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The point is that a typical liberal arts school requires the first two years of school to be general ed type stuff that make a person well rounded. The point is not that they do not teach enough “conservative” course but that they do not require any balanced courses. As I have said before, a liberal arts education is to teach you how to think, not what to think. It is pretty obvious from the degree requirements for most schools that they are more interested in teaching kids what instead of how to think. AMU is an exception and not the rule and their degree requirements reflect the fact that their target student body is the military, which is traditionally more classically liberal than society as a whole.
Do not intentionally kill innocent human life.
You are right that it should be a universal rule but sadly, it is not. Let me list examples where it is not:1. Muslim culture: the blood debt is alive and well there and children are killed because they are potential threats later as they seek vengeance. I have personally seen that occur in Iraq.2. It was common in medieval sacks to kill even the women and children. It was derided at the time but still done because killing the children stopped later attempts at revenge.In a perfect world there would be a universal justice. Sadly, we live in a far from perfect world. We can only operate on the basis of the world we live in, not the world as we would have it. We can strive for the ideal and we should. But that does not change reality.
Give me a universal norm of justice and I will give you examples where that norm has been ignored or violated at will. Such norms are a pipe dream and those dreams don't come out of a tobacco pipe.
I think the main problem or area of divergence is that our concepts of what war is are different. You seem to be talking more about what war should be than what it really is. I try and take a realistic approach to looking at war. Humanistic principles are OK if both sides to a conflict agree upon them. It is when they don't that brute force comes into play.Example 1: Siege WarfareIn the Middle Ages it was common for besiegers to ask for the surrender of a besieged town or castle once it had been fully invested. If the besieged took this opportunity the surrender was generally negotiated and the besieged wer allowed to leave with an agreed upon amount of goods and normally on payment of a ransom. These are the terms Saladin demanded after he took Jerusalem in 1187
"After lengthy negotiations, an agreement was reached between Salah al-Din and the Latins according to which they were granted safe conduct to leave the city, provided that each male paid a ransom of ten dinars, each female paid five dinars, and each child was ransomed for two dinars. All those who paid their ransom within forty days were allowed to leave the city, while those who could not ransom themselves were to be enslaved." source
That was not unusual. However, if the besieged refused to surrender once the place was invested and defeat was only a matter of time, for whatever reason, a relieving force was on the way, the enemy camp had disease, or winter was coming, etc. then once the besieger took the town or castle the lives and property of everyone in the place was forfeit and it was liable to be sacked. That is where you get the stories such as Jerusalem in 1099, Carcassone in 1209 or the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. The rules were known to all and the besieged threw the dice if they refused surrender. Not all sieges ended badly for the defender. I think I remember reading somewhere that less than 50% of medieval sieges were successfully concluded.Example 2: ParoleParole as a concept goes back to classical times. It is essentially when captured troops are released on their word of honor that they will not reenter the current war. The caveat is that if previously paroled troops were recaptured they were subject to summary execution. Parole was used in the West until WWI. The last time I am aware of parole being used by a Western nation is by the British in the Boer War.There are other common rules that fi the traditional Law of War and are not in the Geneva Conventions. One that would be called a war crime today is the doctrine of reprisal. Which, if you really think about it, reprisal is the only effective method of retaliating for violations of typical conventions of war. Another thing is the farcical notion that an absolute right to surrender exists. It does not. Surrender does not have to be accepted and thus take no prisoner orders are legal, even under the Geneva Conventions. Those that violate surrender are liable to be summarily executed and to cause their comrades surrender to be refused.At the risk of engaging in metaphysics: What is justice? It is a subjective term and depends very much on cultural norms. Just compare the criminal punishments of various nations for the same crimes (theft for instance) and you will see exactly what I am talking about. To paraphrase, the only Just War is the one that my side wins.
Phid, what I am saying is that each belligerent determines what they think is the appropriate level of force. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it; it is a question of winning or losing. Not seeing or failing to recognize that fact is what has doomed western armies to failure in every insurgency since WWII. And yes, I consider Iraq and Afghanistan both failures in general. In both places we let our moral qualms get in the way of effectively prosecuting the wars. In the process we kept our humanity but the fact remains that if we had been willing to round up and execute the families of insurgents we could have decisively won in both places. The nature of both cultures is that they are family and tribally oriented and a real threat to the continued existence of either would be an extremely effective way to ensure control of the country. It worked for Saddam for almost 35 years, why would it not work for us?The only method of enforcement on the battlefield is terror and terror is what generally keeps armies from going hog wild. The terror that the same thing they are doing are doing could be done to them or theirs. It really is that simple.
It depends on the type of war. There are essentially two; limited and unlimited wars. The deciding factor is the objective of the belligerents. A war can be limited for one army and unlimited for the other. Iraq is an example of this. It was a limited war for the US but unlimited for Saddam because the survival of himself and his regime rode on victory.Within those broad types of war pretty much anything goes that advances the objective of the belligerents. There are limits to what is acceptable but those limits are based on what the belligerents determine and nothing else. For example, in general prisoners are not killed although they are completely within the power of their captors and thus subject to summary execution. Prisoners are mostly not killed because if we start killing prisoners then the other side will start killing our men they have captured, it is self-limiting.But essentially you are right, anything goes. The nice guy often does not win. War is the ultimate Hobbesian situation and those with scruples who refuse to do the hard or distasteful things lose or win only partial victories. That being said, every war is different and so is every situation so the maximum use of force is not always appropriate. The amount of force used must be tailored to each situation with only that amount of force being used that is required to accomplish the mission. Calculating the right amount of force is the most difficult thing to do and in the modern era most Westerners have erred on the side of not using enough force.
I don't deny that he is perhaps a fascinating figure. I just pointed out why I have never studied him in any detail. Blame my Sophomore high school history teacher, who could make the nuking of Japan sound boring. 😀
You notice how the rabbit looks like it has scales on it? Or perhaps markings like a cheetah? If I were a kid at the time seeing that drawing, I don't know if I would have wanted the Easter Bunny to come to my house. Looks kind of scary.
Maybe that was it's original purpose and the eggs were possessed or rotten.
Those numbers are still lopsided but not out of the norm for a siege. The typical ratio for besieger to besieged is roughly 2 1/2 to 1. The other factors that I talked about also mitigate against calling any siege a lopsided battle as a siege is not really a battle but more of a waiting game. Nobody ever wants to storm a besieged town as that kind of assault is the most dangerous and difficult attack you can make. Casualty ratios for failed assaults are all out of proportion to those of anything but the most decisive open-field battles. Ratios for failed assaults are often in the 15-20 to 1 range for casualties suffered by the assaulting force versus defending force. There is no finesse in an assault on defended works.
According to Wikipedia it was 77,000 Union to 33,000 CSA at Vicksburg and Historynet.com has it at 75,000 to 34,000. I don't think you could discount Joe Johnston's Army of the Tennessee though because it was a force in being that Grant had to take into account thus Grant could not concentrate his army against only Vicksburg. Plus it was a siege and not a come as you are battle where what you bring is what you have. Grant received fresh troops throughout the Siege whereas the Rebs did not have that luxury. grant would not have had that advantage in an open field fight either.
Washington went out of his way to defer to the Continental Congress during the Revolution. The last thing he wanted to be seen as or act like was some kind of Generalissimo.
To be honest I have never really studied him or any of the other Gilded Age presidents as they all seemed pretty boring to me in school.
That is the problem when quasi-religious beliefs are based on ill-understood data. They climate changers will not go to any lengths to keep their ridiculous theory afloat.
That is neat. Is the rabbit jumping over the basket or is it somehow attached? I could not tell either way.
