That a genuinely insane thing to say when most of the major power of ww1 used it to some extent. How can one unironically believe engaging in a tactic fully allowed by the geneva conventions and utilized in the past by nations no one in thier right mknd would ever consider comparing to the victorians in terms of evil makes one equal to the victorians. Its not even like i am suggesting first strikes. Simply mainting the ability to retailiate as a deterrent.
Who let bro cook???
I have moral and practical objections to that.
People are a bit unnerved when somebody enthusiastically presents a scenario where the use of chemical weapons is acceptable. I have seen ideas that are more morally reprehensible discussed in the forum ("We should replay Sherman's March to the sea", which does explicitly call for targeting civilian infrastructure), but the push back isn't surprising. Nearly any deplorable act has been defended as "dire necessity" and people are twitchy about the visceral image of people asphyxiating in a hospital due to mustard gas.
Morality is not a points game but it is relative. I think it is genuinely absurd to apply the same moral standards to a concentration camp uprising or slave uprising as you would to the army's of two random developed democrys duking it out over a territorial beef. I think holding a soviet soldier whose whole village was slaughtered by the wehrmacht and the wherhmacht soldiers who did the slaughtering to the same standard is absurd. It's not that it's acceptable to do atrocity if you enemy is evil enough but that if an enemy had hurt you enough some of your troops will do retaliatory atrocity and I think that they should be approached with leniency, and understanding. I think a freed concentration camp survivor who takes a weapon and shoots the Guard he personally saw beat some of his family to death should be given no punishment and whoever have them the weapon a slap on the wrist if anything. A woman held against her will and repeatedly beaten and raped who executes thier captor in thier sleep should be given great leniancy. Even if escape without killing them was possible. Slaves who light the plantation a blaze and burn the owner and thier family alive in thier rebellion and or escape whether they did it intentionally or not should not be treated the same as if an invading army or group of bandits had done the same. Humanity plunges into the true depths of depravity so rarely these days and that's a good thing. I think ensuring those unwillingly dragged into the deep abysses of man made atrocity who choose to act on thier trauma against those who inflicted on them they should be approached with leniency, kindness and understanding. Those who pulled them into the abyss and dove headfirst into atrocity first of thier own freewill should be treated and approached with contempt.
So you do believe in what I have critized. Good to know.
Of course that is absurd. Slave uprisings aren't institutional, receive no military training and can't be expected to uphold the laws of armed conflict. I'm not expecting random civilians to uphold standards other people are trained for. Counterpoint, what does this have to do with anything? We are playing the president of a nation, not a ragtag group of resistance fighters. We are not talking about 5 people in a van making improvised chemical weapons, we are talking about your suggestion to use retaliatory chemical weapons as a matter of policy of a modern state.
Ok, I don't disagree that retaliatory violence is less bad than the initial violence. But "less bad" still contains the notable adjective "bad". Nobody is arguing that using chemical weapons would make us "just as bad as Victoria", but they are arguing that chemical weapons are unjustified. This has nothing to do with our discussion, and the correct answer to soldiers committing war crimes is appropriate punishment, so that war crimes don't become institutionally acceptable when people are upset enough by something. Your conflation of institutions with the lone, traumatized individual shouldn't be done. An individual can be overwhelmed by emotions, a group of officials in an air-conditioned office somewhere can't. To argue otherwise enables bad actors.
And there we go, the course I suggested is the only action. Nevermind just equipping our own soldiers with gas masks, something that is way cheaper and internationally acceptable, we just have to use this recourse. I'm less charitable when people go straight to discussing a potential atrocity as historical necessity, rather than evaluating countermeasures.
Your reasoning here is insane, and would lead to viewing the entire Victorian population as our enemy. The presence of some people in the Victorian state being loyal enough to become martyrs doesn't mean the population can't be won over, just like the presence of some partisan groups in an area doesn't mean the area couldn't be pacified. Let's stay sober and acknowledge what we saw: A number of veterans, probably out of a mix of coercion and propaganda, followed Victorian orders to suicide attack our forces. This was done to send a message ("The Victorian control over it's population is absolute") and you're buying their propaganda hook, line and sinker. This doesn't mean the battle to convince the population we are better than a fascist state is lost.
