Well, for the rest of us there’s always Walgreens.
I don’t think their employees get five weeks of annual paid vacation, though.
No I am not. The morality of the War and the right/wrong of each side of the War are debatable topics. These are debated frequently. What I am saying is simply this:
A poster says they are upset by the attack on the WTC. They also say they just found out that the U.S. is attacking Iraq. Henceforth, they say, I am going to go join the U.S. Military.
Another poster says they are upset at the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces. They say they are going to go join the resistance there.
The moral right and wrong of the conflict, foreign policy decision and actions of leaders are debatable topics (as you pointed out), however, the rules of the board should not be able to judge a poster based upon the moral issue because, as an International board, it must remain neutral and allow the members to discuss this. Thus, what it cannot do, to remain neutral, is say one poster is wrong while another is not. Both of them are wrong. They are not debating the right or wrong of the war, they are expressing an interest and an intent to go fight and kill.
“I am going to go fight against those Iraqi insurgents” and “I am going to go fight against U.S. soldiers” are exactly the same notion. The right and wrong is debtable for each side, but either side advocating the intent to join forces who are going to kill is expressing a willingness to kill.
Alde’s jerkish and trolling behavior aside, this is a serious dilemma that the board will have to face or it will not be able to obtain the status of multicultural/international. If we take stances on issues, based upon the moral beliefs of one culture and the side we agree with, then it is not neutral. This is true with anything, Repub/Democrat etc…
Throughout the entire presidential campaign, everyone was able to support or attack the candidates, as long as they did not pass certain lines. Threats and intimations of violence and bodily harm were punished. Thus, we can debate the Iraq war, but, if we want to be a neutral board we will have to forbid threads that:
A) Honor soldiers who are given medals for killing. Honoring those who died is ok, as long as both sides can do this. But there can never be an honoring of killing. This was exemplified in a thread about a year ago where a poster was posting information about various medals American troops won and how they won them. I don’t think people would look too kindly on a thread honoring and celebrating the actions of an Iraqi man/woman/child who ran up to an American Humvee and tossed a grendade in, killing 5 soldiers, and then with their last dying breath setting of a charge of explosives that killed 3 more GI’s.
B) While we are war, the discussion of joining the armed forces to take part in a particular conflict, must also be seriously questioned.
This is the impression I got from the rulings from the mods. If this is a misinterpretation, then I am sorry.
Try Google - you’ll find dozens of cites explaining exactly how and why Allawi is a criminal. This is how he’s seen in the ME
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/August/12o/CIA%20puppet%20installed%20to%20pacify%20Iraqi%20resistance%20but%20will%20it%20work%20By%20Linda%20Averill.htm
You must be one sick puppy to find anything ‘laughable’ about the massacre in Fallujah. MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos
Those poor insurgents. I know not all of them were, but to consider Fallujah a massacre is actually laughable. Are you content yet in trying to tarnish the US forces and its allies as baby killers?
Are you fucking kidding me? Al Jazeera? You use that as a cite? As proof? It doesn’t matter who he was, or is, considering he left the Ba’ath party more than 25 years ago, and considering he was attacked and his leg was severly injured, he amended his ways in going against Saddam and his party.
Answer my question.
Oh, hell. You said please twice. The country was Denmark. I was a young woman then and I cannot speak for how the Scandanavian countries are now. They paid an enormous percentage in taxes, but their lives were both secure and free.
I also want to mention an experience that I had in Paris last spring. I had a bit of a fall and got a black eye. (It seemed the existential thing to do at the time.) One of the street vendors (this was by the Left Bank) called an ambulance and my granddaughter and I were taken to a hospital where I was treated by a pleasant physician after about a five minute wait. She spent about twenty or thirty minutes with me and gave me a tetanus shot.
The entire experience – ambulance, hospital, physician, and shot cost less that $24. And that is in a city where a cup of coffee costs four or five dollars.
These things may understandably not be as important to a young person, but at my age that level of health care is stunning. Imagine what it would mean to my mother who is still living and whose medicine alone costs more than the social security she receives each month.
My mother could not even get the machine she has needed to keep circulation going in her legs. Medicare will pay for it but only if they know for certain that it will work. So she has to rent it first. But the machine is too expensive for any store in the small town where she lives to buy so that they will have it to rent out. The doctor feels certain that it will work, but he can’t prove it to Medicare.
