Yada, yada, yada. I have a long and noble history of defending my positions against the likes of you.
It’s just that sometimes I have an opinion or observation I want to express…usually based on something I’ve suddenly come across…and I know people will be expecting me to battle it out for three days and I may not have the time; so rather than disappoint them, I try to let it be known that I may not be around to argue the point (or more likely, defend against obfuscatory semantics) in such a way as they might expect.
As for “inflammatory shit”, I thought my original post to this thread was rather observational and conversational and not inflammatory at all. Not that it matters, but I wasn’t in the slightest of a confrontational state of mind when I posted it; I merely wanted to point out that Mid-East strife is not necessarily due to border alignment after WWII.
But of course to you and your ilk, anything seeking to deflect blame from America…even something perfectly obvious…is “inflammatory shit”. :rolleyes:
Who wouldn’t, now that there’s no other guarantee that the U.S. won’t attack you just because they damned well feel like it?
Conservatives used to be very big on the law of unintended consequences. And this is one that shouldn’t have been too hard to see coming.
And now that our force is all tied down in Iraq, who exactly is in a position to do something about Iran’s nuclear program, or Pakistan’s actual nukes?
Oopsie. More unintended (and easily foreseen) consequences.
Sure. We just took the lid off of Pandora’s box. No harm, no foul, right? :rolleyes:
I don’t know what you mean. I do wonder, though, weren’t you limited in time nearly 2 hours ago?
It’s nice to see that you don’t think we should be to blame if Iraq descends into civil war. Of course, knowing you, Bush shouldn’t be to blame for a single thing. The good thing is that if… no, when you once again paint yourself into an corner, you can play the liberal media card.
If you want to provide a link to a factual source we should consider, go ahead. But if you want to toss in an opinion, you should be willing to defend it, or at least admit you’re overmatched.
Your state of mind doesn’t determine whether the content of your post is inflammatory. Regardless of the tone, the opinion itself was one that was clearly going to start a fight. And you were saying from the get-go that you were going to drop that stinkbomb in, then leave.
Coward.
I’ve had eyes rolled at me by better women and men than you.
When a guy comes into a room and starts overturning furniture, thinking it’ll do some good, maybe he’s the one to blame for the chaos in the room. It should be obvious that, regardless of what silly labels you care to bring to the discussion (“blame America”), that maybe America, as the biggest actor in this drama, as the one who took by far the biggest and most unprecedented action, is the actor most responsible for the resulting turmoil?
That should be common fucking sense. It’s no different from if you’ve got a company that’s getting by, but not doing that great, and you bring in a turnaround artist who changes everything the company is doing, at which point it goes down the tubes, then you and the turnaround artist are the ones to blame. This is a general concept that’s got nothing to do with America, except as a clear for-instance.
I would absolutely gurarantee you that if we never so much as lifted a finger in that region, they would still be at each other’s throats and the threat to the region from nuclear weaponry would be just as strong as it is now. It may have taken them a little longer to get there; but then who’s to say?..without western intervention over the last few decades they might very well have gotten there already.
And now I’m afraid, I must bid you adieu: Good night, John boy…Good night, Zoe; Good night, Firefly; Good night, Hector.
Oops…oh, shit! It’s morning!
Okay then…Good morning, all.
And on preview, you’re right, Hector: I should have bailed long ago; I just hate to let misrepresentation lie. However, I’m rectifying that situation now.
SA, first of all there were/are no WMD in Iraq. Stop pushing that old worn out lie. It was false then, it’s still false. Our own government has called the president on that several times. Second, if the middle east is bound and determined to destroy themselves, then we had no business “forcing freedom and democracy” on Iraq at gunpoint to begin with. Third, no one else is conducting wars of extermination??? How about Sudan, Niger (or is it Nigeria?). Remember Yugoslavia’s “ethnic cleansing” from not that long ago?
The US enabled this civil war in Iraq. WE deposed their dictator, and left a power vacuum. Saddam was/is a scumbag. He was/is a killer and a sadistic fuck. But, as bad as he is, he kept a lid on things - the people were under his thumb. When we removed him and declared “Mission Accomplished”, we had no plan on what to do next - except enrich Keith Brown Root and Halliburton. We could have installed a military governor, like we appointed MacArthur in Japan or Patton in Germany, to keep things rolling, get a government started, and get things done - we didn’t. I think the excuse was called “catastrophic success”. So we fumbled around while no day-to-day administrative functions got done. Jobs went to American companies instead of the locals. The whole aftermath of our invasion was an invitation to disaster. So yes, this civil war was of our making. So, Iraqis will kill each other with glee, and in their free time will kill our soldiers. So what DID we accomplish?
If you want to regard my comments as overturning furniture, that’s you’re prerogative. But I’m damn sure not going to refrain from posting a reasonable observation simply because someone of your ilk is faunching at the bit to make something inflammatory out of it; and the fact that I know in advance that you’re going to do so isn’t going to prevent me from posting an observation that to me is simply a statement of fact and/or observation based on experience.
What you propose is that I dare not say a word unless I have endless time to debate and split-hairs with anyone who comes along wanting to argue about it, and as a good liberal I’m sure you realize this would tend to infringe upon my rights of free speech and would, in effect, result in a form of censorship.
