcock was also on record as stating that he enjoyed the “hunt,” but did not enjoy killing. He killed because it was his duty.

Kyle was different. He was rambunctious and full of tall tales, a publicity seeker. He was also seemingly in love with killing. He probably wasn’t all right in the head. But he was undeniably good with his rifle.

Reviewers are already noticing the similarity of American Sniper to the nazi propaganda film in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.

No nasty “propaganda” in “Inglorious Basterds”, no-sir-ee!

Seriously, how has a bad joke like Tarantino conned so many people into thinking he’s a genius? He’s the Barack Obama of movie directors – if you make a movie bad enough, people will twist themselves inside out trying to find value in it.

“Has Spielberg even made anything memorable in the last twenty years? His reputation seems to be based almost entirely on things he did during the Carter-Reagan years. I keep forgetting he’s even considered to be officially still around.”

You damn fool, aincha heard of A.I., his best film and one of the greatest ever made?

JURASSIC PARK was 20 yrs ago.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN had great actions scenes, maybe greatest ever.

WAR OF THE WORLDS had a stunning first act.

MINORITY REPORT was bit over the top but a real thrill-bait.

TIN TIN was brilliance itself.

INDIANA JONES AND CRYSTAL SKULL is the best in the series.

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN was lots of fun with some food for thought.

MUNICH was bogus but very well done.

WAR HORSE was corny schlock but damn good corny schlock.

TERMINAL was sweet but too sweet.

Spielberg is 100x the director that Eastwood is or could be a million yrs.
However, Eastwood has a more mature sensibility, so even though FLAGS and LETTERS aren’t as visually awesome as SAVING, they are thoughtful in the way that few Spiel movies are.

Why did Storm Troopers wear all of that armor if it didn’t protect against anything?

Right. If Moore was a little more erudite he could have quoted the Civil War soldier who said he hated snipers — both sides — and was always glad to see them killed.

Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Artificial Intelligence, Lincoln?

From the box office receipts, looks like once again MLK was taken out by a sniper.

Until the teaser trailer for the new Star Wars came out, and we learned that Storm Troopers are black. That explains everything.

Black Africans *can* make good soldiers, provided they are properly trained and led. Certainly von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Askaris performed very well in trying circumstances in the German East African campaign of World War I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Lettow-Vorbeck

For four years, with a force that never exceeded about 14,000 (3,000 Germans and 11,000 Africans), he held in check a much larger force of 300,000 British, Belgian, and Portuguese troops. Essentially undefeated in the field, Lettow-Vorbeck was the only German commander to successfully invade imperial British soil during the First World War. His exploits in the campaign have been described by Edwin Palmer Hoyt “as the greatest single guerrilla operation in history, and the most successful.”[1]

And:

The Schutztruppe recruited new personnel and expanded to its eventual size of some 14,000 soldiers, most of them Askaris, and all well-trained and well-disciplined. Lettow-Vorbeck’s fluency in the Swahili language earned the respect and admiration of his African soldiers; he appointed black officers and “said — and believed — [that] ‘we are all Africans here’.”[8] In one historian’s estimation, “It is probable that no white commander of the era had so keen an appreciation of the African’s worth not only as a fighting man but as a man.”[9]

INDIANA JONES AND CRYSTAL SKULL is the best in the series.

You had me thinking you were being serious right up till there!

In recent years, they’ve emphasized the sniper side of this because it has gotten pretty sexy with the public, but it really wasn’t that big a deal for a long time, almost a collateral duty of s2 scouts.

And also because of the kind of terrains our snipers are operating now… for the same reason why even among regular infantry everyone and his brother want .308/7.62×51 rifles now. There is now almost a cult of the long distance shooting.

Prior to 9/11, the kind of sniping that was done, say in Somalia, for example, was more “traditional.” Built-up, 3D, lots of fieldcraft.

This is because, again, to locate the direction of a sound, people imperceptibly move/turn their heads slightly and the the brain processes the differential in sound between the two receptors (ears) in the two positions. A short crack of a rifle, especially if unexpected, doesn’t have enough duration for this phenomena to happen.

Maybe it is BS, but that is what I’ve been told and it makes sense. There are zillions of cases of a single shot ringing out and people pointing in all directions where they thought it came from.

It’s not BS.

Further complicating the matters is terrain. If there are mountains/hills on two or three sides, sound can travel funny. Sometimes the terrain can make those on the receiving end believe that the shot came from the opposite direction of whence it actually came. If you get lucky, they start firing in all directions and further mask your sound/movement.

However, Eastwood has a more mature sensibility, so even though FLAGS and LETTERS aren’t as visually awesome as SAVING, they are thoughtful in the way that few Spiel movies are.

You can say that again!

I watched “Saving Private Ryan” with my wife’s Iowan grandfather, an ETO vet who fought through Normandy all the way to Germany. After the initial landing sequence (first time I saw him shed tears), he and I both grunted, “So much talking. Who bunches like that and talks so much on the move?” And we couldn’t take the rest of the movie seriously after that.

I always found the treatment of violence in Spielberg films juvenile.

“Seriously, how has a bad joke like Tarantino conned so many people into thinking he’s a genius?”

RD is great. Rest is trash though PF is clever trash.

Look, our age worships ‘gay marriage’, thinks it’s cool to have tattoos all over, thinks Katy Perry is talented, praises Kanye West as a poet, and adores Miley Cyrus.
So, why would a scuzzo like Tarantino not be praised to stinking heaven?

Cady Groves, now she’s a real talent who sings her heart out.

We were taught their snipers were cowards, not snipers as a class.

Yup. If they do it it’s sneaky cowardice, but if we do it, it’s just good tactics.

One of the reasons the Americans defeated the British in the Revolution was that the former employed snipers quite liberally while the latter wanted to put their soldiers in a line opposite our soldiers in a line and let the two lines shoot at one another.

That’s just mythology.

George Washington desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a European-style commander in command of a European-style regular army and discouraged bushwacking. He wanted legitimacy for his new country, and did not wish to establish a precedent of coming to power through a “dirty war.”

“INDIANA JONES AND CRYSTAL SKULL is the best in the series.”

“You had me thinking you were being serious right up till there!”

Look, of the four, TEMPLE is too over-the-top and CRUSADE is a mess.

The great ones are the first and fourth.

The opening of the first is sensational. But I think Spiel pushed too hard because he took the Nazi stuff too seriously. So, the violence becomes too nasty and sadistic at times.

CRYSTAL SKULL is finely balanced between form and chaos, and it’s done in the spirit of fun.
It’s pure mastery.

CRYSTAL SKULL is finely balanced between form and chaos, and it’s done in the spirit of fun.
It’s pure mastery.

I found Crystal Skull to be the very essence of mediocrity

On the other hand, I did enjoy Plinkett’s review:

I watched “Saving Private Ryan” with my wife’s Iowan grandfather, an ETO vet who fought through Normandy all the way to Germany. After the initial landing sequence (first time I saw him shed tears), he and I both grunted, “So much talking. Who bunches like that and talks so much on the move?” And we couldn’t take the rest of the movie seriously after that.

Saving Private Ryan has one truly great sequence (the Omaha beach landing).Everything else is just a rehash of WW2 movie cliches.

Skinflint is a good choice of word, which I now know after having looking it up. Did you notice the fake baby?

There’s only one American Sniper who I would consider a hero.

Shooting in general requires good visuo-spatial IQ and superb mental discipline. So, yes, Northeast Asians make good raw material for shooters.

The most famous or infamous (to white nationalists) is FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi who was involved in Ruby Ridge and Waco.

I thought Horiuchi got a bum rap. I guess I’m not much of a libertarian because I think that if you break the law and then refuse to surrender, doom on you. Respect legitimate authority, period.

He wanted legitimacy for his new country, and did not wish to establish a precedent of coming to power through a “dirty war.”

A dirty war might have resulted in much harsher tactics by the Brits. Would a Sherman-style burning of cities have brought the rebels to heel? We will never know, because the Brits never tried it.

“Dicounting Captain Phillips-type scenarios, Snipers qua snipers on the battlefield are intuitively less honorable than foot soldiers, and all else being equal, snipers are dishonorable relative to the targets they snipe.”

All’s fair in love and war. That being said, I can understand the less honorable sentiment even if I don’t necessarily agree.

As has been noted, the non-urban terrain in the various sandboxes, i.e, wide open spaces with long sightlines, seems conducive to the long-range shots. Similarly, the nature of the opponents there – often extremely small groups operating covertly and not distinguished from civilians by uniforms, has similarly enhanced/altered the role and utility of snipers.

In years past, though, for scenarios involving massed, uniformed forces, major primary goals for USMC snipers were officer/leader assassination and psychological warfare. Don’t be the guy next to the radio man, for instance, that is likely to be somebody important. On the psychological warfare side, some poor guy a little bit behind the front line relieving himself or eating is, all other things being equal, a higher value target than a guy on the front line in a fighting position, as the rest of the force is focused on him.

The psychological aspect used to be highly emphasized although I’m uncertain, because of the recent nature of our conflicts, whether it still is. But effective sniper fire has many times shown its utility in damaging the psyche of conventional forces. And yes, generally, the receiving side of this type of sniper fire have considered a sniper a less honorable foe than a garden variety opposing grunt.

Snipers, like, for instance, flamethrower operators, are/were often much more likely to face summary execution by their opponents upon capture. There is usually a visceral hatred towards these sort of enemy operators that goes well beyond the animosity towards the enemy in general. I suppose this is because the extremely directed nature of sniper fire does make it personal and seemingly malicious to the victims. And, as stated above, this isn’t a figment, doctrine, in the past, has emphasized tactics that could be framed as malicious, cruel, dirty tricks by an individual in a position exposed to less risk than your average grunt.

Generally, it seems, in much of military history, snipers on one’s own side are considered standouts, if not heroes, doing a challenging job that, by the nature of it, results in “feats”, whereas snipers on the other side aren’t playing by the rules.

Whatever the case may be there, what about drone operators, which are essentially snipers writ larger by their greater lack of exposure and greater lethality of their weaponry? Are they, or the whole drone operations apparatus heroes? If not, why not? Isn’t the best execution of military matters making the other guy die for his country while preserving one’s own?

I guess I’m not much of a libertarian because I think that if you break the law and then refuse to surrender, doom on you.

You not much of a libertarian, to say the most of you.

After seeing how much damage smart insurgents could do (for example sniping, helo ambushes, drawing US soldiers into buildings and then bringing them down) there’s no doubt in my mind that if our roles had been reversed–Americans had their weapons and they had our gear/technology–that we would have inflicted 10 times the casualties on them than they did on us.

While that’s probably true if they had our rules of engagement, that’s a very big if. More likely they would have killed an entire city to get at the insurgents. It’s not that they’re sadistic – just practical and parochial in the manner of most non-Western cultures. In other words, they value the lives of their people more than they value those of enemy civilians. By many orders of magnitude.

Yup. If they do it it’s sneaky cowardice, but if we do it, it’s just good tactics.

Actually, the way the left (and a number of lefty paleocon pretenders) sees it – if we do it, it’s sneaky cowardice, but if they do it, it’s just good tactics.

“A dirty war might have resulted in much harsher tactics by the Brits. Would a Sherman-style burning of cities have brought the rebels to heel? We will never know, because the Brits never tried it.”

The Burning of Falmouth (October 18, 1775) was an attack by a fleet of Royal Navy vessels on the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts (site of the modern city of Portland, Maine, and not to be confused with the modern towns of Falmouth, Massachusetts or Falmouth, Maine). The fleet was commanded by Captain Henry Mowat.[1] The attack began with a naval bombardment which included incendiary shot, followed by a landing party meant to complete the town’s destruction. The attack was the only major event in what was supposed to be a campaign of retaliation against ports that supported Patriot activities in the early stages of the American Revolutionary War.

