lazyfatbum Wrote:Kingdom of Heaven said it best, in regards to the conflicts in the middle east.

They've been fighting for no reason for thousands of years, the white people need to ignore them.

N-Man Wrote:Well, that's very silly. At the time of Kingdom of Heaven, the "white men" (the Arabs I've met generally considered themselves to be "white" btw) were engaged in perpetual warfare with each other, while the Middle East was pretty much an ocean of peace - at least if you don't consider the arrival of the Turks, which is what brought the white man to intervene in the first place.

lazyfatbum Wrote:Are we talking about the same middle east? Going back to the start of major society the middle east has been a minefield of culture clash with almost every territory being a war-driven group.

They've done nothing but fight over pieces of land and borders since before Christ, look at the Yom Kippur war and iran's islamic revolution, hell look at now :/ In reference to white people: britain (hello?), USSR, eastern-euro blocks, ROME and especially good ol' USA. = Stay the fuck out.

Middle east as peaceful? When? Pangea!?

N-Man Wrote:Yeah... so between Christ and the Islamic revolution, there's about 2000 years, including 500 or so of which are referred to as the Islamic Golden age (roughly from the Hegira to the invasions of the Seljukid Turks in the 11th and 12th centuries). During that time, the Arabs made great strides in disciplines like astronomy, medicine, chemistry and mathematics, which would eventually be brought back to Europe through the Crusades and lead to the Renaissance. They notably conserved several works of Greek authors that were long gone from Europe, and for a long time Europeans had to rely on Arabic translations of Aristotle and the like (until earlier Greek versions were dug up from the dusty basements of monasteries over the course of several centuries). The Middle East, politically, was united under one caliphate, then under two or three as the situation degraded, but it really was nowhere near as bad as in Europe.

As for the Persian empire, it has about a gazillion incarnations (Medes, Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids, Khorezm...) so it would be nice to know which one you're referring to, but there generally wasn't an independent Persian polity during those days - it was subordinate to the Caliph, at least for some time.

edit: amusingly, it's precisely this golden age that groups like Al-Qaeda aspire to and wish to bring back. Of course, they don't realize that their interpretation of Islam is probably 100% more hardcore than the one they had back then.

lazyfatbum Wrote:Middle east as peaceful? When? Pangea!?

Quote: We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]

You have free speech so I can be heard.

Quote: Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was among the speakers on Wednesday at a forum about crime in the cities, sponsored by The New York Post. The Mayor discussed how crime and law enforcement had changed in New York over several decades, and how society had changed. Here is an excerpt, as transcribed by The New York Times.

We constantly present the false impression that government can solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve. Families are significantly less important in the development of children today than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Religion has less influence than it did 30 or 40 years ago. Communities don't mean what they meant 30 or 40 years ago.

As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word values. We talk about teaching ethics in schools -- people say, "What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't." And they confuse that with teaching of religion. And we are afraid to reaffirm the basics upon which a lawful and a decent society are based. We're almost embarrassed by it.

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]

You have free speech so I can be heard.

[ Another interruption. ]

At the core the struggle is philosophical. There are many, many things that can be done in law enforcement to protect us better. There are many things that can done to create a government that is more responsive and more helpful. The fact is that we're fooling people if we suggest to them the solutions to these very, very deep-seated problems are going to be found in government. . . .

The solutions are going to be found when we figure out as a society what our families are going to be like in the next century, and how maybe they are going to be different. They are going to have to be just as solid and just as strong in teaching every single youngster their responsibility for citizenship. We're going to find the answer when schools once again train citizens. Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America.

If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together. We're going to come through this when we realize that it's all about, ultimately, individual responsibility. That in fact the criminal act is about individual responsibility and the building of the respect for the law and ethics is also a matter of individual responsibility.

Quote:and the fact is the market is not all knowing

N-Man Wrote:Man can only be free by ceding part of his authority to decide to the state. Without the state, there cannot be freedom. John Locke's second treatise on civil government. It's essentially the founding text of liberalism. Again, I fail to see what this has to do with fascism - it's basically a verbatim repetition of one of the tenets of liberalism.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:What sort of insane view is that? The freedom to have control of your life stripped away? I literally want to know if he actually knows what the word freedom means.