Bullshit. It has nothing to do with any ilks. I thought, one of the unspoken rules here at the SD was, when a person says something, they have something to back it up, or some logical thought behind it. Your reasonable observation has been disproved by the facts. Deal with it. Good liberals? Step off. Tossing the L word (liberal) will not get you off. It’s stupid to even think it will. I prefer the R word (realist). Or maybe the F word (fact based). Some people deal with facts, they don’t “create their own reality” - I believe the word for that is “delusional”. As for free speech and/or censorship, that is a lame ass heap of shit. Nobody can prevent you from saying anything, no matter how false or how stupid. That’s freedom of speech. However, nobody can prevent someone else from telling you it is lame ass and stupid. That’s also freedom of speech. You can’t have it both ways. Come around here spouting phony talking points, and you get spanked. That’s just how it is.
How can an observation or prediction – given that it’s my actual observation and not one that I made up – be ‘phony’?
I explained my thoughts several times and was perfectly clear about it. Nothing about what I said has been disproved and no cite was denied.
However, one of these days I’m probably going to Pit the practice of those of your ilk (there’s that word again) to demand cites for uncitable information, which you guys just love to trot out to try to obfuscate and derail the arguments that you either don’t have the energy or logical standing to try to refute.
I doubt seriously that the Reader had such things in mind when the right to call for cites was inaugurated. Facts and figures can be cited; observations based on life experience, predictions and opinions cannot. I’d like to find out once and for all just what the Straight Dope’s official position is on this practice of demanding cites for uncitable (as in no place exists…as reasonable men would define it…wherein the alleged information can be found, given that it doesn’t exist in the first place except in the mind of the poster) information.
If it is to be the case that demands for cites of uncitable information are legitimate, is this then to become a message board in which only factual comments can be made? If so and opinion, judgement, observation, and beliefs are therefore out of bounds to all posters, I would wager that participation on this board would fall by about 98%.
So, whaddya say, guy? Let’s knock off the phony high-horse declarations of having ‘prooved’ this or that ‘phony’ comment is wrong and simply call things what they are: i.e., differences of opinion – and have at it on that basis.
Geez, maybe you have something there. How can we get to the bottom of this issue? I know; let’s ask RTFirefly what his real intentions are. Mr. Firefly, sir, is your entire purpose in posting to this thread to simply find an excuse to blame America for one problem or another in the world?
I’d like to state for the record that, when Iraq dissolves into civil war, I and the entire fucking world will hold the US government responsible.*
The Fox-style apologists will try to weasel out of it with spurious legal justifications by:[ul][li]Blaming the insurgents and terrorists[/li][li]spinning the details and discrediting the messengers, to obscure the big picture[/li][li]blaming the Iraqi people for their ingratitude and violent nature[/li][li]and as we’re seeing now by implication, they and people like Starving Artist (whose opinion seems to have moved from enthusiastic support to “observational and conversational”) will perform a Gallic shrug and say: “Hey, these people are savages: it was gonna happen anyway.”[/ul]But nobody outside the US is going to believe a fucking word they say. [/li]
It’d be like the British blaming the Indians for the partition massacres. The US forces won’t necessarily be the people actually doing the fighting, but they sure as hell were the catalyst for this FUBAR situation, and their masters will bear the blame:[ul][li]The war was predicated on a farrago of lies. [/li][li]Hussein, for all his murderous acts on his citizens, Iran and Kuwait, did not threaten the US.[/li][li]He did not have WMD.[/li][li]He did not have anything to do with Al Qaeda.[/li][li]The humanitarian mission, if it ever existed, has failed.[/li][li]The aftermath was planned in blinkered idealism. [/li][li]The occupation has been riddled with incompetence and brutality.[/li][li]The experiment at democracy is on its last legs.[/li][li]And now civil war is about to start.[/ul]And Fox is debating whether this is a good thing or not.[/li]
Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die in this. Take some fucking responsibility for your mistakes, assholes.
I also predict that in decades and centuries to come, ‘Gulf War B’ will go down as one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. And if the nascent sectarian war spreads outside Iraq’s borders, positively the worst.
*I’ll also give a few props to my Arschlecker of a Prime Minister.
Scanned it, and I have no idea what going to Iraq did to inform the piece. He seems to say the same things as many keyboard kommandos say without leaving their chair. Unheralded training of Iraqi troops and reconstruction efforst is going on. Only the ignorant think sectarian differences are significant. An undue focus on acts of terrrorism prevents the full picture of success. The insurgents or those fomenting civil war are losing. The release of prisoners by Hussein is the cause of the widespread lawlessness and violence. Most everyone agrees that the US knows what it is doing. Civil war is a faint ghost of a possibility.
It’s all just more bullshit. The Pentagon just released a report stating that the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions fell from 1 to 0 (zero). Zero.
“Everyone knows the US knows what it is doing”? What is William F. Buckley looking at, when writing in the same publication as Scylla’s linked article that “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” He also says:
I think that if you look around at a variety of sources, you will find that the only thing the linked article proves is that you can go to Iraq and still be a blind partisan shill.
The point of view that I’m working from is not the debating points made or countered, but that the topic for debate was insane in the first place.
If that is deemed a reasonable starting point for a discussion in right-wing American discourse, then your country’s political axis has spun so widely from the rest of the world’s that I don’t know how the rest of the world can even deal with this country any more.
To Godwinise here: if someone on the SDMB started a thread that read “The Holocaust: was it a good thing?”, how would we feel about the person who started it?
