Grunching, but Trump isn't a terrorist.

You were talking about our military striking targets and causing collateral casualties and implied that it was because the victims were nonwhite. But the person giving the order to strike is nonwhite. You could not put that together from my comment?

At last. The plan is to stop the active fomenting of ISIS. Brilliant! Can you be a little more specific though. After all, ISIS already exists and controls large blocks of the Middle East. Are you sure they need us to help them recruit?

Isn't your plan to do nothing and hope that they die on the vine? Or is there something else?

Concerning Butler, you were referring to this?

"In 1931, Butler violated diplomatic norms by publicly recounting gossip about Benito Mussolini in which the dictator allegedly struck and killed a child with his speeding automobile in a hit-and-run accident. The Italian government protested and President Hoover, who strongly disliked Butler, forced Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams III to court-martial him. Butler became the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. He apologized to Secretary Adams and the court-martial was canceled with only a reprimand."

A little thin to make him a basis for your foreign policy strategy, don't you think?

A little muddled here are you not? The dictatorships you are talking about are the ones threatened by ISIS. Fundamentalist Islam is the motivator behind ISIS. I do not think US interests are much in support of fundamentalist Islam. Or are there typos in here that are confusing your comment?

This actually I agree with as I stated earlier. The US support of the fictitious "Arab Spring" by arming insurgents in Syria and supporting them in Egypt and Libya created a power vacuum that help ISIS get a foothold. But it was our opposition to the dictatorships that you mentioned above that got us into this situation, not our support of them as you stated.

There is some truth here in that we did arm fundamentalists at times for other goals and those forces have turned against us. It happened in Afghanistan and it is happening in Syria. We simply cannot resist trying to see democratic states established in that region. It might be good if it happened but the risks of the effort going astray are too great.

But that is water under the bridge. ISIS is here now and we have to deal with them whether we made mistakes that helped them arise or not. It is like a chess game. You may have made mistakes that contributed to the position on the board, but that does not change what the best move is now.

Just to point out, so far you still have not specifically stated what the next move is in your strategy. All I have heard so far is to stop what we are doing. Again, are we at "do nothing"?

I really think that is what you have. We should stop taking any action at all in the ME and hope that ISIS fades away.

We were actually talking about two different things if you want to put it that way. You were talking about how killing innocent people is ok because of what you project as the benevolent intent of the killers. You might ask the parent of a blown up child how they reckon such benevolence.

I was talking about how when you knowingly kill civilians that falls within intent. So if I decided to flood my condo to kill a bug, and the investigator asked me if I intentionally flooded the place, I would have to answer in the affirmative if I was to be honest. If I were to say no, my intention was to drown a bug and the flooding was unintentional, that would be dishonest. I intended both outcomes. The U.S. quite often intends to kill innocent civilians and strike what it claims to be military targets. In actual practice there is almost never a legitimate/legal military target and we are just breaking the law and killing innocent people, both of these intentionally.

I think we would choose to kill less innocent civilians if we assumed their humanity was equal to that of our citizens, especially our white citizens. Do you have a problem with valuing the humanity of Arabs at the same level as white Americans?
What is your source here? It seems to be in contradiction of mine.
Do you really not know that he has a body of work other than the piece I referenced? which I did in part to show how widespread the support for fascism was when they were seen to be aligned with us against working people?

Your thinking is so broken that there wouldn't seem to be any hope of fixing it. It is as though what you believe is a pile of demonstrably false lies which you love like a dung beetle loves ****. If someone took your **** away what would you do?

But then you also say this:

This statement is a version of (thanks to academicians of the anti-war persuasion) a forced concession to reality which few dare to deny at this point. Though acknowledged, it still marginalized in the narrative despite being the primary driving force behind the major crises in the ME. For example, you say your quote above after saying:

I'm not going to write a book explaining to you what U.S. interests actually are, to what extent they have been pursued through support of fundamentalists, and the range of resultant outcomes and reactions. But it appears you know absolutely nothing about Saudi Arabia and our relationship with them. That is a simple but debilitating ignorance which a few google clicks and a bit of light reading can cure. The cliffs notes are that the Saudis are the main purveyors of the fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. The do it all- fund schools, Mosques, and clerics preaching that **** all over the region, blast hateful propaganda over the radio, etc. They are the core generator out of which extremist Islam has been emanating for decades, and they are our best friend. We defend them militarily and diplomatically. We sell them weapons. All lot of their money not going toward advances Jihad and its control over the domestic populations of the region is reinvested in American businesses. This is a very deep and broad relationship which is too big to keep secret. It is also an extremely harmful enterprise to the majority, enough so that a lot of effort goes into keeping people like you blind to it. As you have demonstrated, these efforts are unfortunately very successful.

You filled a post with a lot of nonsense imo and I would be happy to respond to all of it but I have one requirement. You have consistently evaded one element of my posts. Give me a concise, clear answer to this one question.

What should we do about ISIS and its spread in the ME? What is your plan?

Further grunching, but false dichotomy.

If you were talking about me, I do not see a dichotomy in my post, false or otherwise.

I try to keep things simple in this forum and so was trying to keep the discussion focused on the original line of the implications of your definition of terrorism. It seems like you want to talk about my view of what we should do about ISIS. It almost seems like you are saying that, sorry, at this point, ISIS is such a threat that all humanitarian concerns are better dropped.

I have told you what I think we should do about ISIS, at least step 1. When you clumsily declare that the U.S. has never supported fundamentalist Islam, which is about the optimal delusion from a U.S. propaganda standpoint, it doesn't exactly encourage me to dive into a more complex issue like the effective strategy for dealing with ISIS. I'm just trying to show you where your definition of terrorism leads. Conceptually, it leads to non-accountability to laws and values. Practically, it leads to things like ISIS.

I said "grunching" meaning that I couldn't be bothered to read more than the title of the thread before responding.

Domestic terrorism vs. Nut Job is a false dichotomy.

Ah, after eight pages I did not connect your comment with the OP. For what its worth I agree with you.