For all you Fucked up Liberals

[A Black Falcon]

First, the latest Doonesbury.



Nintendarse, you are completely accurate... but I bet because of their length some people (such as, by his own admission, Darunia) skip over long posts... oh well. No helping them.

Anyway, yeah, I agree with everything in your posts there...

In this conflict, the facts aren't the most important part. What Bush's true motivations for going into Iraq are aren't what really matters. Its what the public's opinion of what his motivations are that does... and, as you show there, the Arabs have one very strong and quite united viewpoint about it. Is it accurate? No. But if they all believe it, its that that matters... along with the fact that all we are doinig with our actions is agrivating the problem... and until the US does something to help alleviate the source of Arab anger, we will never get them to not hate us.

The problem is... the problem of Israel is a hopeless mess and no one can see a way out of it, least of all the morons in charge of the US right now... and they obviously admit it... at least Clinton TRIED! Sure, he failed... but he TRIED!

It's interesting that you got that message out of the Doonesbury cartoon, because I got a completely different message. I got the sense that the cartoonist was saying that while CNN and others were reporting something closer to the truth (no matter how brutal and gritty it might be), Fox News is practically a 24-hour pep-rally for the United States.

That's exactly what I interpreted it as too...

But no matter how much Fox News uses selective amnesia, the United States public doesn't care. We like to hear that we're "winning." We like to hear that everyone agrees with us, and that whoever doesn't agree with us is a rotten no-good scumbag. We like to hear that we're stopping the bad guys. We like to hear that we're the saviors. It's comforting. It's also biased. But so is Al-Jazeera. The war is certainly more than civilian casualties and an invading force. It is more than a power struggle between the Western civilizations and the Arab World. It is certainly more than oil. Somewhere in between these points is a proper balance of the American and Arab points of view. But you won't find it on American or Arab television. The American public has a bias that understandably favors itself, and would reject a channel that expressed the Arab point of view without skepticism. In the EXACT SAME WAY, the Arab public has a bias that understandably favors itself, and would reject a channel that expressed the American point of view without skepticism.

Yup. Most people in any area like to believe that they are correct... which makes sense, but ignores what is really going on. I guess that as I said before impressions of the truth affect the future more than the truth does...

Oh, and you are correct about the media. Arab media protrayed it as an invasion and lots of civilian causualties... not accurate. But neither was the US media's propagandizing... but in war the truth is very hard to find. And I'd say that CNN does try a bit harder than the other US networks to be balanced... they have clear US bias, but do more with waht is truly going on and the effects for the other side...

We are more like Arabs than we think. We too have wackos that do terrible things (Oklahoma bombing). The only difference is that their wackos are told that their suffering is the United States' fault. We don't have any clear scapegoat (but we do have a history of making scapegoats). We too have general bias toward our own nation. We too have religious zealots. We too have racism/ethnicism.

I'd also say that Bush is just as rightwing as those super-conservative Arab Sheiks... we both have radicals, and in both cases they have lots of power...

But that is not the whole story. We too have moderates that believe that the opposite side is not skewed so much that it has stopped listening. We too have families. We too have faith in God.

Yes, but right now at least in both cases the conservative radicals have most of the power...

What is "biased in the right direction?" I know it was accompanied by a smiley, but your writing before that kind of backs up that you actually believe that. Doesn't "the right direction" completely depend upon your point of view?

"Biased in the right direction" means "news that you agree with, irregardless of the facts". And everyone is prone to liking news like that, as you said.

And if we were in their shoes, we would probably be thinking what they're thinking, and they would probably be thinking what we're thinking.

Absolutely. If Bush was a Arab he'd be one of those hardcore (but popular) anti-American radicals... I see no diffence between, say, Billy Graham or the like and Islamic Mullahs...

The difference of course is that any Islamic moderates or liberals aren't very free to express their opinions...