Well, just remember what my ol’ Granny said “You can draw more flies with honey than with vinegar. Of course, shit works even better!”
(We’ve all got colorful relatives, Scylla. Except for Spavined G., of course, but, well, you know, Iowa Most of us assume nobody else is interested.)
And this wisdom from my very own Daddy (drunkard, gambler, pawnbroker): “Don’t worry 'bout what people are thinking about you. They’re not thinking about you.”
The reason I ask, Scylla, is that you could simply have written “we pulled a dictator out of a spider hole for a flea inspection”.
The plural was not required to make your point. So I just wondered why you chose the plural.
Because phrasing your sentence in the plural made it sound as if pulling vile dictators out of holes was a common US activity.
I haven’t done a count, but I would have thought that it was a pretty damn rare activity, and that propping up dictators was a more common US behaviour.
No. I’m not talking about the nature and purpose of conflict in war.
Attempting to simply contain or resist an aggressor is losing game, and if that’s all you are doing you are being stupid.
If somebody attacked you with a knife, and you simply try to avoid the blows or deflect them you are being stupid. You have to be continually perfect to avoid getting stabbed. All your opponent has to do is make you mess up once and then you have a knife in you.
Avoiding or deflecting the blow is necessary. Just as important is preventing the next blow from occuring. In my example you would need to take away the knife, and incapacitate or kill your attacker. Either that, or run away so that your attacker could no longer try to stab you.
Israel for the most part has simply been held to deflecting each individual knife blow. They have not removed the threat so the threat remains.
This is what I mean by the balance of power and the deadlock. It doesn’t shift after each conflict. The pieces on the board remain essentially the same, and Israel has historically gotten attacked quite a lot because its attackers survive intact and are able to regroup for another try.
Having something horrible like a war occur is bad enough. At least sometimes wars if prosecuted to their end, lead to peace.
The problem with the Israeli conflicts is that they have not been persecuted to resolution, so they keep happening again and again. IMO this is because of the power deadlock and the politics of the situation.
Israel is allowed to defend herself but when she attacks her attackers she is labelled an aggressor, and she does not have the power to follow all the way through. The knife is never getting taken out of the attackers’ hand.
Yeah, Scylla you’re always good with the nice dinky little parables.
Now. What precisely do you think should be done about the Palestinians to “destroy” them", “not allow them to exist” and cause them “not to survive”?
You know, the actual human beings under discussion?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Princhester *
**The reason I ask, Scylla, is that you could simply have written “we pulled a dictator out of a spider hole for a flea inspection”.
The plural was not required to make your point. So I just wondered why you chose the plural.
I began by consulting my Standard Guidelines for Euphemisation 2002 edition to see whether “Pulling a dictator from a spider hole” might be euphemisized to generally describe regime change in a totalitarian environment, and decided that that would be ok, under section 12 which describes using specific events to refer to general ones.
Next I consulted Warriner’s grammar for the proper gerundification of euphemisms and found pluralization to be the commonsest and most generally accepted method.
Having thus proven that “pulling dictators from spider holes,” was a proper and appropriate colloquial usage I then submitted it to the NAACP for prior aprroval and registered it as a timely colloquialism, and was granted said status by the Colloquial Standards Review Center who issued letter ruling number 999475393 on my behalf potecting the usage under law from undo innane nitpicking. Only after completing all the aforementioned due diligence did I then proceed to post it.
If your going to nitpick my pluralizations I’ll expect you to honor my choice of tense. My point was that it was a mistake to allow the current situation to materialize in the first place. They should have not been allowed to resettle in these territories.
Now that they are there it’s quite the conundrum, which is my point.
You’re dodging the point, and I’m sure you know it.
The point is not that you used a euphemism, it’s that you used a plural euphemism for a singular activity, the rhetorical effect of which was to suggest that the activity is common, when in fact it is not. just depending on what his strategic goals are at any given time.
Aagh, just ignore that last bit, it was a stray bit of another post altogether.
I’m having some trouble reading this so it is not an indication as to what you think should happen now, not merely (as you are now trying to pretend) an indication of what should have happened in the past. You say that they “are granted” the right of existence (not just that they were granted that right). You say “it’s a big mistake” to let them survive, not merely that it was.