Quote:DJ, surely you understand that in Ron Paul's world there is no government funding for science - or for anything else, for that matter, except perhaps a defensive army. You can disagree with that, but understand that he's not opposed to science so much as he's opposed to the government funding anything.

N-Man Wrote:Would you like us to discuss real, actual fascism? The corporatist economic model and all? Why is it so much of a stretch to describe Islamists as metaphorical fascists, when their societal ideals are actually quite similar to fascism - if for entirely different reasons - but not so much of a stretch to call Rudy Giuliani a fascist? Do you understand your own hypocrisy - calling Bush and Giuliani **"fascists" while refusing to acknowledge the term "Islamofascist" (which is, if as uninteresting as the term "neoliberal", at least somewhat vaguely accurate)?

As for the rest, I read your descriptions of "shredded civil rights", and I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I just don't believe that the things you cited constitute much of an affront to civil rights, unless used in particularly malicious ways.

Quote:And yet, it did. After Tet is when politicians started motioning to "bring the troops home", renewing the enemy's energy and allowing him to make outrageous demands. Of course, it didn't happen instantly.

Relations between China and the Soviet Union became cold long before the 70s. Mao started being a little bitch soon after Stalin's death, when Khrushchev acknowledged that Uncle Joe was a bit of a genocidal maniac. It has been postulated that the USA could probably have invaded North Vietnam without causing a Chinese counterattack considering that situation (which was unknown at that point to US intelligentsia).

Quote:I guess all those people who died in Rwanda and Bosnia didn't live in the real world. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of the UN - actually, I strongly believe in a one-world state - its problem is that it includes nations that are not liberal democracies. Those nations' governments should not be regarded as legitimate nor recognized in any way. If those governments were to be removed from the UN, then I have no doubt that it would have the moral imperative (and therefore the gumption) to act decisively.

Anyway, explain to me, in ten lines or less, what the UN, once it is "involved" will do in Iraq to solve or ease the situation.



Yeah, that's a real bind innit.

Quote:Maybe. Vietnam was involved with the Soviets much earlier than you'd think. Ho Chi Minh was not so much pro-American as he was a proponent of the "Third Way" - technically neutral in the conflict between capitalism and communism, but really on the Soviet side. Third Way states were usually third world nations that weren't really communist, but naturally prone to seeing the USA as the enemy. Kissinger explained this fairly well in his book I mentioned earlier - third world countries could gain more, materially, by opposing the USA, since they were less likely to become confrontational than the USSR. Nasser gave the first example when building the Aswan dam by playing off the superpowers against each other, to see who would propose the most money, then finally denouncing the Americans as imperialists to gain points with the population.

N-Man Wrote:Ron Paul would surely disagree; the market is all knowing. If the market decides that there's no money for research, it means there's no demand (and therefore need) for research. Yes, you can disagree with this, but many old men with doctorates in fancy disciplines like philosophy and economics have written long and boring books describing why they think it's true. That makes it a theory, and apparently one that Ron Paul adheres to.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:The market is made up of idiots. Their doctorates failed to do any actual experiments to back it up. I base this on the fact that the market for quack medicine makes money up to and exceeding the market for legitimate medicine. The market is not all knowing. What do they base their conclusion on?

Quote:A large amount of economic philosophy is utter bunk.

Quote:If a little taxation and government funding is needed to keep progress on track, so be it.

Quote:Scientists would do best, I would imagine.

A Black Falcon Wrote:Anyway, the free market left alone? Well, look what happens when we do that... monopolies, trusts, industry elites telling the government how to spend its money... these things are bad and should be avoided. Capitalism as practiced, without government action, turns toward monopoly, as history shows. There must be government controls. Of course, the issue of how far exactly to take those controls is an extremely difficult one, and I'm pretty bad at economics, so I can't really say...

Great Rumbler Wrote:Alright, but why should a scientist decide what's best for me? Why can't all the scientists and experts come to me and compete for my hard-earned money? Why should the government just take my money and give it out to people to do research on things that I don't want?