Mowat had set a deadline of 9:00 am on October 18 for the town’s response. By 9:40 the town appeared to be deserted, so he ran a red flag up the Canceaux ’​s masthead, and ordered the fleet to begin firing. Incendiary cannonballs set fire to the harbor installations and most of the town’s houses and public buildings.[8] One witness reported:

The firing began from all the vessels with all possible briskness, discharging on all parts of the town … a horrible shower of balls from three to nine pounds weight, bombs, carcasses, live shells, grapeshot and musketballs. … The firing lasted, with little cessation, until six o’clock.[9]

When the bombardment appeared inadequate to Mowat, he sent a landing party to set fire to any buildings that had survived.[10] The town militia offered little significant resistance, as most were helping their families to safety. In spite of this, some of the landed British marines were killed or wounded.[11] By evening, according to Mowat, “the body of the town was in one flame”.[12]

Aftermath[edit]
Following the bombardment, Mowat went on to Boothbay, where he set fire to a few houses and raided for livestock, but his expedition was faltering to an end. The decks of some of his ships had been inadequately braced for prolonged gunnery, and many of his guns had jumped their mounts. He returned to Boston, and remained there as winter was setting in. When Admiral Graves was relieved in December 1775, these punitive raids were gradually abandoned.[10] One of the last, undertaken to avenge British military losses to revolutionary Patriots, was the burning of Norfolk, Virginia, on January 1, 1776, instigated by Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia.[13]

The Richmond Campaign was a group of British military actions against the capital of Virginia, Richmond, and the surrounding area, during the American Revolutionary War. Lead by American turncoat Benedict Arnold, the Richmond Campaign is considered one of his greatest successes while serving under the British Army, and one of the most notorious actions that Arnold ever performed.

At noon, Arnold’s forces marched triumphantly into the city, described by an eyewitness as “undisturbed by even a single shot.” From his headquarters at Main Street’s City Tavern (he would only stay in Richmond for a day), Arnold wrote a letter to Jefferson, saying that if he could move the city’s tobacco stores and military arms to his ships, he would leave Richmond unharmed. Jefferson’s response was livid, refusing that a turncoat do anything to Richmond’s supplies.

Upon receiving the letter the next day on January 6, Arnold was enraged, and ordered Richmond to be set to the torch. British troops then started a rampage across the city, burning government buildings as well as private homes, ransacking the city of its valuables and supplies. A strong wind spread the flames even more, adding to the destruction. After most of Richmond was burned and its valuables sacked, Arnold led his forces outside of Richmond and to the Westham cannon foundry, which held even more armaments, and preceded to burn it down. After its destruction, the British went down to the city of Chesterfield, and began another spree of violence, burning down homes and looting buildings.

The destruction of Richmond, one of the most important cities in the United States, outraged the American populace. George Washington was so angered and humiliated by the destruction of Richmond, that he put a 5,000 guinea bounty on Arnold’s head and ordered his aide, the Marquis de Lafayette, to hang Arnold if he encountered him in battle. Continental marksmen were issued targets painted in Benedict’s appearance to practice on, if in the event they saw him.

The British, on the other hand saw Arnold’s victory at Richmond as a turning point, and gave them hopes that Loyalists could rise up with them, and quell the American presence in the South. Many slaves were liberated from the raided plantations, as well as Richmond itself, and many of them promptly joined the British Army afterwards, in exchange for their freedom. After Arnold’s initial raid on the James River and the area around Richmond, more minor raids ensued. British commanders like William Phillips and Banastre Tarleton followed in Arnold’s example, raiding and burning more outlying towns and preying on Continental troops. Benedict Arnold, the Continental Army’s brilliant General, had guaranteed himself a place in the British ranks with the Richmond Campaign, as well as a spot in the annals of history.

“Grand Budapest Hotel” is a very pleasant movie. It does seem like an odd “Best Picture” choice as it didn’t seem to be trying to mean anything at all.

I am a sucker for anything that smacks of the nostalgic vestiges of the glorious Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Apparently, Ralph Fiennes is too. He played a Hungarian count in “The English Patient.” And then, of course, there was “Sunshine,” which was, in its way, a nostalgic celebration of the liberal Dual Monarchy.

The most famous or infamous (to white nationalists) is FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi who was involved in Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Lon Horiuchi isn’t controversial with just white nationalists.

I thought Horiuchi got a bum rap. I guess I’m not much of a libertarian because I think that if you break the law and then refuse to surrender, doom on you. Respect legitimate authority, period.

It’s true that much of the blame goes to the national leadership and the local commander at hand. Still, American military officers and law enforcement officials have the moral duty to disobey illegal orders. Besides, it’s not a good idea to fire shots when you cannot clearly identify a target and what’s behind it.

Btw, how does this compare with HURT LOCKER?

Hurt Locker is much more profound imo. The point AS is trying to make requires the context of a good war to be valid (and even then it seems 50/50 if this story is actually about a wolf in sheepdog’s clothing). The point made in Hurt Locker is true in all contexts: you’re most alive when close to death.

Hurt Locker is much more profound imo.

I found “Hurt Locker” to be a very feminine imagination of war and its dangers.

The point made in Hurt Locker is true in all contexts: you’re most alive when close to death.

I am all for a good adrenaline rush. But, personally, I feel most alive when I, rhetorically writing, am kicking the balls of my enemy who is down and out, with nary a damage and danger to myself. And then I come home safe and sound to the loving embrace of my woman and children. That feels pretty darn alive to me.

All this faux Zen stuff about being alive on the knife’s edge strikes me so much as an armchair version of “feeling alive.”

Remember what Genghis Khan said about what is best in life?

Why do the SeALs have snipers? Sniping is the exact opposite of what the SeALs were originally developed for — i.e. quick in an out missions. Yet another example of mission creep.

“Embittered Former Republican says:

This movie doesn’t sit well with me. Chris Kyle was not a very admirable figure. I get the strong impression that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if the government said I was an extremist.

We would be better off without “sheepdogs” like Kyle.”

I agree. I don’t like this trend of glorifying silent killers. As a friend of mine (a big gun nut) sometimes says – killing people from a mile out is just murder. And one has to wonder what these guys would do under orders. Would they just as obediantly kill us, I wonder? I suppose anybody can look like the enemy though a telescopic sight.

Another recent article on Mr. Unz’ site here mentions that the number of special forces operatives has more than doubled since 2001. These are guys whose missions often consist of going out in the dead of night and killing people. Is that supposed to make us “secure”? Is that supposed to make us free?

“Anonymous says:”

The most famous or infamous (to white nationalists) is FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi who was involved in Ruby Ridge and Waco.

I thought Horiuchi got a bum rap. I guess I’m not much of a libertarian because I think that if you break the law and then refuse to surrender, doom on you. Respect legitimate authority, period.

Hey, guy, and I mean this with all sincerity – F**k you, you little pr**k. The Federal government was not exercising legitimate authority in the Weaver case. They subborned him to modify a shotgun (just short enough to be illegal) so that they could arrest him and turn him into an informant. Then they surveiled him and his family for days out in the woods, and tried to arrest him at his home, and in so doing, killed his wife, his son, and his dog.

Maybe you wouldn’t feel the way you do if you saw your wife get her head blown off while holding a baby.

And, again – a very sincere F**k You to you.

in the various sandboxes

More like dust boxes.

Of all things, I think we learned more about dry lubrication for firearms and how to deal with head trauma than ever before thanks to the recent war.

Another recent article on Mr. Unz’ site here mentions that the number of special forces operatives has more than doubled since 2001. These are guys whose missions often consist of going out in the dead of night and killing people. Is that supposed to make us “secure”? Is that supposed to make us free?

What would you have our military fight insurgents with? Heavy armor and aircraft carriers? Just drop JDAMs all day? (Hey, maybe that errant JDAM strike was meant to kill Hamid Karzai!)

And worry not. A lot of these modern day ninja types are actually quite pro-American people. Many of them are more likely to aid the new patriots than hunt them down should our government turn oppressive.

The people you have to worry about are the locals serving no-knocks and killing your dogs on faulty intel.

@Twinkle

I found “Hurt Locker” to be a very feminine imagination of war and its dangers.

But, personally, I feel most alive when I, rhetorically writing, am kicking the balls of my enemy who is down and out, with nary a damage and danger to myself.

Yes, very feminine.

All this faux Zen stuff about being alive on the knife’s edge strikes me so much as an armchair version of “feeling alive.”

It’s not faux Zen it’s not wanting to spoil the moment – it’s a particular moment in the movie – for the sort of people who’d understand when they see it.

Remember what Genghis Khan said about what is best in life?

Wasn’t it something like “the greatest pleasure in life is to get someone else to drop bombs on the children of your enemies while you sit at home and enjoy watching them scream on TV?”

I may have misremembered it.

If Chris Kyle was killing Jews instead of Arab Muslims, everybody here on iSteve would be hailing him as a hero. iSteve readers are acting like a bunch of left wing Berkeley beta male fags with the killing Muslim terrorists is a bad thing mentality.

iSteve readers kissing the ass of a bunch of savage animals who would not hesitate to chop their heads of with a machete.

I remember Steve Sailer posted some statistics that the majority of his readers live in blue states and not red states. That would explain all of the beta male pussies here.

Why do the SeALs have snipers? Sniping is the exact opposite of what the SeALs were originally developed for — i.e. quick in an out missions. Yet another example of mission creep.

Budgets aren’t sacred, and budget people are always focused on the here and now. That is why every unit will make a pitch for roles it can play in current conflicts. Because the alternative is to have its budget reduced and, in the worst case, be decommissioned. Marines have been the target of budget cutters since forever. This is why they are perennially involved in missions that have nothing to do with any large body of water.

I agree. I don’t like this trend of glorifying silent killers. As a friend of mine (a big gun nut) sometimes says – killing people from a mile out is just murder. And one has to wonder what these guys would do under orders. Would they just as obediantly kill us, I wonder? I suppose anybody can look like the enemy though a telescopic sight.

Another recent article on Mr. Unz’ site here mentions that the number of special forces operatives has more than doubled since 2001. These are guys whose missions often consist of going out in the dead of night and killing people. Is that supposed to make us “secure”? Is that supposed to make us free?

That’s the whole point of having a large military budget – make the enemy pay without incurring a bunch of friendly casualties. War isn’t a game – as with other political activities, its objective is to achieve our goals at minimum cost to ourselves. And most wars result in outsized casualties for the losers. In antiquity, when wars were fought with blunt and edged hand weapons, arrows and crossbow bolts, the losing side would typically lose thousands even as the winners lost dozens or hundreds. No one felt any qualms about chopping down the personnel of disintegrating enemy formations from behind. Because those who got away would get another chance to reorganize and kill them in battle. Why would a rational person let the enemy get a second bite at the apple? Battles aren’t friendly jousts – they are organized slaughter. The only question is whether our people, or their people, get slaughtered.

Why would anyone fight these people? You meathead.

The American Revolution was two entirely different wars. Tactics that George Washington may have abjured up North Nathanael Greene, Daniel Morgan, Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter were enthusiastically employing in the South.

Well, more than nothing. I read Marine Sniper, about the guy in Vietnam who actually did what Barry Pepper did in Saving Private Ryan to the other sniper. And I was cell mates with a marine sniper for six months. Lot of interesting stories, hard to know what was true though, given the circumstance.

