Letters to the Editor
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All Goodpeople
Where are all the outrages about our own governments news control?
-- Goodpeople
Man, you is right here, at the throbbing heart of it! Walk right in, sit right down, baby, let your spine roll out.
We got outrages a-plenty! And Beef, if you're asking wheres that, to.
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Jkalos
What's a good basic text for logic? I was advised against taking it by a well meaning but obviously misguided faculty adviser when I was at NYU.
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I remember as we prepared to invade iraq musing that the children orphaned by GWI
would not welcome us ... nor would their mothers, grandmothers and other kin.
Iraq lost probably more than a generation of males in its war with Iran ... there are estimates that each side lost 1 million combatants ... those sons who were slaughtered on the highway of death were the part of next generation, the seed crop.
I remember, in the shame of Abu Ghraib, realizing that the Iraqis had know this was going on all along ... and probably had not been surprised.... true, we weren't generally killing our prisoners en mass ... just violating all the standards we had always said we stood for ...
I remember wondering how much air play our errant wedding party bombings, our horrible Afghan prisons, and our war atrocities such as Mazar-i-Sharif had gotten in Iraq ... I had to figure they'd heard about it all...
I never in a million billion years expected this "regieme change" to go well ... that, by all accounts, Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith somehow apparently genuinely assumed we had god's will at our back and goodness and justice would rain down, etc., I think speaks to the cult-like nature of Team Bush and the neocons.
Condi Rice and Colin Powell did have reservations ... many people did have reservations ... but they pretty much shut up and sat down as ordered ... and held their piece.
link to WSWS article of Mazaar-I-Sharif on my name -- in November 20001
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@politically lost
for independent study a good one is:
David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning. New York: Norton and Co. It has a nice paperback edition with self-tests with answers and so forth.
You should be able to find it on Amazon.com. Look in the used book part for even better prices.
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when 9-11 happened
I immediately thought of something I had said in a class on Plato's Republic. Socrates is arguing against the position that justice is to do good to friends and evil to enemies, and says that a just man will never do evil to anyone (in fact would rather suffer evil than do it). To do evil means for him to lessen the essential integrity of a living nature, to make it less excellent. And I told my class about something I saw on the news once, back when we popped off a bunch of cruise missiles at Libya. And on the news I saw a building where one of those missiles had god off course and struck an apartment building and killed a grandma, a wife, and a five year old child. And the father was there on camera holding the child, and next to him was part of the missile with a "us" on it. And the man was screaming, and according to the interpreter he was screaming: I hate you America! I hate you forever! And I said to my class: see, he was made less excellent as a human being. According to Plato, a just person could not do that. That was the first thing that came to my mind on 9-11. I wondered if he was on one of the planes.
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Charlie Rose... Interupting His Guests? Please.
Glenn, it is not mathematically possible for Charlie Rose to "interrupt far more than normal". He interrupts almost 100% of the time now, so "far more" would bend the time-space continuum.
And, may I say, yours is one of the most valuable voices in our time. I could extol your virtues ad nauseam. Please don't give up the good fight.
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-- Jkalos
"Plato stands alone, smiling at them all."
Thanks for your take on Plato. I take you to mean that the neo-Platonic crowd did move a distance from Plato himself, even if not a great distance. I had read that, but not from one who studies Plato himself.
I have spent much time researching the mystery religions of the ancients; and it looks like most follow the basic myth cycle of the ancient Egyptians. (but then, I was not there at the time; I think) :-)
Again, thanks.
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Making amends..
I just did a little back-of-the-envelope math and came up with this:
A Nobel prize winning economist has calculated the true cost of the Iraq debacle at over $3 trillion.. There are around 26 million Iraqis.
That works out to $115,384 per Iraqi.
It really would have been far, far cheaper to have simply bought the damn country.
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How exactly were they worse off under Saddam? -- Paul Daniel Ash
BDS on parade.
If you need to have it explained, why a ruthless dictator is worse than a civil war, I can't help you. As has been pointed out many times.... "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Sound famliar? -
@Susan Sunflower
See, that's sort of a problem, Susan. As soon as we grant the Iraqis even the most rudimentary standing as human beings, many of the things that happened to them as a result of the US invasion become very problematic. The obligations of an occupier are confusing, but many, many, many of the incidents which characterise our occupation would rise to the level of assaults, or murder. This would be disasterous to the self-image of the people involved. It would also make us question whether these people will always confine their agression to mandated targets, or, my particular fear, their willingness to act on mandated targets extends to assualting or murdering (in the line of duty, of course,) their fellow citizens.
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Iraq lost probably more than a generation of males in its war with Iran
"... there are estimates that each side lost 1 million combatants ... those sons who were slaughtered on the highway of death were the part of next generation, the seed crop." -- susan sunflower
Susan, I recall dimly that our Republican friends may have been behind the Iraq - Iran war in the first place. I seem to recall a lot of talk about our boy Saddam getting those Bastard Iranians (tm) back for us; getting back at them for the hostage crisis.
Do you recall any of that talk?