They didn't vote to join us because they were concerned over a retaliatory massacre of their city. And of course any march will face resistance, but that doesn't mean "the entire adult population will fight to death against us, regardless of their actions".
This is the image strongly authoritarian states like to sell to the outside. Fascists do it, North Korea does it, Russia and the Soviet Union did it and so on. "The population is completely united behind the great leader, with every citizen willing to die for the state" is what authoritarians like to believe. But I don't think it's true. Authoritarian states are in the weird position where a lot of their stability relies on the image of invincibility, leading situation where protests either seem ineffectual or rapidly spiral out of control. Humans in authoritarian regimes are still humans and can be persuaded to oppose their government, if they believe it to be possible. There is a reason authoritarian governments heavily invest in internal propaganda and censorship, because the population can be persuaded to oppose them if they learn of information. They are still subject to popular approval, though in a much more stratified way. And this works in reverse, population can rally to support authoritarian states under the right circumstances.
We are talking hypotheticals here, but to give another example of a fascist states that survived for a long time: Franco's Spain, which survived for 35 years. He certainly propagandized to the youth, suppressed opposition, mass culled his enemies after the war and so on. And yet his government still fell, thanks to a liberal coup after his death. Spain didn't require a mass culling of the adult population to escape fascism. I have no reason to believe the entire victorian population to actually be fanatical regime supporters and you're assumption they do is very odd. France certainly didn't mandate people to die rather than get pacemakers.
I'll agree with this, and while we could probably make some really cheap chemical weapons as a side effect of setting up a fertilizer and chemical industry. It would be vastly better to invest that production into more pesticides and fertilizer and other chemical goods, entirely because gassing a Vic formation would be a trick that would work effectively once and then never again.
Ok if gasing a military formation is across the line nuking a city definitely is. Even I think that's way over the line. I would support tactical nuking thier army formations if we had such capabilities but WMDs in civilian targets is a big red line for me.
Did he fold them into knots or something?
It's either a mis writing or he is in fact double jointed and is trying to casually "flex" on them.
Okay since people apparently don't know what folding your arms behind you back is. Here's a picture.It's either a mis writing or he is in fact double jointed and is trying to casually "flex" on them.
It's the fact that he folded his arms behind his back twice without any mention of them unfolding or using them to perform another task.Okay since people apparently don't know what folding your arms behind you back is. Here's a picture.
That's not 'folding arms behind back' that's either Parade Rest, or standing At Ease, both of which are formation positions or Parade Rest is also done when addressing a non-commissioned officer as a subordinate/lower rank. Standing at Attention is done for officers of superior rank, and unless getting dressed down/in a highly formal situation, doesn't tend to happen for long until the superior officer gives the command of Relax (can move everything except your right foot)Okay since people apparently don't know what folding your arms behind you back is. Here's a picture.
Yes. Some of us are, in fact, going to be thoroughly against nuking any cities anywhere. Or of using nukes at all.
Yeah, and even if we did pick the option in the nation-building segment at the start of the quest that gave us a nuke, it would just be a bomb in the back of a flatbed truck, and honestly we would be better off using our actions doing anything else than worrying about a delivery system.
Except it's not just an image Victoria is projecting. It's not just propaganda. It's objective observable fact. We have literally observed divisions of the Victorian charge themselves into machine gun nests TO THE LAST MAN. They climbed over hills of thier own corpeses to try desperately to kill just one of us. We have seen hundreds of Victorian soldiers and sailors choose to drown or freeze ro death rather than allow themselves to be captured. Some of the ones we did fish out of the water came out clutching grenades! Old men agreed to slaughter there own fellow townsfolk and to die to the last to kill just a small number more of us. You cannot sit there and tell me that Victoria is just another unpopular authoritarian regime trying to pretend thier soldiers are dogmatic and fanatical when we have seen countless examples of dogmatism and fanaticism. Thier support amongst at the very least the male white population is objectviely strong and fanatical. Its not just us that have physically observed these phenomenon. Victoria has done similar shows of fanatism in almost every war they've fought in. Thier fanatism is not an image, its not an illusion , it's not something isolated to a few elite hyper ideological divisions. It's something that permeates their entire martial culture and is real, has been objectively observed numerous times in numerous conditions and its a very real phenomenon.
So what, exactly, are you actually proposing be done?