But I don’t think anything that I could learn about being a sniper would change my opinion that sucker punching a guy is not honorable, especially if you do it from a hundred yards away. I was trying to make an academic point that was also simple, which basically was just that whether or not sniping people is honorable depends on things everyone otherwise agrees on BUT for lots of reasons, no one thinks about in that context, especially these days.

When I said All Else Being Equal, I meant more than you would have guessed I suppose. I basically meant imagine a sniper in a vacuum with his target, assuming the target wouldn’t be a target without the advantage the sniper needs in order to take his time. Make sense?

Snipers shoot at people who don’t know they are being targeted from a concealed or distant position. Doing just that can obviously be necessary and efficient and impressive and heroic. But killing people who can’t defend themselves is not honorable, and its dishonorable if you do it with comfortable safety. When circumstances intrude and that simple, academic scenario turns into a firefight then the question of honor either becomes obvious or too particular to be a useful thought experiment.

And I would say the same principles apply to everyone else. Sniper is just the only one of the type we put on a pedestall, and no one is dumb enough to argue that the guy who fires the drones is honorable.

“I found “Hurt Locker” to be a very feminine imagination of war and its dangers.”

Because a masculine imagination isn’t afraid of explosive devices?

“I am a sucker for anything that smacks of the nostalgic vestiges of the glorious Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

But GBH really exists in a bubble. It’s hipster obliteration of the past.
I didn’t get any sense that it had anything to do with the real or even mythical past.

Annoying.

Mosquitoes.

Likely AIPAC would have seen to it that some other senator would have cast the deciding vote in favor if Ventura had appointed someone who was antiwar. A lot of controversial votes are arranged in that way and made to seem falsely close.

If I needed a military hero I would take Alvin York over Chris Kyle any day of the week.

On the whole I agree with you, EFR,

I cannot imagine Kyle living a quality life post-sniping. Sooner or later he would have succumbed to the psychological effects of his barbarous acts. However, another deranged ‘sniper’ saved Kyle from himself. Poetic justice.

“This is a man who bragged about shooting 30 looters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”
IMO, looters should be shot. Bragging? maybe not.

Call bullshit all you like. I’m aware of the Marines, my uncle did that back in the ’90s. My personal relevant experience is Army, Sniper platoon, HHT, 2/11 ACR circa 2004/5. Conflict was Iraq, Bilal area.

If I may point a few things out. Your read on what marine S/S would do in combat is what is bullshit. And even were it true, it in no way impacts all long distance marksmen everywhere. Doctrine and SOP varies widely between services and units. An M4 with an ACOG is perfectly workable out to 400 meters in the hands of any marksman worthy of his M-24. And while I did love my 24, the M4 did the lion’s share of work. One of the biggest challenges to a sniper in the middle east is keeping sand out of the delicate optics and the action. In transit, my unit used drag bags to carry the big guns, meaning it took precious seconds to unpack and load the rifle, which in combat situations you sometimes just don’t have. And yes, while doctrine calls for the spotter to carry the M4, and the sniper to carry an M9 and the M24, in reality, the M9 is so unreliable as to be classified as a single-shot weapon, so everyone carried the M4. One of my spotters was real hardcore and humped a 240.

What the hell is this womanly language? Why all the words to let the world know you’re still scared of the mean jocks from HS?

If you knew any of these people IRL you’d know they’re people who come from Red States and are ideologically opposed to the Prog Left around here. They’re just not going to get their panties in such a wad that instead of living up to their potential as elite soldiers they’ll post huffy comments on blogs.

In any case, in sniping, marksmanship ability is necessary but also secondary. Fieldcraft is far more important.

Twinkie, that is the case if you are discussing snipers. But increasingly infantry units are using what are known as designated marksmen to take those long shots required in places like Afghanistan where the standard issue M4 can’t reach. These guys are not true snipers and do not receive the training of snipers regarding fieldcraft. They are essentially the best shooters in their infantry platoon given a larger rifle like the M-14 to take those special shots when the unit is pinned down.

What’s with the personal attacks on Kyle? He was a God-fearing, Christian man. And if you don’t love Jesus, you can go to Hell.

I haven’t seen this and don’t intend to until it comes on dvd.

But is this film blatantly jingoistic or is it admiring of a soldier’s skills?

Take a film like DAS BOOT. It presents German submarine soldiers as men of courage, dedication, and honor, but it is NOT pro-Nazi. I saw back in the early 80s as a kid in a theater full of Jews, and Jews got into it.
We admire the men in DAS BOOT but that doesn’t mean we agree with the ideology they’re serving. After all, soldiers ALWAYS do what they’re told. This is true in ALL nations. They have no autonomy in decision-making.

Maybe in a sly way, Eastwood is being a bit subversive. After all, it’s about a sniper. So many films have been about American gung-ho types. The big action film of the 80s was Rambo who stood out in the open and had bullets bounce off his chest.

In contrast, a sniper doesn’t fight so ‘honorably’ and macho-ishly. He fights sneakily. It’s like Japanese in LETTERS had to hide and fight like rats against the Americans.

Even the title American Sniper… it doesn’t sound so rah-rah.

And maybe Eastwood feels like a sniper as he works in overwhelmingly Liberal and Jewish Hollywood. So,he has to use a bit of subterfuge sometimes. He has to make his films acceptable to mainstream liberalism and conservatism. He has to show that he loves Jews and Negroes…
but sometimes, he ‘snipes’ in a scene like in Gran Torino that deals with black thuggery.
And I think there is a hidden message in UNFORGIVEN. And in that film, the bounty hunters often snipe at the ‘bad guys’.
The hidden message is that even as UNFORGIVEN condemns vigilantism, it makes us root for Munney when he goes after the sheriff. You see, he killed a Negro and that means all bets are off. Blood! We demand the blood of the ‘racist’ sheriff!!!

“Meanwhile, everyone knows that all of America’s greatest enemies are located in DC, Wall Street, and Hollywood.”

Maybe, but the Washington Sniper that terrorized the US in the early 2000s didn’t make a good case for sniping.

On the other hand, maybe promotion of sniping can send all the American psychos to shoot others overseas.

Imagine if the Columbine kids had been promised a ticket to Iraq to shoot a bunch of people there. They might have spared their high school.

And that Texas tower shooter in the 60s should have been sent to Vietnam.

Horiuchi was ex-Delta and a psychopath, he admitted in court he liked killing people.

Law enforcement has no reason to hire professional killers like him. All they do is militarize law enforcement.

And respect what “authority”, the guy was set up by ATF and when he didn’t play along they sent their goons to make him pay. They murdered his kid and then it spiraled out from their.

Horiuchi tried for a ‘two-fer’ killing the old man and his wife with a single shot.

The FBI didn’t care if they murdered innocents. But since it was a white guy instead of one your your precious blacks or Muslims that’s okay.

There are 2 pitches for more war going on at the same time, the glorification or this sniper and the “radical Islam” slogan. The politicians seem very cautious about what the public is thinking. Obama didn’t feel he had to say “radical Islam” in the State of the Union even with the Republicans and the media harping on him. And then Ernst didn’t say it in her rebuttal either.

Its such a stupid attack on religion that you wonder how anyone buys it but then you see a “focus group” worrying about “sharia law.”

I think you’ll find most of us here would have rather had the US borders closed than go to Iraq, but I still loved this movie. Just because a war was not a good idea, that doesn’t mean there were no heroes.

I scoff at the idea that any of our wars in the last century or so have been waged to protect our territory, citizenry, or even our way of life. That said, yes, our civilization does depend on men with guns who are willing to kill people. And yes, the left seems to have a problem with that, more as a spiritual/moral than ideological matter.

That is to say, low key. Snipers, by nature, aren’t and can’t be peacocks. Because peacocks make easy targets. Hathcock was also on record as stating that he enjoyed the “hunt,” but did not enjoy killing. He killed because it was his duty.

I saw a “most effective snipers in history” page while checking to see where Kyle stood in the rankings. I only scanned it, but IIRC, one of our best snipers in Vietnam always wore a white feather on his helmet, and only took it off for one kill.

INDIANA JONES AND CRYSTAL SKULL is the best in the series.

LOLwhut?

Mr. Unz nailed it.

When I first heard of sniper guy was when he was killed by one of his clients he was doing gun therapy with. Which I thought was about as insane as it gets and from which Kyle earned his Darwin award.

Okay he did 10 tours back to back taking pot shots at Haijis in a useless war that accomplished nothing. A smart guy would have walked away ASAP from that clusterf**k and be grateful he came away with all his bodyparts.

Bottom line with sniper guy, he was just a tool and a expendable one at that in a elective war that didn’t help our country at all and ruined another. All started by nasty little men in D.C. who would never lower themselves to even acknowledge the hired help like Kyle that did all their dirty work for them.

If men like Klye applied themselves to actually serving the country as opposed to being a loyal tool for a bunch of shadowy oligarchs who in reality despise those in the armed forces and consider them little more than “fungible assets”, they would have made a bee line to Wall Street and cleaned house there and then on K Street. They would have become the saviors of this country.

But that’s asking too much from these sorts of men. Far too much to care for their country.

Instead they prefer to spill their guts in strange countries that have no impact on U.S. security.

“Meanwhile, everyone knows that all of America’s greatest enemies are located in DC, Wall Street, and Hollywood. If the silly fellow had just made a list of all the important people in those three places and then put bullets through the heads of a random selection of 160 of them, he’d have immediately become America’s greatest national hero, or at least that’s what all the public opinion polls seem to indicate. He would have been known as America’s own William Tell of the 21st Century.

Stupid sniper guy…”

Ah yes, the “I’ve got a little list” theory of assassination:

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs —
All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs —
All children who are up in dates, and floor you with ’em flat —
All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like that —
And all third persons who on spoiling tête-á-têtes insist —
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!

(Chorus:)
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.

(Ko-Ko:)
There’s the banjo serenader, and the others of his race,
And the piano-organist — I’ve got him on the list!
And the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face,
They never would be missed — they never would be missed!
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who “doesn’t think she dances, but would rather like to try”;
And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist —
I don’t think she’d be missed — I’m sure she’d not he missed!

(Chorus:)
He’s got her on the list — he’s got her on the list;
And I don’t think she’ll be missed — I’m sure she’ll not be missed!

(Ko-Ko:)
And that Nisi Prius nuisance, who just now is rather rife,
The Judicial humorist — I’ve got him on the list!
All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life —
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed.
And apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind,
Such as — What d’ye call him — Thing’em-bob, and likewise — Never-mind,
And ‘St— ‘st— ‘st— and What’s-his-name, and also You-know-who —
The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.
But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list,
For they’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!

(Chorus:)
You may put ’em on the list — you may put ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed!

We can all agree that there are those who deserve only to die, Ron.The problem lies in the fact that my little list will probably not agree in every particular with your little list.And both of our little lists will probably be at odds with the list that was carefully crafted by the fellow who lives in the van down by the river and eats a diet of government cheese…..

What would you have our military fight insurgents with?

Since the red savages were conquered back during the 19th Century, I don’t see much reason at all for our military to be fighting insurgents. Guarding our borders does not require fighting insurgents. Even securing the sea lanes doesn’t require fighting insurgents.

Well, I haven’t seen the movie myself, but that sniper guy really sounds like an ignorant half-wit…

Supposedly, he wandered around Iraq killing all of the enemies of America he found there. What a dummy! None of America’s enemies live in Iraq, although I’m sure lots of Iraqis had gotten annoyed at being occupied by America. Prior to that, I doubt whether a single Iraqi cared much about America one way or the other.

I quite agree on that point, Ron.America’s real enemies lie on our Southern frontiers: Mexico, Haiti, Honduras, etc.

