Letters to the Editor
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replies
@RMP
What I like about your idea on creating my own blog would be making what I want to provide to my contacts more user friendly. I would not clog up their email account because they would only get one email per day or so and I could solicit feedback like any blog does. I could have a section on the best comments of the day from other blogs.
You've got it exactly. The key is to make it easy for others. Also, by personalizing the content, e.g., leading into topics with a word or two from you, makes it more trustworthy.
@bystander
Online communities may be the answer to lots of different social issues, and the spread of some social/political agendas. But, I wonder, given the constraints that encumber most folks' lives, and mine again, eventually, how viable this medium is for countering the reach of newsprint, television, and radio.
Your path here doesn't sound so different to mine. I suspect it's similar to a lot of people. I think many, many people have given up on the MSM. The key is by blogging, you are providing a trusted place from which to jump off into the blogosphere. Sure, no one has enough time. But they're more apt to read a blog than carry a protest sign. Which leads me to...
@antineocon
RE: "socially safe"
I'm a pretty average person. I have a decent job, wife, 2 kids, appearance is outwardly pretty conservative. I don't feel that comfortable protesting - but I got to the point I had to. The last antiwar protest I attended in Oakland -- one of the most progressive cities in America -- I carried a sign with about 100 hundred others in front of shops and restaurant's teeming with people. They'd watch us walk by, smile, barely pausing their conversations. These people are anti-war. But they'd no sooner pick up a sign or refuse to pay a credit card bill or order "just ice," then date Shooter. Now I'm in San Diego. The social status quo is "support the troops or else." These are shooters who are packing.
Protest is not yet socially acceptable. Daily lives remain unaffected. "Oh well, they say, another election cycle is coming." "Oh well, those recruits volunteered and really like shooting stuff." "Oh well, not even Bush is stupid enough to attack Iran."
Education must come first. Anger or determination for change next. Then maybe they'll pick up a sign.
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@Denning
Man when you list it out, even though not a complete list, it still is jaw dropping to see what these folks have gotten away with and continue to get away with.
@shooter
I always thought shooter might have been a plant, a punching bag, to get peoples debating skills honed, but the martyr complex speculation sounds as good as any. And I know, I know, don't feed the trolls...who neither grasp nuance or the will to grow understanding.
@rush
I'd like rush to answer this question, how many pundits, soldiers, politicians, or "personalities" have called soldiers who support the war phony soldiers?
@God
I talk to God and alot of times I'm angry, and come on, it's God we're talking about here, creator of the universe, if he can't take a little bit of my anger... anyways he has never told me what to do, even when I wanted him to. Instead he's told me (ok I intuited he told me) "I'm not living your life, it's your fukkin' life, go live it."
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Afghanistan
To offer a partial answer to shooter's question:
1) The Taliban were a damn sight more collaborative in al Qaeda than just "harboring a fugitive". The fugitive was, at the time of the September 11 attacks, running the Taliban government's military.
2) My post was about the infrastructure things that should have been done in Afghanistan, the collaborations with Iran that should have been done, and the paltry amount that it was estimated, by a consortium of countries, to cost. For the record, after pegging the cost at $25B, they ponied up promises of $5B, and then failed to come through with most of the $5B.
3) The failure to understand the factions in Afghanistan -- viz the difference between Hekmatyar and Massoud, the absurd belief that Massoud was a communist, the equally absurd belief that a) there were moderates among the Taliban leadership, and b) that Hekmatyar was one of them was a CIA/State department blunder stretching over 4 American administrations: Reagan, Bush(the elder), Clinton, Bush(the lesser). It is within reason to assert that had it not been for this failure, and the failure to understand where the Pakistani ISI stood in the whole mess, and the failure to play realpolitik and do what was in Iran and the U.S. best interests all the way through, there might not have been any war for us to fight there, and possibly no September 11 to spark it.
To blithely state that the same justifications and arguments that apply to Iraq also apply equally to Afghanistan is basically to admit total ignorance about either. I'm not saying that to be insulting, shooter, but the two have very different histories and very different players. Well timed non-war intervention in Afghanistan would have solved too many problems to be anything but a stern warning that what you don't give a damn about will bite you in the ass. And well constructed non-war intervention there now would still solve a lot of problems. You support the Iraq war, shooter, $25B is a pittance compared to that.
And spraying crops is about the dumbest foreign policy decision in years -- even the military and intelligence people are saying so.
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sajwah- S!
I remember a person telling me that the whole notion of "Lord" means we stumping humanoids are so stupid we need some humble advice.
LORD- simply means somthin' has been governing the galaxies and heavenly 'bodies' of mass out there in orbit for some time...
...And is wiser than we critter bumping around and getting into a quarrel, a itching for a daily feud...
I forgot what I was going to say...
...O, Lord O Mercy My! Gloria in alchemy duo? I am not sure. I do enjoy the thoughts.