Black Hawk Down Reaction
Added 2021-12-02 15:33:27 +0000 UTCFor the full reaction including the Movie you can download the full reaction torrent:
Don't forget to SEED for a FEW days!!!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ey2fS2t2ZdN2wXboApDe-VLveE5HuSZ7/view?usp=sharing
To use the torrent you can download Utorrent Desktop (which I use) or Bitorrent Classic
https://www.utorrent.com/DOWNLOADS/WIN
https://www.bittorrent.com/products/
How to use torrents - https://rebrand.ly/3d808e
If you want to use Google Drive which includes the movie - https://rebrand.ly/2371dd
Comments
Excellent analysis, Alexander! I hope Ellie will take a moment to read through your comments - it should hopefully answer the questions she asked at the end. Interesting that you too noticed her reasonable tactical suggestion about destroying the key building that was the initial objective of the mission.
Gary Slator
2021-12-09 15:42:52 +0000 UTCThis movie follows the events of that battle extremely closely. The thing in Mogadishu was really hard to deal with. When there were 20,000 marines there to support the UN everything was fine, the militants wouldn't openly confront a large US force. Once they left the militants no longer feared openly defying the UN peacekeeping force. As far as why they didn't just blow up that building, something similar had been done before, but due to bad luck or just bad intelligence and planning it resulted in a lot of civilian deaths. Things like that even in the 90s weren't as common as they might have been 50 or 60 years ago, but with the modern information age in an instant pictures and first hand accounts are circulated around the world and the optics of civilian casualties rightfully looks really bad. It's kind of like when we tried bombing what we thought was a facility related to chemical weapons in Iraq in the 90s, but the building ended up being filled with civilians (there's some evidence that Saddam Hussein basically orchestrated us killing his own citizens in that incident through a false intelligence leak). That's part of why US politicians wanted the operation to be smaller scale, with no aerial artillery support or armored vehicles. Public opinion of involvement in the area was really negative after the civilian casualties. My personal opinion is that the civilian casualties from those bombings were horrible, but the idea that US involvement was somehow wrong or evil was insanity driven by the news and politicians. At that point there were more than a half million people dead from starvation, and you had a bunch of crazy militants hell bent on genocide of rival clans. Yes the US screwed up in some earlier operations resulting in a lot of civilian deaths, but those casualties were in the hundreds, versus the 3 million facing starvation and the 500,000 already dead. Part of the city of Mogadishu was basically under militant control, the entire population of Somalia was starving due to the impacts of the civil War, and there was a lot of racially targeted violence, since the different clans in the area didn't get along, a lot like what happened in Rwanda and many other African nations. Many of the people living in that part of the city didn't really have anywhere else to go, and the militants were using the civilian population basically as human shields. Compared to bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan who were based in the wilderness it was a lot harder to get to them without impacting civilians. And without being able to remove those people in power there was no way to save large portions of that population from genocide and/or starvation. I'm really ashamed to say, but partisan politics in the US (and in the UN) very often results in the group opposed to intervention hyper-focusing on anything done wrong by the nation's trying to help, while ignoring the problem which is resulting in a 1000 to 10,000 times as many dead civilians. They inundate news cycles with the negative to sway public opinion, using a narrative ignores the overall reality of a situation to push their views. I hate it because every single political group on the international and national level use tactics like this to push their own agendas, while people who have no way to protect themselves suffer. Things look a little better now, and the African Union seems to be a bit more stable and able to exert it's influence to protect people from its member nations, but it's still a horrible mess in Africa right now. Genocide, starvation, and slavery are still extremely prevalent for some groups in certain African countries.
Alex
2021-12-07 02:40:45 +0000 UTCEllie yet again demonstrates her super capacity to empathise and engage so genuinely with a particularly tough war movie. One of the actors she seems to have recognised (yet Mish somehow missed) was Tom Sizemore, playing a Colonel here, who memorably was Sergeant Horvath (Tom Hank’s old army sidekick) in Saving Private Ryan.
Gary Slator
2021-12-03 13:47:07 +0000 UTCWould be cool to see them watch Jarhead
Delphi
2021-12-03 09:51:37 +0000 UTCGood reaction from both of you.
Runsnaked
2021-12-03 04:17:30 +0000 UTCwatch blood diamond its amazing
Emin Duranovic
2021-12-02 17:24:19 +0000 UTC