Sounds like present tense to me.
Well. This discussion has certainly picked up since yesterday.
Scylla:
Very briefly, a couple of responses:
And yet, this is not my understanding of the evolution of the Israeli state. Not all Palestinians left freely; many were removed by force. That is an historical fact. Others fled in fear. Others were angry that their lands had been invaded, and fought back. In fact, using your analogy, one could argue the precise opposite: that really, it is Israel that should never have been granted the “right to exist,” and the then residents of “Palestine” who should have declared all-out war.
Within the borders of the original state of Israel (the so-called “green line”) Palestinians were granted no concessions or territories. The Occupied Territories came about after Israel took land in the Six Day War and refused (probably with good reason) to give it back afterwards. If my history isn’t too foggy (and I’m sure yojimbo or Tamerlane can correct me if I’m wrong), “Trans-Jordanian” conceded the Territories Israel won in the war, but Israel did not annex them, leaving the Palestinians inhabiting a string of refugee camps in the middle of a judicial no-man’s-land, and claiming at least this small strip of the earth’s surface as their own.
But truth to tell, I can’t make heads or tales out of your arguments on this point. First you speak in present tense, leading me to believe that this is your solution for the current problem. But then you backtrack and claim that what you mean is that the “Palestinians,” in some indefinite sense, shouldn’t have been granted the right to exist in the first place. Still, you advocate the “Big Dawg” approach in international relations, so it would seem that you would support this approach in the here and now as well. And in replying to Princester a bit further down the page, you write:
So you seem to me to be making a distinction without meaning. Do you, or do you not, believe that the “Big Dawg” principle should be applied as a solution to the current Israeli-Palestinian problem?
In addition, I’m not at all sure I – or anyone else reading this – is really clear on what you mean when you write, “And yes, they should not have been allowed to continue to exist. Not in any genocidal oppressive meaning, but as a force to be dealt with, a group with a viable claim.” Because from my perspective, and the perspective of other posters here as well, it sure sounds like you mean genocide (although I’m sure you don’t. At least, I really hope not.). But have you yourself really thought through the consequences of not allowing a specific cultural group the right to exist as a political entity?
So we have now been reduced to attacking the symbols of resistance to American imperialism, freely admitting that they have done nothing of substance against us. Perhaps you can see that we are playing right into the hands of those who argue that the US is an aggressor nation in the first place: one cannot even speak out against the US without fear of invasion.
I’m wondering, really, what gives the US alone the right to decide who and who should not “remain on the board.” Anyway, there may be some merit to this argument, but it must also be balanced against other considerations.
There is a tradition in US foreign policy that assumes the world to be an imperfect place. It is based on the idea of the continual management and careful fine-tuning of relations with allies, combined with the containment threats by means of mutual defense. It does not assume the US to be a preeminent world power with the right to simply waltz in and take over other nations at a whim, and is skeptical of the US’s ability to transform the globe into its own image. Colin Powell could be said to represent that old tradition of statecraft in the current administration.
Arrayed against that tradition is the current wave of neo-conservative “aggressive nationalists,” Paul Wolfowitz foremost among them, but also including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Daniel Perle, and others. They promote a “Big Dawg” approach to international relations, but you may be surprised to learn, Scylla, that even they are not as aggressive as you would have them be. Never would they advocate the invasion of Libya over the bombing of a disco, for example. So even the most extremely hawkish right-wingers in this current administration of right-wingers fall to the left of your recommendations, if I read you right.
I heard a CIA analyst in a TV interview claim that after the US bombed Tripoli, international terrorism “bottomed out” for about three years. And to claim that bombing the capital of Libya, including his presidential residences, was “no disincentive to Qaddaffi” is to have simply left the path of reason. I personally believe that the bombings led Qaddaffi to curtail his support of international terrorism completely. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that he or his government has been behind any “terrorist” attacks since then?
I find this to be a compelling argument, on the other hand. It would be for me a very strong argument for international intervention under the auspices of the UN, if such could be achieved.
Regarding leaving your country:
Well, Scylla, immigration laws for one thing. You don’t think the Swedish government is going let you just pack up your stuff and move over, do you?