All of the men, money, and materiel that were wasted in Iraq should have been used to secure our borders.Just imagine if Kyle’s sniper skills had been used to keep Latin American mestizos from invading our country….That would have been a task worthy of his service.

I scoff at the idea that any of our wars in the last century or so have been waged to protect our territory, citizenry, or even our way of life.

I don’t know; had the USA stayed out of WW2, that would have meant a Soviet ruled Europe stretching all the way to the English Channel.That would have been a disquieting prospect…..

There is no need for the draft since there are plenty of meatheads like you

“INDIANA JONES AND CRYSTAL SKULL is the best in the series.”

“LOLwhut?”

http://youtu.be/9DZNDEqcSi0?t=46s

You toddamn morons really make laugh.

What IS the Indian Jones series? It’s action, comedy, adventure, and bit of romance. They have to be addressed on that level. CRYSTAL SKULL works best because it follows the Goldilocks rules.
Too-muchness kills an action movie. TEMPLE OF DOOM was like one big roller coaster ride. CRUSADE was all over the map. The first was excellent, but Spielberg got too ugly and vengeful with the Nazi thing and skulls blowing up and oozing with blood in the final scene was like Nazi fetish porn.

CRYSTAL SKULL was made for the fun of it. It doesn’t push too hard with the action but the action choreography is marvelous. Also, what had once been cutting-edge in the 1980s has been streamlined into a classic style by Spielberg’s mastery that has become more assured over the years. He evolved from brilliant movie brat to surehanded master, and CRYSTAL SKULL has some of best choreographed action scenes in cinema. It even has an element of grace, as in the motorcycle chase scene. I love how it slides to an end.

Villains are more fun than nasty. As such, the violence is less sadistic and vicious than in some other JONES movies.

And the opening scene is absolutely dazzling. It is a mini-masterpiece in its own right.
Though Lucas(producer) never again made a film like American Graffiti, SKULL has some of the groove of that film.

The opening is absolutely flawless, inspired, and breathtaking in its use of long shots, pans, reflections in hubcaps and mirrors, weaving in and out of interiors, shocks and surprises, framing through windows, and etc.
This is genius. It’s something Michael Bay will never get. This level of talent is something you have to be born/gifted with. It’s visual Mozart. To create such masterly form out of chaos and tension.

“Twinkie says:

“”Another recent article on Mr. Unz’ site here mentions that the number of special forces operatives has more than doubled since 2001. These are guys whose missions often consist of going out in the dead of night and killing people. Is that supposed to make us “secure”? Is that supposed to make us free?””

What would you have our military fight insurgents with? Heavy armor and aircraft carriers? Just drop JDAMs all day? (Hey, maybe that errant JDAM strike was meant to kill Hamid Karzai!)”

How’s about not fighting them at all. Why do we have to stick our nose in their countries? And by what right do we call them “insurgents”? Because they are fighting against the puppet leaders we have designated for them (who themselves hate our guts and wish us dead as well)?

“And worry not. A lot of these modern day ninja types are actually quite pro-American people. Many of them are more likely to aid the new patriots than hunt them down should our government turn oppressive.”

A lot? Define a lot. A lot of ex special forces go to work for shadowy companies like Kraft or Blackwater, or hire themselves out as bodyguards to the ultra-wealthy. Those guys clearly have demonstrated a mercenary streak in their post-military employment. And they have shown themselves keen for “the mission” (as stupid and pointless as that is) while in uniform.

Forgive me if I am un-reassured.

Unfortunately the war devastated the Christian Iraqi community

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-iraq-war-became-a-war-on-christians/

“Jack Hanson says:

What the hell is this womanly language? Why all the words to let the world know you’re still scared of the mean jocks from HS?”

What’s with the false bravado? Covering up your latent homosexuality? (Hey, you insult me, I insult you).

“If you knew any of these people IRL you’d know they’re people who come from Red States and are ideologically opposed to the Prog Left around here.

They WORK for the prog-left, you idiot.

“Jefferson says:

If Chris Kyle was killing Jews instead of Arab Muslims, everybody here on iSteve would be hailing him as a hero.”

You are not only wrong, you are an idiot.

If you can’t see the sheer brilliance of a scene like this, you need to call it quits. It just doesn’t get any better.

Kael mentioned Eisenstein when she reviewed JAWS. And Spielberg pays homage by having the head of the sculpture smash into the KGB car, a clear allusion to the dismantling of the Czar statue in OCTOBER.

http://youtu.be/k62eaN9-TLY?t=3m18s

Dwight MacDonald found Hollywood filmmaking conventional and predictable in contrast to early Soviet filmmaking that seemed to original and revolutionary in editing, framing, and other techniques.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/macdonald-and-movies

Spielberg combined the populism with Hollywood with the expression-rich eccentricism of early Soviet cinema. I suppose there was something of this in Disney as well. FANTASIA is both a crowd-pleaser and one of the boldest experiments in cinema.

Both Eisenstein and Spielberg were engineer-poets of the image. They know the calculations but also the music.

Anon says:

That’s the whole point of having a large military budget – make the enemy pay without incurring a bunch of friendly casualties. War isn’t a game – as with other political activities, its objective is to achieve our goals at minimum cost to ourselves.”

The goals of these wars are not our goals.

“And most wars result in outsized casualties for the losers. In antiquity, when wars were fought with blunt and edged hand weapons, arrows and crossbow bolts, the losing side would typically lose thousands even as the winners lost dozens or hundreds.”

You have clearly never heard of the greek warlord Pyrrhus.

“No one felt any qualms about chopping down the personnel of disintegrating enemy formations from behind. Because those who got away would get another chance to reorganize and kill them in battle. Why would a rational person let the enemy get a second bite at the apple? Battles aren’t friendly jousts – they are organized slaughter. The only question is whether our people, or their people, get slaughtered.”

No, that is not the only question. The most important question is should the war be fought at all.

Yes, very feminine.

It’s not faux Zen it’s not wanting to spoil the moment – it’s a particular moment in the movie – for the sort of people who’d understand when they see it.

Buddy, when I was a teenager in NYC, I stood toe-to-toe with a black criminal who tried to rob me and exchanged stab wounds with him. It wasn’t like the duel in West Side Story. It was just wild and awkward. There was blood everywhere and it looked like there was axe murdering going on. I survived. And that’s what mattered.

It’s not at all “manly” or “honorable” to engage in that kind of life-or-death combat. It doesn’t make you feel “more alive” in the moment. You pretty much operate on instinct and tunnel vision (and rely on muscle memory) and just try to survive. There is no time to reflect on the nature of life and beauty in the moment. That’s all movie bullshit for people who haven’t been in real life-or-death combat. If anything, you just wake up with cold sweat a lot later or have bad insomnia and have to go see a therapist.

And that experience served me well later in life. As the SAS guys say, just shoot the buggers in the head and move on. No need to make a big fuss about it. You “celebrate life” later in the comforts of your home with your woman… That’s “alive”!

Personally I always enjoyed watching bad guys drop with absolutely no injury to my people, but if you think otherwise, I encourage you to engage in your notion of “honorable combat” as often as possible. God and Darwin will sort you out.

And worry not. A lot of these modern day ninja types are actually quite pro-American people. Many of them are more likely to aid the new patriots than hunt them down should our government turn oppressive.

Uh, no Sport, absoulutely not. That would cost them their pension, which is one of the factors that encouraged them to stay in the military anyway.

But, personally, I feel most alive when I, rhetorically writing, am kicking the balls of my enemy who is down and out, with nary a damage and danger to myself. And then I come home safe and sound to the loving embrace of my woman and children. That feels pretty darn alive to me.

OK, so are you a tax attorney, or an IT specialist?

Meanwhile, everyone knows that all of America’s greatest enemies are located in DC, Wall Street, and Hollywood. If the silly fellow had just made a list of all the important people in those three places and then put bullets through the heads of a random selection of 160 of them, he’d have immediately become America’s greatest national hero, or at least that’s what all the public opinion polls seem to indicate. He would have been known as America’s own William Tell of the 21st Century.

Mr. Unz, are you seriously suggesting serial killing as a path to becoming “America’s greatest national hero”?

In any case, in sniping, marksmanship ability is necessary but also secondary. Fieldcraft is far more important.

Twinkie, that is the case if you are discussing snipers.

Try the fifth word in my original sentence.

They are essentially the best shooters in their infantry platoon given a larger rifle like the M-14 to take those special shots when the unit is pinned down.

I believe I alluded to this earlier when I remarked upon everybody and his brother wanting a 7.62×51 rifles now.

The point made in Hurt Locker is true in all contexts: you’re most alive when close to death.

Also that the number of choices in breakfast cereals can be stupefying.

in reality, the M9 is so unreliable as to be classified as a single-shot weapon

That’s a bit unfair to the Beretta. True, it’s an atrocious weapon to use in extremely dusty or sandy environment due to its open slide design, but in “normal” environments that open slide makes it very reliable (excellent ejection). My main problem with the M9 is the ridiculously oversize grip and the looooooooong double action trigger reach.

As you well know, with the amount of fine sand or dust, there is just no two ways about it. You have to clean often and run relatively dry.

I basically meant imagine a sniper in a vacuum with his target, assuming the target wouldn’t be a target without the advantage the sniper needs in order to take his time. Make sense?

Snipers don’t operate in a vacuum. Nobody does except astronauts.

I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s all the cartoons like “300” and such. But some folks just don’t seem to get it. All’s fair in love and war. The idea of war is to impose your will on your enemy, and one of the best ways to do that is to make his guys drop while none of ours does.

Stop with these ancient Greek hoplite battle fantasies (and even Greeks quickly moved on to using peltasts and other missile-slingers to win battles).

I don’t know the exact national composition of the people Chris Kyle killed in Iraq, but undoubtedly a lot of them were not Iraqi. I can say this because the terrorists in Iraq included significant numbers of “foreign fighters”, as they came to be called.

http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/infographics/26584940.html

“The British government has confirmed that at least 600 British citizens have gone to Iraq and Syria to fight for Islamist groups. However intelligence services estimate that there could be as many as 2000.”

Islamists came from all over the world to fight in Iraq. They came from Bosnia and Belgium, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. It wasn’t because they wanted to fight for Iraqi nationalism. Hell, even the Iraqis don’t seem to have any particular interest in Iraqi nationalism.

In antiquity, when wars were fought with blunt and edged hand weapons, arrows and crossbow bolts, the losing side would typically lose thousands even as the winners lost dozens or hundreds. No one felt any qualms about chopping down the personnel of disintegrating enemy formations from behind. Because those who got away would get another chance to reorganize and kill them in battle. Why would a rational person let the enemy get a second bite at the apple? Battles aren’t friendly jousts – they are organized slaughter. The only question is whether our people, or their people, get slaughtered.

Well put.

The reason for the casualty disparity was rather simple. The actual number of deaths from combat was usually very small. Typically, the morale of one side broke first, at which point the men on that side would discard arms and armor and run the other way (it’s futile to run with all the heavy equipment). And that was precisely when it was the easiest to cut men down – when they have their backs toward you, unarmed, and presenting no threat whatsoever. The vast majority of battle casualties almost always was incurred during a rout and the ensuing pursuit (in which capacity light troops and cavalry excelled). The slaughter would only end when the losing men made it to rugged terrain difficult for pursuit (forests or mountains) and the night fell, making pursuit more hazardous (there could be ambushes for the pursuers).

Almost always armies broke mentally first, rather than physically. Only the very truly elite troops, typically bodyguards of commanders and rulers, would “fight to the last man” and died where they stood.