N-Man Wrote:To get back at the original topic, John McCain is doing well, and I like him quite a bit as well - he was actually my favorite at the start, but totally lost me when he started going on about religion some six months back, and then he just seemed to disappear over the summer... fingers crossed, he'll get the nomination. If it turns out to be Romney or Huckabee against Obama, then I'll go for Obama - on the other hand, if it comes down to either of those two against Hilary, I might as well just shut down the TV.

A Black Falcon Wrote:As I said, there are not "islamofascists". They are theocrats, and the difference is important and significant. Fascists are not religious, theocrats are. It really does make a huge, huge difference.

Quote:Oh, and those were only a couple of things Bush has done to our civil liberties. Other things include revoking the right of habeus corpus, the Supreme Court nominees he chose revoking centuries of precedent in multiple cases (that 'centuries of precedent' one was when they said that police can break into your house with no warning if they have a search warrant. Before you actually had to get notification before they could do it; this right reached back centuries and was part of the British Common Law we inherited as the basis of our legal system. The conservative majority in the supreme court tossed that out, saying something like 'who cares if you're embarrassed by the police' or such.), all that stuff about indefinite holding of people who have not been charged with a crime (this goes so utterly, TOTALLY against everything that the American judicial system has ever stood for that it is simply astonishing that anyone even considered it, much less implemented it... previously habeus corpus had been suspended during wartime a few times, but always with the intent of bringing it back soon. Here the "war" can never end, so it is a permanent measure. The "War on Terror" is a gift that keeps on giving!), etc, etc, etc.

Quote:So you'd risk war with a nuclear-armed nation just on the THEORY that they might not attack? What a great idea... (during the Korean War, of course, China didn't have the bomb yet.)

Quote:As for Tet, it was a strategic defeat for the NVA and NLF, that is true. What it was most successful at doing was hurting American morale. But given that we never should had been in there in the first place and the whole war was based on lies and misconceptions (in addition to the whole "was Ho Chi Minh's government actually anti-American at the end of WWII?", you could also add on "the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a forgery and a lie -- quite simply, it never happened. That was the excuse for war. Thus, the war was unjustified and based on lies, but was fought anyway because of how badly the US government wanted to fight it." and "the government lied to the American people consistently and blatantly throughout the war, pretending that we were "winning" when we were not (invading a village, killing whoever you found there, and then leaving is not a "victory".), understating or ignoring Vietnamese civilian casualties and displacement (do you really want to tell the American people that we have killed millions of innocents? FIVE MILLION people died in Indochina between 1959 and 1975!), saying that "if Vietnam goes communist it'll all fall like dominoes" when that did not happen, etc, etc, etc...

Quote:They need to hold talks between the three major groups, with international negotiators, and with clear statements that they would be rewarded for making peace, while continuing to fight would not be an option. Bush has given up and is just letting them fight and not talk; the important thing here is getting them to talk, not who gets them to do it. Either the UN or a Democratic administration could do the trick, I think, though of course any Democratic administration would get the UN involved too. Don't understate the capability of the international community... as I said, Rwanda ended when they finally got involved, Iran got rid of nuclear weapons because of European pressure, etc. Things could potentially happen in Iraq with the right international pressure, but we'll never know with anti-internationalists like the Bush administration in power here.

Quote:You are right, though, that having nations like Syria on the UN "Human Rights Commitee" is a disgrace and makes that body useless. The UN should be doing more to get nations to build democracy among the peoples of the world; it is a very hard task, but not an impossible one. As I said simply holding votes does nothing; you must instead build civic culture in nations that do not have it. Even though it does seem impossible, I think that it is... even in the Middle East, mostly devoid of such feelings, there are nations like Turkey that have real elections and government. Pakistan too, really, though its is more troubled of course. I don't think that not recognizing any autocratic nations is the solution, though... there are simply too many of them. We should punish the ones that are the worst human rights abusers for sure (China needs to be treated very differently... we can't because they make all of our stuff, but they need to be.), but punishing nations simply for being autocratic? No, we should be working on efforts to change them instead, within what is possible; not everything is.

