Letters to the Editor
-
nabalzbbfr
you really are an idiot
sorry if thats not the most intelligent retort to your post, but its all I got.
I think of it as kind of the "lowest common denominator" of all the replies you're likely to get.
-
re: some facts
Whispers said ...
It is important to note that people like nabalzbbfr usually speak only in metaphors. "There's a cancer growing in the mideast!" "If Vietnam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will fall like dominos!" This reliance on metaphorical speaking is a sign that the person in question doesn't really know a lot of facts, and needs to resort to fantastical explanations for their thinking. The truth is that the threats exist more in the minds of the person in question than in reality.
I wanted to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. And you said it better than I could have! Thanks. These fools act as if real, fact-based analysis is a sign of weakness.
-
Sadly, he has point
And we had better learn to deal with it and narrate the history effectively so the true culprits get the credit. Our troubles in that region are just beginning, and much worse than when any previous president left us after leaving office, and for all intents and purposes, Bush left office when this Congress convened. Bush has put our finger in the Chinese handcuffs and we cannot just pull out. The damage is done. There is a an actual needle that needs to be threaded in that region now, between occupation and total disengagement, which we cannot do, thanks to them. It will not be easy. There are no good moves for us. We are deep in the shit, thank you very much.
-
Another wasted effort by nabalzbbfr
Who turned out to be right? The Neoconservatives or the panglossian liberals, who in some demented Orwellian distortion warp now call themselves realists!
Who turned out to be right?
For a start, the ones who warned invading and occupying Iraq would be a disaster. (hint: it wasn't Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfwitz, or the other Neocons)
Keep your fantasyland revisions of history and reality if that's what it takes for you to live with yourself. We've come to expect nothing better of you.
But don't pretend for an instant you've any cretibility on this issue.
-
We need to be mindful of the blowback
And we will surely get it. We used them as proxies to kill a million "accused communists" in Indonesia in 1965. We used them against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s. Then our former allies and proxies flew some planes into some of our buildings after the collapse of "our" mutual enemy, the Soviet Union. We were their allies then. We are their enemies now, the Shia and the Takfiri, and you think we can just walk away without repercussions? If Bush had not gone into Iraq, maybe. If you think we can just disengage and be safe, you are kidding yourself. There are no good moves. That is a failed policy. There is a damn good chance we will be hit again, perhaps not here, but hit where it hurts, and neither staying in Iraq nor redeployiing from Iraq will prevent that. We have Bush to thank for that. Get that narrative straight and start reciting it because that is the reality and those are the facts. Welcome to the new millenium. It's going to be an ugly century. Make sure the blame goes where it should. Attacking, invading and occupying Iraq was as much a crime against humanity as OBL attacking NYC and the Pentagon.
-
cancer?
"There's a cancer growing in the mideast!" "If Vietnam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will fall like dominos!"
The Shia-Sunni schism is a domino that fell a long time ago. If religious extremists can take over our political processes, they can do it anywhere. I would never make light of it. I'd rather deal with socialists.
-
re: shooter, what in hell are you mainlining now...or is it a slow weekend?
Sorry, I was thinking that RWA was something interesting, but no. It seems to be just a euphemism for "fascist". Tsk.
-
shooter
Maybe you thought RWA meant Romance Writers of America.
Faulty reasoning — RWAs are more likely to:
Make many incorrect inferences from evidence. heh
-
On calling for better trolls
In making political arguments, people tend to overlook the collective nature of cultural forces, and of their consequent intricacies.
To an educated layman reading the Book of Mormon, its literary antecedents -- or lack of them -- and the relative cultural isolation of its author are clear. It's obvious, for example, that Joseph Smith didn't actually know Hebrew or Aramaic. To draw from that the conclusion that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an unsophisticated cultural organization, or to characterize its members as a bunch of hick cultists -- as I've heard people do -- would be to make a grave error.
Likewise, it may be amusing to a modern cosmopolitan to watch from a distance the seemingly absurd contortions of the Roman Catholic canonization process currently underway -- the somewhat desperate search for documented miracles, etc. -- but again, such a characterization overlooks the enormously sophisticated political and cultural influences at work in it, and the transmutation of a relatively primitive historical imperative with origins over a thousand years old into something easily as complex and relevant in the broad sense as any American election.
(A note to believers: no disrespect is meant to your faith, or to the institutions which are its stewards. Quite the contrary; my respect for both is considerable.)
In the ebb and flow of history, though, it's also possible for perfectly respectable cultural forms to become debased. The RWAs being discussed here, high, double-high and otherwise, are in some respects the vulgar offspring of once viable forms of social organization. We shouldn't forget that authoritarian societies built Chartres cathedral, for example, and the great temple at Karnak, and produced most of the great works of literature, philosophy and science which still inform us.
The problem with folks like Michael Ledeen and Glenn Reynolds isn't that they're authoritarians per se, it's that they're stark raving mad, and the most tedious, and frankly disgusting part of arguing against their lunacy is their pretense to being the inheritors and custodians of cultural traditions which their madness prevents them from understanding. From the philosopher king to Moloch is a journey in the wrong direction, against the flow of history, and I hate the idea that anyone need to point it out, least of all me. Oh, cursed spite... just about sums up my reaction.