If Chris Kyle was killing Jews instead of Arab Muslims, everybody here on iSteve would be hailing him as a hero. iSteve readers are acting like a bunch of left wing Berkeley beta male fags with the killing Muslim terrorists is a bad thing mentality.

This is one of several posts I’ve seen from you calling out posters over Chris Kyle and writing stuff like they are not 1/32nd the man he was. You appear to have a man-crush on this guy, and cannot separate the fact that many of us can’t get too excited over somebody’s exploits in a war many of us consider to have been a mistake that should never have taken place. Personally I wish he’d have plied his trade in Afghanistan trying to take out OBL and company. Maybe if he’d been deployed to Tora Bora in 2001, we’d have been spared the Iraq Attack.

For some reason these sites tend to attract the keyboard commandos. Being in the armed forces pays the bills, and does not usually result in being imprisoned or executed. Your Breivik-type mission is very different. If that is your standard of serving country, it’s a very difficult standard with an extremely high personal cost. I suppose we will be hearing about you in the news in a few years?

I tend to assume that many of Steve’s readers are also readers of Razib, so this will be familiar to many of you.However, for the benefit of those who do not, Razib’s discussion concerning why Rome defeated Carthage seems rather germane to the topic at hand:

According to Goldsworthy Carthage, like the Hellenistic states, operated in a more classical Westphalian framework where victory and defeat were never final, but simply instances of a continuous game between elites of distinct polities. But, if it was not for the material advantages of the Roman system its ideological orientation would have been suicidal, because wars of attrition can only be maintained when there are resources to feed them. The Romans relied upon conscript armies of free peasantry, committed to the idea of their republic as an expression of collective will, as well as Italian allies of long standing. Goldsworthy notes that no individual of the Roman elite betrayed their city, no did any of the Latin allies (the cities who went over to Hannibal during his years in Italy tended to be culturally distant from Rome). And, the citizen base of Rome was notoriously broad, because the Roman system was expansive, assimilating allies and elites of foreign cities over time. This is an ancient feature of Roman society, as at least half of the major patrician lineages are not Latin, but Sabine. This is in contrast to organization of Hellenistic or Carthaginian polities, which were not assimilative, but multicultural and cosmopolitan in a manner more resembling the later Roman system of the imperial period, or empires more generally.* The armies of Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms were not manned by citizens, but professionals, whether a standing army, or mercenaries and subject peoples. The army deployed by Hannibal consisted of Libyans and Spaniards, as well as other assorted hirelings. Until the last of the conflicts between Rome and Carthage, which took place in the immediate environs of Carthage, Roman amateur soldiers lined up against armies in the service of Carthage, not armies of Carthaginians.

Ultimately the particular story in The Fall of Carthage dovetails perfectly with the general model in Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. The Romans of the republic had asabiyah, social cohesion. Against their enemies they exhibited a stance where they accepted that the only alternatives were collective victory or collective extinction. One can speculate why this was so, but clearly that is the key variable in the rise of Rome in the world after the death of Alexander. And it explains the fall of Carthage, which in many ways was a Hellenistic polity, rather than an heir to the ancient traditions of the Levant. In the sense of microeconomics the Carthaginians were homo economicus in comparison to the Romans. The years before the Third Punic War were ones of incredible prosperity for the city of Carthage, as documented in the Roman literary sources as well as archaeology. Rome fought Carthage not because it was weak and poor, but because it was strong and rich. And Rome won because its citizens loved their city more than could be accounted for by any rational calculation.

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/institutions-usually-beat-genius/

The 9-11 pilots were from Saudia Arabia and Egypt.

“killing people from a mile out is just murder…

I haven’t seen the film either, but some of you could at least read some reviews, or something like that, and easily address some of your non sequiturs. The people that Kyle killed from “a mile out” were people that were setting up bombs and bazookas in order fire on his fellow soldiers. If I understand the story line, Kyle’s first kill was a woman. Murder, you say? Despicable? Actually, the woman in question was about to toss a grenade on his fellow soldiers. That is why killed her, not because she was some random person in his sights that might as easily have been me or you.

Asking why we needed to be there in the first place is a worthwhile endeavor. I support that. But asking why we need snipers in the first place is just ignorant. I wouldn’t want any of my loved ones used as cannon fodder. But I certainly understand why men and women who are now in that position (even those who signed up willingly) might be grateful for having snipers in the background ready to kill-those who are tossing bombs at them.

Without any of the USA’s help, including Lend Lease, you may have had a Nazi empire stretching all the way to the English Channel. We would be complaining about a different set of problems.

And as for the comments of the form “…sounds like an ignorant half-wit…What a dummy!… A smart guy would have walked away ASAP…sheepdogs…”, well, thanks so much, Sherlocks. Yes, the proverbial “rough men” who stand ready to do violence while you sleep peaceably in your beds are not typically Rhodes scholars, or eagerly anticipating their upcoming IPO’s. They’re more likely to be thrill-seeking bumpkins who have the choice of either rationalizing the killing they do, and coming to peace with it some bizarre way, or else leaveing their kids with the memory of a father who offed himself from remorse. You can keep pondering on that from the comfort of your armchairs, but you won’t be the first.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
…
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
But Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

I went to Berkeley and I’m for humiliating Islam as much as possible. Of course, I always favored doing it from the air, which almost no one agreed with. Incidentally an Egyptian in Berkeley told me in ’02 that arabs are incapable of democracy. That guy knew more than all of Bush’s advisers.

“Just imagine if Kyle’s sniper skills had been used to keep Latin American mestizos from invading our country….That would have been a task worthy of his service.”

Setting a sniper against aspiring fruit-pickers and housemaids? Even if I were a moral nihilist, I’m guessing that would not do the immigration restrictionist lobbies a whole lotta good. Also, if the those guys wouldn’t want to be charged with crimes-against-humanity the next time they ventured out to Canada or Europe, they’d need an additional extra-sensory scope to identify and decipher any gang tattoos, so that in some foolproof way, they could focus their sights only on murderers, dog-fighters, and pimps of 12-year old prostitutes, but maybe there’s an app for that.

Assuming the USSR would have won the war against Nazi Germany without US help. I tend to disagree.

So that would mean a Nazi Germany ruling Europe.

Well, I haven’t seen the movie myself, but that sniper guy really sounds like an ignorant half-wit…

Supposedly, he wandered around Iraq killing all of the enemies of America he found there. What a dummy! None of America’s enemies live in Iraq, although I’m sure lots of Iraqis had gotten annoyed at being occupied by America. Prior to that, I doubt whether a single Iraqi cared much about America one way or the other.

Yeah, you might want to watch the movie or read the book before being wrong about Kyle’s
Meanwhile, everyone knows that all of America’s greatest enemies are located in DC, Wall Street, and Hollywood. If the silly fellow had just made a list of all the important people in those three places and then put bullets through the heads of a random selection of 160 of them, he’d have immediately become America’s greatest national hero, or at least that’s what all the public opinion polls seem to indicate. He would have been known as America’s own William Tell of the 21st Century.

Stupid sniper guy…

Read Kyle’s book or see the movie. Jihadis flocked to Iraq and the U.S. military and Kyle were engaged fighting Jihadis. Most of the sweeping military operations (including Kyle’s time there) were focused on the Sunni Triangle. Kyle and his SEAL team are constantly referring to AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq). The Shiite areas (majority of Iraq) or Kurdish areas were largely left alone.

“Maybe, but the Washington Sniper that terrorized the US in the early 2000s didn’t make a good case for sniping.”

IMO, the incident made a terrific case for sniping and I’ve always been surprised that any terrorists interested in terrorizing the U.S. have never followed up with similar acts.

The impact of these shootings on the area was incalculable, people were terrorized, which was the point. And the only reason they were caught was because they were essentially begging to be caught.

Assuming the USSR would have won the war against Nazi Germany without US help. I tend to disagree.

British aid plus blockade would have been enough to ensure a Soviet victory.Things would have just taken a bit longer (Berlin falls in ’46?).

So that would mean a Nazi Germany ruling Europe.

That possibility is even more disquieting:

Yet even this corrected image of the Holocaust conveys an unacceptably incomplete sense of the scope of German mass killing policies in Europe. The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from lands annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered a first stage of Generalplan Ost implemented in eastern Poland: ten thousand Polish children were killed and a hundred thousand adults expelled. The Wehrmacht purposefully starved about one million people in the siege of Leningrad, and about a hundred thousand more in planned famines in Ukrainian cities. Some three million captured Soviet soldiers died of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were purposefully killed: as with the siege of Leningrad, the knowledge and intention to starve people to death was present. Had the Holocaust not taken place, this would be recalled as the worst war crime in modern history.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jul/16/holocaust-the-ignored-reality/

Yeah okay. And by the same metric you fund the prog left by paying taxes.

Get a grip and stop worrying about big bad snipers giving you wedgies.

CRYSTAL SKULL was made for the fun of it.

So was the first one, dear fellow

It doesn’t push too hard with the action but the action choreography is marvelous. Also, what had once been cutting-edge in the 1980s has been streamlined into a classic style by Spielberg’s mastery that has become more assured over the years.

Streamlined but also oddly gutless…..Perhaps Spielberg needs to get his testosterone count checked.

He evolved from brilliant movie brat to surehanded master, and CRYSTAL SKULL has some of best choreographed action scenes in cinema. It even has an element of grace, as in the motorcycle chase scene. I love how it slides to an end.

That scene, along with the opening, is one of the best parts of the picture.Unfortunately, we also get dreck like Shia Labeouf fencing with Cate Blanchett…..

Villains are more fun than nasty. As such, the violence is less sadistic and vicious than in some other JONES movies.

Which is a drawback.Raiders had just the right amount of ultraviolence . Doom had too much. Skull has too little. It feels like the Concerned Parents of America cut.

And the opening scene is absolutely dazzling. It is a mini-masterpiece in its own right.
Though Lucas(producer) never again made a film like American Graffiti, SKULL has some of the groove of that film.

Yeah, a I said earlier, that sequence is one of the two best parts of the picture.

This is genius. It’s something Michael Bay will never get.

Saying that Spielberg is better than Michael Bay is damning with faint praise

Dwight MacDonald found Hollywood filmmaking conventional and predictable in contrast to early Soviet filmmaking that seemed to original and revolutionary in editing, framing, and other techniques.

I’ve never much cared for MacDonald’s film criticism.

Those fruit pickers and housemaids are an army of invasion.

Another problem with

Crystal Skull

has to do with the nature of the pursued artefact itself, the eponymous crystal skull. The two best Indiana Jones films, Raiders and Last Crusade, are about quests for objects with tremendous mythical resonance in the Western mind (the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders, the Holy Grail in Last Crusade).Crystal Skull and Temple of Doom , in contrast, are concerned with stuff that has meaning only for UFO nutjobs (the crystal skull) and Hindus (the Sankara stones).

You don’t have to believe *everything* the Allies said about WWII:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/10/holocaust-nazi-perspective.html

The Prosecution at Nuremberg had submitted to Bach [Bach-Zelewski] an alleged confession of Peiper’s, according to which Himmler — in the presence of Peiper and others, including Bach — had drawn up a plan by which, under cover of the military campaign, forty million Slavs were to be slaughtered. At this point Bach — as he now averred — turned indignantly to the Prosecution’s interrogator and declared that Himmler had spoken of killing “only” thirty millions. In conclusion Bach told my informant that after this admission, he could no longer deny the fact of the proposal, and had to give his evidence accordingly.