Finally:
Well, not Nazi Germany by any stretch. And never to my knowledge have I accused the US government of genocide (outside of killing off the American Indians). But a war of conquest, maybe; something along those lines. The US government is engaged in a war of conquest hidden in the rhetoric of duty, patriotism, self-defense, and concern for human rights.
Sorry if you find my position trite, but if you think my stance requires me to hoist a Kalashnakov and join the Taliban resistance forces, well, I’ll just going to have to disappoint you. I’ve a family to take care of, you know.
And speaking of that, I must be off. We are going up country for a few days to spend Christmas with the in-laws, and to hunt moose. My brother-in-law is breaking in his new Norwegian moose-dog, and I’m invited! So, Merry Christmas everybody and Happy New Year….
See ya in 2004!
Merry Christmas, dude. 
Just to clarify, Daniel Pearl was the young WSJ journalist murdered in Karachi. Last year I think. I guess Svinlesha meant Richard Perle aka The Prince of Darkness and co-founding PNAC nasty.
Conquest?! Yeah, they conquered a dictator and kicked him out.
See, my idea of conquering another nation is to ride in on your horses, raping and pillaging as you go. To quote Arnold, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women! You know, kind of like those olden day Swedes called Vikings did.
My idea of conquest does not include setting up a democratic government by removing a dictator who had killed countless thousands as the fancy took him. After a new government is installed the US will leave except for a probably a few military bases. As the US has bases in over a hundered other countries around the world I guess you might consider them to be conquered, too? Kind of like Germany and Japan after WW2. They make their own decisions. Or do you consider them to be States 51 and 52 now?
Is that a ‘No comment’ Scylla,
I see. Hmmmmm. And if the newly installed (your word choice here being more apt than you may realize) government should disapprove? If they would prefer no such bases? Have you any reason to believe that the Iraqi people, as a whole, would welcome such a development? And by “reason”, of course, I mean evidence.
Your definition of “conquest” is entirely dependent on the presence or absence of benign intent. That is your privilege, of course. Please keep in mind that the rest of us were not advised that such benign intent was the central purpose of the invasion. We were operating under the impression that protecting America from Saddam’s ghastly weapons and his close cooperation with Al Queda was the crucial motivation. From here, it looks like the liberation of Iraq only became central after the previous crucial issue was stuffed down the Memory Hole.
What about all the other countries where the US has bases? How about the governments of Japan and Germany? They were ‘installed’, too. Do you consider that the US has a less than benign interest in them?
**
That’s nice. Who are the rest of you by the way? Your fellow Americans? Do you plan on staying in Iraq as a conqueror? If not, why do you assume that your next door neighbour, a fellow American, does?
Faith and bugger! I don’t think friend Scylla has named any conspirators, indicted or otherwise.
For the record:
I am not, nor have I ever been, nor have I so much as contemplated, a position as a “Ringleader” in any conspiracy to sully or besmirch the fair name of Scylla. Further, I swear on the name of Eugene V. Debs that I am unaware of any such conspiracy, now or in the past.
[Joe Isuzu] You’ve got my word on that! [/JI]
You think I misinterpreted the above, old cock ?
Looks to me like you’re in the Big Dawg Conspiracy up to your nuts, make no mistake!
I quite take your point. I had overlooked that snide inference, being by nature a kindly and benign person. It would appear that you are entirely correct, I am the only named conspirator, with the implication being that since I am in possession of the Table of Organization, I must be at least the membership coordinator, if not the head honcho.
(And may I assume the “old cock” reference is best translated into 'Merkin as “rooster who has reached full maturity”? Still haven’t quite penetrated this whole “wanker/bollocks” mystery…)
But, finally, of no consequence. Friend Scylla has disowned his previous statements: poof! they are no more. He never said it, and if you prove he said it, he didn’t mean it, and if he did mean it, it meant something entirely different than what a plain reading would suggest.
(Oh, and I remain assured that you do not regard the nickname Werewolf of London as pejorative?)
Those were conquered countries, not “liberated” ones.
Or are we now admitting that the invasion was an attack on the Iraqi people?