Quote:Kissenger is a power-hungry warmonger... and as I said early on Ho Chi Minh did make some overtures to the Americans, which we ignored. Would he have ended up solidly in the Soviet camp anyway even if we had attempted to befriend Vietnam at the end of WWII and told France that we wouldn't support their effort to retake Vietnam (this would have led to a very quick failure of the French effort. We funded most of the French war in Indochina that ended in 1954.)? Possible, certainly, but we'll just never know, and it seems very hard to believe that that path would have led to a worse result than the one we got, given how horrifically badly things went there in the course we chose.

Quote:OK, let's go over this one more time. Giuliani is a fascist because he's authoritarian. Islamists are authoritarians as well. Since being authoritarian is enough to be called a fascist - according to your own definition - I fail to see why Islamists can't be called fascists. So what we can do is either use your definition and call both Giuliani and Islamists "fascists", OR we can use the word "fascist" properly and in reference to extreme nationalism, the corporatist economic model etc. etc. and not call either Giuliani or Islamists fascists. Pick one. Not half of one and half the other.

Quote:Rwanda, Iran? Are these dreams you had? Rwanda ended when everyone was dead - or rather, when rebels finally ousted the genocidal government, and Iran for all we know is building a nuke right now with Russian help. The Europeans are just as freaked out about Iran as anyone, and the French foreign minister even said that they would support an armed intervention if need be.

Quote:I'm not sure I follow your point on Iraq. What more do we need to do to "get them to talk"? Elected people from every ethnic group have been talking for a while now and not getting anywhere. There are some things we could do to help along those talks, including trying to stabilize the situation military-wise - and this, I believe, is what the current US policy is. What else do you want to do? Force them to make a decision? It'll just make the fighting flare up again.

Quote:Well, you need to pick one. Either we shut our door to autocratic regimes like China, or we try and build a "civic culture" in those countries - by trading, in all likelihood. You can't just shut down commerce and have them live in abject poverty then try and help them build a "civic culture", it's nonsense.

Quote:Kissinger is a textbook realist , and you mostly know him as a power-hungry whatever because he was very successful - any realist will look like a power-hungry warmonger, but most of the time you don't hear about them because they don't become media sensations like Dr. Kissinger did. Anyway, he's recognized as an authority on international relations and is widely studied. Who Ho Chi Minh would have sided with should the USA not have opposed him from the start is interesting but difficult to ascertain - IMO he would have edged towards the Third Way countries, IE I'll side with whoever gives me the most money, or I'll just take everybody's money and side with the Soviets in the end because they have the biggest guns anyway. That may be better than what happened historically, but it's not better than what could have happened - like, for example, winning the war.

Quote:Someone has to. The only real alternative is direct democracy, and that doesn't work anywhere larger than a small town... ballot initiatives are all well and good (and I think they're great), but you couldn't run a government with just them. You vote for people to do exactly that, and that's the only way things could possibly work in a country as big as ours and you know it... your real point here is "we shouldn't be spending money on these things", it seems clear to me, and I obviously couldn't disagree more. Nobody likes EVERYTHING the government is doing, but that's why we have things like primaries and elections -- so people can choose the candidates who best line up with their views.

Quote:You shouldn't make assumptions like that. Actually, barring a few exceptions, I think we should be spending more on scientific development, particularly in space travel.

alien space marine Wrote:Evangelical bullshit

Quote:On the other hand, the problem with our current system is that there are so many issues to be dealt with that it's utterly impossible to find the candidate that supports everything you want them to. So, cut out all the ambiguity and let each person decide what they want for themselves. Just take the money you would have spent on taxes and pass along a donation to NASA, or a university research institute working on curing diabetes, or whatever.

Great Rumbler Wrote:Yeah, Benny Hinn is crazy.

Quote:The revisionist approach to Vietnam
Email|Print| Text size – + By H.D.S. Greenway
February 19, 2008

FORTY YEARS ago this week, as twilight fell over the Republic of South Vietnam, I was lying on a stretcher in the rain outside a military hospital on a base near Hue. There were so many casualties that day that we had to wait our turn for overworked and overwhelmed doctors to attend to us. First came the wounded who could be saved, putting aside those who could not. Triage, they called it. Then came the lesser wounds, such as my own, which could wait their turn.
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*

The surgeon who eventually operated on me was furious - furious that he had been told to treat Americans first, leaving our South Vietnamese allies out in the rain.