Now, at last, we were getting near to the heart of the matter, and the former S.S. Leader from Himmler’s staff was able to put the whole story together. He remembered indeed the very occurrence on which it was founded. One evening early in 1941 Himmler and some of his cronies were sitting round the fire in the Wewelsburg; in addition to Bach and Peiper there were present Heydrich, Daluege, Obergrüppenführer Wolff, and Rauter, one of the Gestapo chiefs in Holland. Himmler spoke of an impending war in the east, which, he said, was unavoidable, the only question being when it would start and who would fire the first shot. He warned the company of the difficulty of the coming conflict and said in effect: “Germany is technically, Russia numerically, superior. The Soviet has unlimited power over its citizens and will sacrifice them without compunction: should Germany allow herself to be similarly tempted she will incur instead of strategical victory biological defeat.” Later in the evening, Himmler computed the possible casualties on both sides, and estimated that in view of their determination to resist, and taking into account epidemics and famine, the Russians’ losses might total anything up to thirty million.

What a revelation! Himmler’s calculations of the enormous losses caused by military action and the general results of war were of course something very different from a deliberate and diabolical campaign of murder. I was reminded of Clemenceau’s “vingt millions de trop” — an expression which had been exploited by our German propaganda. But surely we had never distorted that remark beyond the bounds of reason, as this not dissimilar calculation of Himmler’s had been distorted! I could see at last how, in the hands of a determined Prosecution, Himmler’s thirty million hypothetical casualties had become metamorphosed into thirty million victims of a premeditated murder.

Bach was not the type of man to avoid this kind of thing. His was the sort of mind peculiarly susceptible to the latest impressions it had received, and his outlook, formerly imbued with Nazi ideas, now bore the clear impress of Allied propaganda. This example of a particular piece of testimony, with its background and its sequel, might be cited as how it is possible to shift the emphasis of evidence from one point to another, and so alter its whole bearing and significance.

The opening 5 or 10 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull are great, with the fake homes waiting for the nuclear bomb test and the rocket sled.

Yeah, that scene and the chase through the university are the best parts of the film.Sadly, we also get Shia LaBeouf swinging Tarzan style though the forest and dueling with Cate Blanchett, bad CGI jungle scenes, etc
.

Spielberg should do more movies set in the time of his youth, like Catch Me If You Can.

Yeah, he does seem to have a good feel for the period.

Perhaps recent movie history would look very different if Spielberg had stuck with Leonardo DiCaprio as his main actor and Scorsese had wound up with Shia LeBeouf.

Well, Shia LaBeouf only did one film with Spielberg as the director (“Crystal Skull”), and I get the distinct impression that Spielberg ended up not much liking LaBeouf:

May 2010
LaBeouf tells reporters at the Cannes Film Festival that he thought Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which LaBeouf played Indie’s son Mutt Williams, “dropped the ball” and let fans down. Speaking to the LA Times, the actor also revealed that the film’s star, Harrison Ford, allegedly felt the same way. When asked whether his comments might annoy the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, LaBeouf said: “he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work.” Spielberg later released a statement saying that LaBeouf’s comments had “killed my spirits.”

The public doesn’t share the high esteem of commeters here for “Crystal Skull”. These are the IMDB ratings for the four movies.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark : 8.6

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom : 7.6

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade : 8.3

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull : 6.2

The first Indy Jones movies were homages to the pulp fiction of the 1930’s. Crystal Skull was a homage to the first three Indy Jones movies.

IMO, the incident made a terrific case for sniping and I’ve always been surprised that any terrorists interested in terrorizing the U.S. have never followed up with similar acts.

Given how simple this kind of thing is to do, I expect they did not want to rile up the left, which was helping them by agitating for a early withdrawal. Uncle Sam was inflicting serious damage on the insurgents, and it would have been a much rougher ride for them, if the commitment to Afghanistan and Iraq extended for decades. Ultimately, we expended less than 1% of GDP in two wars that stretched the enemy to the point that they had to resort to wasting their most highly-motivated fighters in suicide bombings.

“Just imagine if Kyle’s sniper skills had been used to keep Latin American mestizos from invading our country….That would have been a task worthy of his service.”

Setting a sniper against aspiring fruit-pickers and housemaids? Even if I were a moral nihilist, I’m guessing that would not do the immigration restrictionist lobbies a whole lotta good.

Just indulging in a bit of ÉPATER LE BOURGEOIS, dear fellow.Obviously, such extreme methods would not be necessary.An Israeli-style fence should be enough to do the job.
.

And worry not. A lot of these modern day ninja types are actually quite pro-American people. Many of them are more likely to aid the new patriots than hunt them down should our government turn oppressive.

The people you have to worry about are the locals serving no-knocks and killing your dogs on faulty intel.

I’m not so sure about that. A lot of the current “militarized” cops doing no-knocks, flash-bangs, etc, are ex-military or wannabes drawn from the same demographic.

As long ago as the 1980s, SEALs, for training, were accompanying police on raids on the fortified crack block-houses of the era, that didn’t seem to bother them one bit.

I think that a lot of these guys would like to believe they would be on the side of new patriots or whatever, but I’d also guess that most of them would just go along, probably get incremented into it, starting, as such things do, with smallish incidents.

Those fruit pickers and housemaids are an army of invasion.

You forgot “…composed overwhelmingly of unarmed civilians.” As such, advocating that we sic snipers on them is mental, unless you’re just an SPLC mole trying to make immigration restrictionists look like loons. If that’s the case, your employers got their money’s worth, I guess.

SYON:

Just indulging in a bit of ÉPATER LE BOURGEOIS, dear fellow…

You and I know that. But some of the people we’ll eventually need to convince if a fence or real restrictions are going to be put in place are all too ready to take that kind of comment at face value.

Yeah but weren’t the DC snipers hitting ordinary schlubs and working stiffs filling up at gas stations and stuff?

Stalin killed millions in the Soviet Union, so preventing killings in the Soviet Union doesn’t seem like would have been a good justification for intervention by the US.

In the sort of circles in which I socialise, Steven Spielberg is a byword of typical American Hollywood schlock. A sentiment I have mostly gone along with. One day I was watching TV late at night, during a time slot which on the channel I was watching was usually filled by B-movies, tacky Christian message movies, and other cheap rubbish. On this day the movie was called duel which I had never heard of, and by appearances seemed to be a low budget B-movie. As I watched it, though, I thought, “you know, this movie isn’t half bad” and further into the movie, “actually this movie is rather good, in fact it is better than most big budget, box office hits”, I thought that this just went to show that popularity or renown was little correlated with quality, even for American movies. When the end credits came up, I saw it was made by one Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, it is a bit odd to refer to a sniper killing enemies whose weapon of choice was the IED as less honorable than his opponents.

And yeah, people quibbling about his attitude sound like commies. “Oh no, you mean he wasn’t some kind of reluctant warrior-monk like in my favorite commie movies? You mean he actually hated the enemy? Oh noes! His 250 kills should be called back!”

The country’s full of such “half-wits.” I’d rather consider them misguided natural allies than “half-wits.”

FFS. Close your fucking tags, people.

Edit: okay, if 20 closing tags didn’t fix it, I guess a commenter isn’t to blame.

Yeah but weren’t the DC snipers hitting ordinary schlubs and working stiffs filling up at gas stations and stuff?

That was the point, actually, they were shooting people in mall parking lots, filling gas, etc. DC was pretty tense in the immediate days after 9/11, but most people didn’t seem to feel personally threatened. However, people did feel personally threatened by the DC sniper. One might feel this is an overreaction, that one’s wife was being silly warning you to keep your head down when you filled up, ya know, what were the odds.

But then somebody would get shot, maybe 1/4 mile away from your home at a gas station you use, and they’d interview his wife, or her husband, or something, who would tearfully recount how they had warned the victim to be careful just as they had left the house 15 minutes before being shot.

Just like your wife was doing, and you were dismissing as hysterical.

This sort of thing made a huge impression on people, especially after it happened a few times and the authorities, in the holy Washington DC metro area, fer chrissakes, not some nowhere flyover place with inconsequential inhabitants, couldn’t track these guys down.

The MoCo police chief really made an ass of himself in the process, which also didn’t instill much confidence in people.

IMO, the incident made a terrific case for sniping and I’ve always been surprised that any terrorists interested in terrorizing the U.S. have never followed up with similar acts.

The impact of these shootings on the area was incalculable, people were terrorized, which was the point. And the only reason they were caught was because they were essentially begging to be caught.

Indeed!

One of the puzzling aspects of the Jihadis is that they never learned to “flow down” with the hardening of the high value targets.

If one examined the Israeli experience, one would quickly see the pattern. At first, the Arabs engaged Israel militarily, army for army. When that failed, they launched small raids against Israeli military targets and installations. When that turned out to be costly and futile, they started to attack schools. Then the schools were hardened and the terrorists began to attack pizzerias and bus stops.

Generally terrorists and guerillas are (or ought to be) like water, as Sun Tzu put it, flow from high to low and go around obstacles.

The U.S. is an extremely porous and open society. It is not like Israel at all. Our people have not been inured to frequent terrorist attacks and our people do not have the mentality of those who live in a garrison state. It is very much open to a series of “random” low intensity terror attacks on soft, civilian targets over wide geographic space. The Washington* area “sniper” attacks writ large nationwide would be quite crippling.

*Also what made these attacks doubly terrifying was that they took place over a relatively wide geographic area and included several suburbs, not just highly visible urban targets.

We need people willing to go off and fight wars, and most of them won’t be sophisticated thinkers on foreign policy. The job of voters is to put people into office who won’t piss away the sacrifice and bravery of guys like that, while also not tossing vast amounts of wealth onto a fire and maybe not wrecking random helpless third-world countries. So far, we’re not doing a great job.

“Temple of Doom” is pretty amazing. Why is that not as popular as “Last Crusade.”

Conventional theory: OTT violence* (Aztec-style human sacrifice, complete with hearts being pulled out of chests), an unbelievably annoying female lead (future Mrs Spielberg Kate Capshaw), etc

My theory: All of the above, plus the fact that the central objects of mystery in the film are the Sankara Stones, which are utterly meaningless to Westerners. Indiana Jones movies need an atmosphere heavy with the weight of myth.Hence, the success of Raiders and Last Crusade, which involved quests to find the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.Crystal skulls and Hindu mumbo-jumbo are weak sauce in comparison.

*With a proposed plot involving child slaves, human sacrifice, and evil cults, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is decidedly darker in tone than its predecessor—and it was meant to be that way. Lucas wanted a downbeat mood similar to the one in his Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. In retrospect, he and Spielberg attributed the extremely dark themes in Temple of Doom to their respective marriages that had broken up—Spielberg divorced actress Amy Irving and Lucas divorced film editor Marcia Lucas (née Griffin)—around the same time the movie was being developed.

What they had in mind was so dark, in fact, that Raiders of the Lost Ark screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan turned down their offer to pen the second film. “I just thought it was horrible. It’s so mean,” Kasdan said later. “There’s nothing pleasant about it. I think Temple of Doom represents a chaotic period in both their lives, and the movie is very ugly and mean-spirited.”

Even Lucas came to somewhat regret how dark their movie was, telling Empire magazine, “Part of it was I was going through a divorce, Steven had just broken up and we were not in a good mood, so we decided on something a little more edgy. It ended up darker than we thought it would be. Once we got out of our bad moods, which went on for a year or two, we kind of looked at it and went, ‘Mmmmm, we certainly took it to the extreme.’ But that’s kind of what we wanted to do, for better or worse.”

If one examined the Israeli experience, one would quickly see the pattern. At first, the Arabs engaged Israel militarily, army for army. When that failed, they launched small raids against Israeli military targets and installations. When that turned out to be costly and futile, they started to attack schools. Then the schools were hardened and the terrorists began to attack pizzerias and bus stops.

