Re: Guns Yes, Tampons NO! Welcome to Texas, Y'all!
He was only for a standing army during a time of potential invasion which quickly became a reality.
And your proof for this is...what, exactly? And don't give me what you personally think he meant - give me QUOTES.
Oh, I figure you're thinking of his quote that the acme of generalship is to win without fighting - but that doesn't at all mean that he didn't believe in standing armies. It means he (quite rightly) believed that it was best if an army could win without bloodshed. He would have loved one of the early battles by Genghis Khan in northern China wherein they approached a fortified city with an army in front of it that was significantly larger than his own. The city - like most cities - was built next to a river, so Genghis Khan had the river dammed - he was going to dam it to the point that when he knocked down the dam, it would wash away the opposing army. The dam gave way ahead of time and the opposing army was suddenly covered in waist-deep water, and they knew that if Genghis Khan wanted to, he could do it all over again and more effectively...so they surrendered. That is a prime example of Sun Tzu's "acme of generalship".
He trained the troops, led them on an incredibly successful guerrilla campaign, and then quietly retired to write his Art of War. If Sun Tzu was so pro-standing army then why did he not stay as General?
Gee, I don't know, maybe because he was getting OLD???? You're comparatively quite young - otherwise you wouldn't have said that. This may come as a surprise to you, but generals - the ones who live - always retire sooner or later. Always. The wise ones don't wait too long to retire, for there are many examples of generals who were brilliant at first, but grew too cautious or too arrogant in their power as they grew older. That, and no matter how much one loves the military, one gets tired of being part of it, as this retired Navy man can tell you from first-hand experience.
He would find our general cluster****s in Afghanistan and Iraq comical at the least. We largely failed to engage the enemy on our own terms, failed horribly in winning over the population, fought when we could have avoided it, failed in keeping public support and even that of much of our own military, and are engaged in a series of prolonged wars that may escalate yet again.
I quite agree, with the exception of your last phrase. We're not going to war again anytime soon unless we're forced to do so, thanks to the fact that in the modern democratic world, the will of the people whether or not to go to war is a MUCH stronger determinant than it was in the days when the king could wake up one day and say, "let's go invade somebody!" Here's an example: ten DAYS after he was sworn in to office in 2001, Bush 43 had a cabinet meeting concerning the invasion of Iraq...but even then he knew that he couldn't just up and invade. Then, a few days (or was it weeks) after 9/11, he told Bush that 9/11 was his opportunity to invade Iraq. Obama ended the war in Iraq and stopped most combat ops in Afghanistan...and when it came to Libya he put no boots on the ground at all. And according to polls, Americans are strongly against us getting directly involved in Syria. I sure don't want to see us putting boots on the ground there!
Moving on to the Constitutional level, our own Founding Fathers would and have vehemently argued that every American has an individual duty to uphold the Constitution and no duty to support the government itself, rather the opposite. The Bill of Rights is specifically stated to be made up of inalienable (rights that can and shall not be taken away from the people and upheld by any means necessary) rights. Between the NSA's usual bull****, PRISM, the Patriot act, the 2013 NDAA, etc. etc. the government has explicitly and inarguably violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh Amendments as well as Article III of the Constitution in thirteen years alone.
You should read a bit more American history - our politicians have a long and storied past of violating the Constitution. When it comes to the First Amendment, there were people sentenced to prison during WWI for a decade for merely speaking out against the war. When it comes to surveillance, you should read up on what J. Edgar Hoover did sometime. You can pontificate all you want, all day long about the Constitution this and the Constitution that, but you'll find out as the years go by that when the government (rightly or wrongly) perceives a threat, it will address that threat and will find a way (legal or not) to ignore the Constitutional rights of those involved.
And here's a story for you - back in 2000, I was in Security on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, and my office got a call from someone with a foreign accent who told us that when we pulled in next time in the Middle East, they were going to blow up a vessel next to us. Of course we made sure that everybody and his brother were informed. We deployed and pulled in to Dubai in early October, and we kept a sharp eye out for any possible threat. Nothing happened and we pulled out. Four days later the USS Cole was bombed in the same way that we were told we'd be bombed. I'm sure the Feds eventually found the phone records of the individual who called, but if we'd had PRISM then, even if the person called from overseas we'd have had his phone number and everyone who had called or had been called by that phone number, and quite possibly identified those people using those phones. Seeing as how one of the people involved in the planning of the attack on the USS Cole was later one of the hijackers on 9/11, if we'd had PRISM, we might've forestalled the 9/11 attacks and the decade of national insanity that followed.
So now that you know this story, would you personally be willing to let the government know your phone records (never mind that your phone company already does (and so do all the other corporations your phone company sells your number to)) if it might forestall another 9/11 or worse?
Snowden has a duty, as an American citizen, to uphold the Constitution by any means necessary. That makes him a hero and a patriot, especially considering the fact that the vast majority of the American public are too ignorant, unwilling, or in denial to do what needs to be done to uphold the supreme law of the land.
Snowden is a traitor. Dude, he went to China (Hong Kong is STILL China) and then to Russia. Come now, do you REALLY think that their intelligence agencies weren't all over his computers? Are you really so naive as to think that? And if you've read Sun Tzu, you'd know that he held the nation's intelligence services in highest regard and of prime importance.
And then there's Snowden's brother-in-treason, Bradley Manning. If Manning had only released the video of the civilians getting killed, he'd be a hero and I'd call him a hero. But that's not all he released. He also released (in addition to hundreds of thousands of military communiques) a quarter million diplomatic messages and cables. Do you remember what happened to Valerie Plame thanks to Cheney and company? Remember how she - a CIA agent - was publicly exposed, and as a result her entire operation and all the agents she'd worked with in that operation were exposed and no longer of any use? Cheney quite literally committed treason...
and every one of those quarter million diplomatic messages and cables that Manning released had the potential for exposing an agent or informants just as Cheney had exposed Valerie Plame. Manning didn't understand this - he thought he was doing the right thing - but he was a low-level wonk. He could not have known which messages would have endangered agents and informants...but it's all but certain that we had agents and informants (and their families) die thanks to what Manning did.
And what do you think Sun Tzu would have said about Snowden and Manning? Again, read about how important he felt a nation's intelligence was to the preservation of that nation.
If you would like sources regarding the intentions of the Founding Fathers regarding the Constitution, I would be happy to provide them.
Sure - go ahead...and bear in mind that you'd be hard-pressed to find any major nation that actually abides by the freedoms that we still have. For instance, if you lived in China or Russia - you know, those nations that Snowden ran away to - just what you've written in this post I'm replying to would have been enough to place you on a watch list of possible insurgents. You really, truly have no conception of the degree of freedom you now have. Yes, it's always en vogue to claim "They're taking our freedoms away!!!!" but in reality you're much freer than most. This is not to say we're perfect - we're certainly not, and especially towards minorities. There's always room for improvement.
And realize that times change, threats change. You see, there's this thing called 'evolution', and it basically goes like this: those creatures who don't adapt to changes in their environment, changes to their world...such creatures die off and go extinct. Just as this principle applies to anthills and herd animals, it also applies to nations. This is why absolute monarchies used to be the rule - now they're almost extinct. Economies used to be almost solely libertarian in character - now the economies with the highest standards of living in the world are almost exclusively socialized democracies.
Either adapt to the new world - and the changing nature of threats therein - or go extinct.