It was the Tet Offensive, the turning point in the war. For it was Tet that brought the United States to sue for peace, and President Johnson to give up running for another term. Negotiations dragged on and on, and seven years later it was all over.

Today there is a school of thought that says Tet was a terrible defeat for the Communist Vietnamese, that it should never have caused us to flinch, that the war was basically won by 1972, and that if we had only stayed the course we would have won it. Henry Kissinger has said as much, whole generations of soldiers were told that, and, it seems, that many around President Bush believe it as well.

When Iraq became the quagmire it is, I used to wonder how we could make the same mistake again so soon. But then I realized that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were in the Oval office with President Ford when Saigon fell. Perhaps they, and the worshipers of American power, felt that, this time, we would get it right.

In a strictly military sense, Tet was a defeat for the communists. But as the Prussian military strategist, Karl von Clausewitz, said, "War is a continuation of policy by other means . . . a real political instrument." And politically, Tet showed there was no light at the end of the tunnel, and that to fight on in an endless war was not something the American public was going to stand for. Vietnam showed that we could win every battle and still lose the war. And if I am not mistaken, we have never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lewis Sorley's book "A Better War" is the most persuasive account I've read advocating this revisionist theory. It is filled with statistics to prove its case. But let me cite two examples of battles that I observed. In 1971, operation Lam Son 719 was an attempt by the South Vietnamese, with American air power, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Sorley's statistics would have you believe that it was a success. But those of us who were there, and saw the South Vietnamese coming out of Laos beaten with their tail between their legs, know differently. Statistics seldom tell the whole story.Continued...

Quote:Page 2 of 2 --

In 1972, during the Easter Offensive, Sorley recounts how the South Vietnamese held the line on the My Chanh River, north of Hue, with the help of American fire power, but not American troops, who had mostly gone by then.
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I remember that night, with the terrifying sound of North Vietnamese tanks in the dark, and the calm voice of an American adviser speaking softly into his radio, saying, "Lend me your assets." And in the assets came, fighter bombers from Thailand, B-52s from Guam, naval gunfire from the South China Sea, and the South Vietnamese held.

But Sorley is too honest not to mention the other side of the story. The North Vietnamese failed to overrun the country, but the Easter Offensive ended with huge swaths of South Vietnamese territory lost. And the cease-fire that followed did not - could not - require the North Vietnamese to withdraw back across the border. South Vietnam, even with our air power, could hot hurl them back. Thus was South Vietnam fatally outflanked, awaiting the next offensive. And with the North Vietnamese there would always be another offensive.

Sorely points to the success of pacification efforts in the South. But when I drove through the Mekong River Delta, after the cease-fire that left opposing forces in place, village after village that we had on our maps as pacified had raised the Viet Cong flag. I met with a Viet Cong leader in the forest who told me that South Vietnam was a hollow shell that would soon collapse of its own weight. He turned out to be right.

In the end, the South Vietnamese leadership could not inspire the way the communist nationalists did, perhaps because the South seemed to be fighting for foreigners. For the United States, as for France before, it was basically a colonial war, not that vital to our national interests. For Hanoi, it was everything.

When the end came in 1975, and my helicopter lifted away from the American Embassy in Saigon, with the ammunition dumps blowing up in the gathering dark, I felt that we had betrayed our allies - not because we were unwilling to continue the war, but because we had gone to war there in the first place, unnecessarily and foolishly, understanding nothing, only to cause more death and destruction than could ever be justified.

There is little to be gained in saying but if only this, or only that. Constant surges won all our battles, but it was never enough for the South Vietnamese to stand alone. The revisionists have forgotten their Clausewitz.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:Someone's saying we "won Vietnam"? That's like saying the burning of the original president's house way back when was "totally part of our genius plan".

Are we supposed to believe everyone in charge is some sort of masterful Xanatos "even when I lose I win" type of evil genius?