Generally terrorists and guerillas are (or ought to be) like water, as Sun Tzu put it, flow from high to low and go around obstacles.

The difference between Israel and the US, as targets, is that the US can hit a lot harder and keeping on hitting for decades, with trillion-dollar war budgets. The international community can hold Israel down and prevent it from hitting back systematically, except in spurts. If Palestinians did to the US what it’s doing to Israel on a per capita basis, we’d have invaded, executed the leaders, put in a permanent occupation force, installed tame leaders, and run the place like a protectorate. Nobody pushes the US around. Between Afghanistan and Iraq, we have probably killed over a hundred thousand insurgents and inflicted a greater number of collateral casualties just by being there when the insurgents are trying to get to our people. Israel is a pussycat compared to us. That’s why Islamist leaders have to think twice.

Guys like bin Laden and Zawahiri always talk a good game, as all leaders must, about making personal sacrifices. But the fact is that they are looking to set up new regimes with themselves at the head. Can’t do that if they’re killed by an American drone strike, along with their families.

I suppose in the context of this thread, it is also worth noting that the DC Sniper(s) were pretty much shooting at relatively close ranges, 100 yards or less, in most cases, IIRC.

That brings to the fore the distinction, at least to some, that sniping is a tactic, picking off unsuspecting targets with a minimum of shots and for the purposes of harassing fire, whereas long-range shooting is a technique of which snipers (and others) may avail themselves.

By that definition, which is admittedly blurry and not necessarily agreed upon by all, much of which Kyle engaged in wasn’t strictly sniping as it was simply longer range shooting – it sounded like his targets were usually engaged in direct hostilities, rather than being an off duty Taliban, or a support guy, etc.

Probably just semantics…

Stalin killed millions in the Soviet Union, so preventing killings in the Soviet Union doesn’t seem like would have been a good justification for intervention by the US.

Preventing/stopping killings is never the real reason for intervention, dear fellow. As you rightfully pointed out, no one was willing to stop Joe Stalin from starving to death 3 million Ukrainians in 32-33, or from executing 111,091 Soviet Poles in 1937-38. Similarly, no one did anything to stop Mao in 1949-53, when he wiped out around two million people.

No, the real reason why America would have acted to prevent Hitler from gaining control of Continental Europe is because (as George F Kennan noted) it’s a crucial piece of real estate.

One of the puzzling aspects of the Jihadis is that they never learned to “flow down” with the hardening of the high value targets.

The U.S. is an extremely porous and open society.

Why would they need to continue to hit targets in the US? They hit the mother load with 9-11 and changed the course of history. That one attack has caused us to spend probably over a trillion dollars and counting. It has completely changed our domestic way of life. It has impacted what used to be considered privacy rights, and keeps us forever chasing our tails.

I doubt any other attacks would even come close to the damage 9-11 caused. And as long as we are expending treasure to prevent the next attack, they really have succeeded even if they don’t launch another attack.

If Palestinians did to the US what it’s doing to Israel on a per capita basis, we’d have invaded, executed the leaders, put in a permanent occupation force, installed tame leaders, and run the place like a protectorate. Nobody pushes the US around.

And that is why we are going broke. Israel would be stupid to put an occupation force in an Arab nation. It’s better to build fences, lay minefields and selectively assassinate the leaders like they have been doing.

As recently as 2000, at least one of our parties was against ‘nation building’. But that got dumped after 9-11, and has been biting us in the rear ever since.

Nobody pushes the US around.

Here is a question for you: If Egypt or some other neighbor were dumping their surplus population into Israel on a per capital basis like Mexico does to the USA, would the Israelis allow this and also grant these migrants citizenship?

After you answer this, then ask yourself if anyone pushes the US around.

“HA says:

Asking why we needed to be there in the first place is a worthwhile endeavor. I support that. But asking why we need snipers in the first place is just ignorant. I wouldn’t want any of my loved ones used as cannon fodder. But I certainly understand why men and women who are now in that position (even those who signed up willingly) might be grateful for having snipers in the background ready to kill-those who are tossing bombs at them.”

Yours is a valid point. I’m not questioning the need for snipers. I’m questioning the glorification of them. A lot of things are done in war – things that might be necessary to win a war – which ought not to be glorified.

Machine-guns have come to be recognized as an indispensible weapon for any army. I would not be surprised that there have been many machine-gunners who have killed far more enemy soldiers than any sniper ever has. And yet, there aren’t too many movies about heroic machine-gunners. Flame-throwers were deemed a useful weapon in WWI and WWII, and even up through Vietnam. Has there ever been a movie about a heroic flame-thrower man? Where is the movie about those heroic bull-dozer drivers who buried the front-line Iraqi infantry alive in their trenches in the first (our first) Gulf War.

“Jack Hanson says:

Yeah okay. And by the same metric you fund the prog left by paying taxes.”

Yeah, and people who stop paying their taxes – really stop paying as a matter of principle – are liable to get their head shot off by a government sniper.

“Get a grip and stop worrying about big bad snipers giving you wedgies.”

Your jock-sniffing douche routine is a little too overcompensatory, if you ask me.

…………………..Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I liked “Temple of Doom” better than “The Last Crusade”, which I didn’t much care for at all. I liked the idea of “Crystal Skull” – updating it to the 50s – but the execution was poor, the McGuffin was too contrived, and it had Shia LaPew or whatever his name is

“Ex Submarine Officer says:

I think that a lot of these guys would like to believe they would be on the side of new patriots or whatever, but I’d also guess that most of them would just go along, probably get incremented into it, starting, as such things do, with smallish incidents.”

And in short order, the “us vs. them” mentality would cement their loyalty. Hey they got one of our guys; it’s time for payback, etc., etc.

America itself doesn’t own Continental European real estate. American investors invested in Nazi Germany and owned assets there.

From The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein:

https://books.google.com/books?id=B7T706Cg_JkC&pg=PA194&dq=kissinger+dumb+animals&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TtvBVMfWJoSjNrC0hIgK&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=kissinger%20dumb%20animals&f=false

Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy.

I’d like to see a movie glorifying drone pilots, heroically piloting drones from leather chairs in trailers in Nevada Air Force bases after lunch at Arby’s, overcoming the horrors and stress of war:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html

What about Star Wars? It was a greater success than Indiana Jones and it was based on a made up myth.

It was just wild and awkward. There was blood everywhere and it looked like there was axe murdering going on. I survived. And that’s what mattered.You mean to tell me you couldn’t come up with a cool Schwarzenegger line?

You disappoint me.

My best friend told me this story and I know him pretty well so I believe it to be true.

After a prolonged argument over something trivial in his neighborhood a crackhead whipped out a 9 mm and held it 6 inches from his nose; the guy said “Muthafucka, I will blow yo’ fuckin’ brains out right now!”

My friend said; “well technically, I only have one brain.”

Mr. Anon, I’m not much for praise, but your posts have become outstanding, rivaling even mine.

Interesting that Eastwood went up against sniper-assassins in Dirty Harry and In the Line of Fire.

Would Scorpio be a hero if he were sent to war?

“an unbelievably annoying female lead (future Mrs Spielberg Kate Capshaw), etc”

The element that was UNBEARABLY annoying was the kid, “Short Round,” played by Jonathan Ke Quan. Not that Kate Capshaw wasn’t annoying as well.

By the way, judging from a few comments, there seems to be this elitist condescension that SOCOM ninja types come from some sort of a hillbilly demographic. That is not the case at all. A lot of these “operators” come from middle to upper middle class families from suburbs. They are usually phenomenal athlete-adventurers who don’t like to lose, not some redneck Jedis.

I still train weekly with some older local LEOs, mostly SWAT guys and firearms/defensive tactics instructors. They all have college degrees and all but a couple have significant military experiences. If their commanding officers told them to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens, most of them would laugh to the COs’ faces. Most of them are real standup guys.

I know there is plenty of authoritarian gun-seizing types in the police too, but many are not like that at all. And “institutionalization” is mostly a federal issue. There are always careerists everywhere.

I will say this, however. Some of the younger LEOs tend to be a bit itchy for my taste and occasionally testosterone-poisoned. As a generic rule of thumb, I don’t really like training with anyone under age 35. Once you are married, have kids, and your t-level falls off, you tend to acquire better judgment because you want to go home safe and sound after the shift’s over.

Why would they need to continue to hit targets in the US? They hit the mother load with 9-11 and changed the course of history. That one attack has caused us to spend probably over a trillion dollars and counting. It has completely changed our domestic way of life. It has impacted what used to be considered privacy rights, and keeps us forever chasing our tails.

I doubt any other attacks would even come close to the damage 9-11 caused. And as long as we are expending treasure to prevent the next attack, they really have succeeded even if they don’t launch another attack.

You clearly have not been to Israel or any other garrison state. And you seem to be one of these types who think that “it can’t get any worse.”

It can.

9/11, as shocking and as dramatic as it was, wore off psychologically once the people realized there was no more follow-on attacks. Furthermore, it was geographically very limited. People in Portland and Des Moines didn’t feel all that threatened.

Imagine pizzerias blowing up, ped mall being sniped, and water sources being poisoned. Add a few cyber attacks on power supply. Soon every accident and tragedy looks like a terrorist attack, people get jumpy from Austin to Boston. Heck, you run down a pole with power lines and you can create some confusion and havoc to thousands and tens of thousands of homes (power companies have to turn off power to the whole affected area to effect repairs – that’s if the repairmen get there safe and sound). The mass psychological dislocation can be tremendous.

You can’t “kill” a country this size with this many people no matter how dramatic an attack is and how many people you kill aside from nuclear attacks. But you can unravel a soft society like ours by creating a mass psychological spiral-disintegration.

“I’m not questioning the need for snipers. I’m questioning the glorification of them. A lot of things are done in war – things that might be necessary to win a war – which ought not to be glorified.”

I think I know what you mean.

From “Jarhead,” you will learn that Marines pump themselves up by watching war movies on video: “We yell Semper fi and we head-butt…each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war.” The fact that these films are meant to be antiwar doesn’t faze them. “Actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war,” Swofford writes, “no matter what the supposed message.” Marines love them because “the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [our] fighting skills.”

Presumably, that’s what will happen to this movie as well, which makes me even less likely to ever want to see it. (Though, as I recall, Jarhead was criticized by Marines as being too extreme in another kind of way.)

Shit! I’m a…I’m an idiot. I was thinking about astronauts… the whole time…I just think the way we put them on a pedestal because they can look at half the world at once AND WE CAN’T SEE THEM WHEN THEY DO IT!!!

Come on, Twinkie.

You know how sometimes snipers successfully carry out a mission without a hitch? It’s almost like him and his target were all there was in the world, because on the one hand that poor bastard bit it cause he didn’t even know it was coming, and on the other hand that poor bastard bit it cause he didn’t have anything to hide behind when he saw the gun. Both ways he’s dead. And both ways that sniper walks away assured of his honor. Because Americans can’t conceive of the difference between doing what your job requires and understanding that what some jobs require is not honorable.

Do you really think I was having a battle fantasy? Because my point was more that YOU GUYS are having a fantasy, about a dude…..who thought it was a good idea to jump on THE DUMBEST bandwagon in human history. When the bandwagon got to the other side of the world, the dude found out there wasn’t any beer at the party…and they had told him there was going to beer at the party….but he never once doubted it was a good idea to go to a party on the other side of the world that didn’t have any beer. And never did.

Simple mix up. The Pres thought Saddam was a drinker. Didn’t matter, because then the dude decided these dirt poor bastards deserved to die, after the barbarians decided to defend their neighborhood from being blown up and occupied by some high-tech aliens who spoke an unknown language. So he set out in earnest to show them what happens when you try to defend what’s yours: You Get Killed Defenselessly.

And he showed that to something like 200 of those pathetically impoverished barbarians who would even fight sometimes with nothing but rocks, and didn’t even have any beer. Except the dude and his buddies couldn’t win the war, and they came home losers. Didn’t matter though, since he was a celebrity, for sniping more men, women and children than anyone ever, with barely a scratch on him.

I’ll stop before I get to the tragedy, because it would just be too easy, and in all seriousness I do think Chris Kyle is an American Hero. Hercules with a rifle. But you know what would have put him in the ultimate all-time running? If he hadn’t sounded like a fucking idiot when he talked about what he did and why he did it and what he thought about having done it.

And you seem to be one of these types who think that “it can’t get any worse.”

It can.

9/11, as shocking and as dramatic as it was, wore off psychologically once the people realized there was no more follow-on attacks. Furthermore, it was geographically very limited. People in Portland and Des Moines didn’t feel all that threatened.

You can’t “kill” a country this size with this many people no matter how dramatic an attack is and how many people you kill aside from nuclear attacks. But you can unravel a soft society like ours by creating a mass psychological spiral-disintegration.

America has already been killed for many of us. First, each and every day more and more non-Europeans flood into this nation forever changing the America we grew up in. Would garrison state Israel permit its ethnic character to be so changed?

Second, you might think people have forgotten about 9-11, but the bureaucracy has not forgotten. And our way of life has forever been altered into something completely unrecognizable to the previous generation. We have ridiculous security checks seemingly everywhere from airports to ballparks. We have government surveillance on levels unimaginable just a little over a decade ago, all the result of 9-11. And of course we blew the budget trying to nation-build two backwaters for over a decade with predictable results. And it appears we are itching to keep going back for more. Does garrison state Israel try to nation build? I suppose they might have in Lebanon, but have since learned their lesson.

And yet the simple fact is the 9-11 guys, the Boston Bombers, Lee Malvo, even Major Hasan, are either immigrants, foreign visa holders or sons of post-1965 immigrants. In other words these guys really should have never been in this nation. Yet immigration is one thing that apparently is so sacrosanct that we will travel half way around the world to nation build an alien nation for a decade at the cost of a trillion dollars before we even consider changing our immigration policy. But no, it’s the right of everyone around the world to come to America, and apparently that right is inalienable. Does garrison state Israel offer that right too?

I’d switch places with Israel. I’d take their level of terror attacks along with their strong desire to maintain their identity over what we have become any day of the week.

I doubt any other attacks would even come close to the damage 9-11 caused. And as long as we are expending treasure to prevent the next attack, they really have succeeded even if they don’t launch another attack.

I’ll respectfully disagree, although my perception is colored by living in DC both during 9/11 and the DC Sniper incident.

During the sniper incident, the fear level among the populace was much, much higher, essentially a panic. Personally, it was a revelation to me that a dude (two dudes as it turned out) with a rifle taking random potshots at random, unimportant people, could be paralyzing the capital so much.

We really didn’t have the time to see how this was going to play out long term, since they were caught in about 3 weeks, but one can imagine the invasive countermeasures the public would have welcomed, demanded actually, had this attack continued or had it been followed by a series of more.

FWIW, I believe the fact that John Muhammad was tried/executed in seven years from being apprehended, which is lightning speed for a capital case, is a reflection of the general horror and shock at the incident.

Given the proven ability of Islamist leaders to recruit suicide operatives along with the generally low-skill, low-dollar, low-planning of sniper attacks, as compared to a 9/11 or suitcase nuke or whatever, I’ve been eternally mystified why there haven’t been similar incidents.

Perhaps preventing widespread panic, as it were, is as much a component of the authorities predictable downplaying of Major Hasan, El Al ticket counter incidents as a pattern of Islamic terror as it is a knee-jerk PC response.

British aid plus blockade would have been enough to ensure a Soviet victory.Things would have just taken a bit longer (Berlin falls in ’46?).

I still disagree. The Soviet war economy was on the verge of collapse in 1942, and they were receiving generous American aid by that time. The Brits themselves needed American aid, so how much could they have sent the Soviets? Also the Soviets faced difficulties finding new conscripts by 1945, because they were burning through more soldiers than came of military age each year. With German troop strengths 50% higher (you don’t think without American intervention there would have been a Normandy front, and many of the 8.8cm guns would have been sent to the east as well, since they would have proved less useful in German cities in the absence of American bombers), I think Soviet losses would have been still higher, and German losses probably lower (less lost to encirclements etc.), which would have meant at best the USSR having to sue for peace.

Yes, Nazi Germany was horrendous. But it’s better to argue that without American intervention Europe would be under German rule than under Soviet rule, because American intervention actually caused Eastern Europe to fall under Soviet rule.

However, often interventions lead to unintended consequences. It’s for example not impossible that Hitler and Stalin would have fought a couple of years more, and by 1947, both of them exhausted, would have grudgingly made a peace with each other. This would have led to two weakened monster-states, both of which would have had to pursue American favors against the other.

According to Jeffrey Herf’s highly convincing book (this title was recommended by no less an authority than Professor Evans), Hitler was so irrational that he believed American Jews both had actual influence over American policy and that they cared for their European brethren. So he thought he can treat them like hostages, threatening (already in 1939) with their extermination. As American involvement in the war grew, Hitler turned the screws on his hostages, and when war broke out, he started exterminating them.

I’m convinced by Herf, his otherwise sharp logic only breaks down when he keeps insisting that there was no Jewish influence over Roosevelt or US policy at all. He could perhaps argue that Jews weren’t all-powerful (true), or that they weren’t part of a giant conspiracy (even if often acting in concert), so they were only led by their emotions (hating Hitler and pushing for war against him) and not by rational considerations a conspiratorial organization might have had (considering that maybe they should push for peace with Hitler in exchange for Hitler letting the Jews out of Germany).

This also means that actually the holocaust was partly a result of American involvement in the war, which would explain why the declaration of war with America was so coincident with the all-out unleashing of the “Final Solution” (cf. Evans: The Third Reich At War, the discussion starting at p242), and why Hitler was so open about his threats. It all makes sense if he was thinking of European Jews as hostages, whose fate could be used as bargaining chips vis-à-vis the influential Jews in America:

Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa!

I’m not saying this is necessarily so, but I think that using the worst case (US having to stand up against a unified Eurasian totalitarian dictatorship) as a foregone conclusion is just wrong. It is possible, but there are other possibilities (like the weakened Hitler and Stalin both facing a strong and nuclear US with the British Empire as an ally, and the Jewish holocaust not having happened), so one can argue that there was also a best case scenario, especially if we think Hitler would have died around 1950 anyway (and probably his successors would have been less rigid about ideology).

Given the proven ability of Islamist leaders to recruit suicide operatives along with the generally low-skill, low-dollar, low-planning of sniper attacks, as compared to a 9/11 or suitcase nuke or whatever, I’ve been eternally mystified why there haven’t been similar incidents.

I think they like going home to their families at the end of the day. A tenfold increase in resources devoted to killing them and their followers kind of puts the kibosh on that. A basic principle of warfare (politics, really) is never make more enemies than you have the resources to handle. Given their shoestring resources, and our practically unlimited ability to throw resources at the problem (at least relative to them) vis-a-vis killing them, why would they want to alienate their left-wing and occasionally paleocon allies stateside, and their dovish European allies, who claim that there is no Islamic terrorist threat outside of American blundering abroad? Resources thrown at attacking Americans are wasted resources that could have been used against local Muslim regimes to gain land and population, from which flows money and manpower to continue the jihad. The overwhelmingly Muslim populace is amenable to the idea that victory in battle is a sign of Allah’s approval and will get on the bandwagon.

Whereas the only thing they get from attacking the US is bragging rights and an American populace baying for blood. When 9/11 was fresh in the American psyche, left-wing blogs (Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs being a case in point) were unapologetically calling for something near genocide. It was only with the passage of time, when follow-on Muslim terror attacks did not systematically materialize, that they reverted to their usual unworldly left-wing kumbaya platitudes.

One reason Palestinians attack Israel is to encourage Jews to leave. If enough Jews get out, Israel’s ability to ward off its neighbors will decline, and it is possible that the state will become weak enough to tempt its neighbors into another combined invasion, but this time, one that succeeds. Another reason they do it is to keep the cause alive. If Palestinians don’t keep refreshing the tree of Fatah (conquest, of Israel) with the blood of martyrs, why should other Muslims care about their cause? Heck, why should Palestinians care? Eventually, everyone will become resigned to the existence of Israel, and the dream of a mostly Jew-free Middle East will become just another musty relic.

You can’t “kill” a country this size with this many people no matter how dramatic an attack is and how many people you kill aside from nuclear attacks. But you can unravel a soft society like ours by creating a mass psychological spiral-disintegration.

Since that unraveling might include a decrease in moral preening vis-a-vis the current rules of engagement, that might not be such a good thing for jihadists and jihadist leaders.

http://theclinteastwoodarchive.blogspot.com/2012/06/ethical-vision-of-clint-eastwood-sara.html

You make some good points. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, although, as I indicated, I have more questions about this than answers.

The first question I have, by your logic, is why do 9/11 in the first place then? Certainly people moved by your postulated mindset, that sniper attacks are just going to enrage the beast, would even be more abhorrent of something even higher profile than 9/11.

Or, did they learn from their mistakes with 9/11? Then that means our response to 9/11 was more or less appropriate.

These sound like disingenuous questions, but they really are not. Like I said, I’ve always been a little mystified by this, but I’m a pretty one-dimensional dude not at all suited for byzantine ME politics/intrigues/trains of logic.

I suppose one could argue for the World Wars (on the most abstract of the three criteria I mentioned). One could also argue that, had WWI not left such a bad taste in Germany’s mouth (in part due to American intervention), the corporal could not have seized power and started WWII.

I’ll respectfully disagree, although my perception is colored by living in DC both during 9/11 and the DC Sniper incident.

I don’t doubt a Charlie Hebdo or DC-sniper type attacks would cause terror. I am saying they would not be as effective as 9-11. How could they be? The 9-11 attacks essentially baited the US into two wars, long occupations and trillions spent. It also led to our intervention and support of the overthrow of the governments of Libya and Syria. It has left the islamists in more control of the middle east than they ever could have dreamed. Did any of us ever envision what ISIS has carved out? And even in Afghanistan, it is only a matter of time before the Taliban take over.

The plum on the cake for the islamists is that they have been allowed to ethnically cleanse Christians from many places in the ME, and they have generated a new torrent of muslim refugees into Europe and the USA, which will only give them more potential recruits in the lands of their enemies.

How could a few more sniping attacks do any better than this? And does the US even have the money or desire to repeat what we have done since 2001?

If anything more domestic attacks might, I say might, cause a greater number of Americans to DEMAND an end to this open border nonsense, which of course is at the heart of the matter, yet is never allowed to be discussed. Quite simply if they were not allowed into our nation in the first place, these attacks would have not happened. Ditto for Europe.

Perhaps preventing widespread panic, as it were, is as much a component of the authorities predictable downplaying of Major Hasan, El Al ticket counter incidents as a pattern of Islamic terror as it is a knee-jerk PC response.

I tend to think it is more along the lines of a knee-jerk PC response. The media played up Ferguson which they knew full well would lead to riots with innocent people, like that St. Louis Bosniak and the NYC cops, being murdered. But they played it up anyway. Yet, they won’t play up black-on-white crime or islamic terror because they don’t want the still-majority white population to realize that they’ve been had. They might demand a change of course in our ongoing transformation. And we can’t have that.