I didn’t mean to turn your question into a rant about health care in America, but it is a disgrace.
Originally posted by Zoe
As Rune will confirm, Denmark and the Netherlands have about the same social security system, health care, no poverty, high standard of living, lots of vacation and the realisation that family is very important. We pay a lot of taxes, but an experience, like yours in Paris, would cost you about the same, or less.
We are no longer ‘free’ though. Nor are our street safe anymore.
Radical muslims have taken care of that.
We can critisize every religion except the muslim religion. You’ll get killed for that. Our young women no longer can wear mini-skirts without being called a whore. Our homo-sexuals are being threatened to be thrown of off high buildings [head first] and history teachers who explain the holocaust are shot through the head.
Believe me, America isn’t that bad.
I once thought of Denmark as the country of noble and heroic people who worked so hard to save so many Jews.
A thread of a few months back informed me that Denmark is now a country of bigotted immigration policies, designed to keep out ‘those damn Pakis’.
Could you please give me a link to that thread, DocCathode? I’m not too sure about Denmark’s policies so I’ll not speak for the Danes, but I believe that claim was refuted?
A F*ck You To Denmark, The Coming Shame Of Europe
I was stunned as well. It was like finding out that your childhood hero, the man who set a homerun record, invented the polio vaccine, and saved your life with a Heimlich, was photographed doing heroin while torturing kittens.
Howyadoin,
The first part was a twist on lyrics from the Black Sabbath song War Pigs. Reading all the venomous posts that carried on in the thread after the OP’ers (mostly deserved) banning, I could imagine him laughing uproariously over the magnificent shitstorm he left behind. That brought up the Sabbath reference.
I couldn’t care a bit less about the “Bush Sucks” vs. “Dirty Hippie Scum” poo-fling that this thread and so many others have become. It’s so 2004, really.
I saw a thread today asking if global warming might have played a role in triggering the Indian Ocean tsunami. It was a legitimate question, and I’m sure it wasn’t the intent of the OP’er, but I could just imagine the Usual Suspects seizing on this and carrying it off to war. The Bush record on “global warming”/“climate change”/“insert the phrase your special interest paid some focus-grouping asshole to invent” would invite shots from those who support Bush for Antichrist, which would call the other side to the ramparts, and here we go again…
The Pit has become nothing but a poorly managed version of GD with naughty words and ad hominem smart bombs. GD itself has been in decline since 2002. For crissakes, sometimes this place makes Italian politics look cohesive and intelligent.
To paraphrase Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get a blog?”
-Rav
Yes, I remember the thread.
The Danes that I have known do not share the racial perspective that Gum has.
I live in an international community that includes a large population of Muslims. We have none of the kinds of problems that Gum described. It is quite a stretch for me to imagine that Muslims in Denmark would be so different from Muslims here. I doubt that they are all radical.
The incidents that are described appear to be anecdotal. (The museum dedicated to the Danish resistance is still open, is it not?)
I don’t know whether or not the information about the immigration policy in that thread was accurate or how the situation was resolved.
I would point out also that a smaller, relatively neutral country that is protected by more powerful allies (I don’t mean this as an insult) does not have to spend much of its GNP on defense. This leaves a much greater proportion of revenues collected through taxation available for societal benefits.
I doubt that here in the U.S., even if we had similarly high tax rates and didn’t have a population that was so fractious and fragmented that getting them to all pull together to take care of each other would be virtually impossible, we would be able to offer similar benefits simply because our defense spending uses up so great of a percentage of the revenue that countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands have available to help fund their societal programs.
I’m wondering also, gum, how such countries manage not to have poverty without the wholesale subsidizing of those who simply will not or can not, for whatever reason, hold down a job or earn enough money to support their families? And if the government does, in effect, support these people, how does it keep the rest of its populace content to support them…and how does it keep everyone else from jumping on the bandwagon and just kicking back and letting the government support them?
This is a big problem we conservatives have with the idea of socialism: How do you keep 'em working when the government will support 'em if they don’t?
And you have my sympathies regarding the problem regarding Muslim radicals in your country. This is the problem with societies that strive to give their citizens rights and freedoms. Being concerned with everyone’s rights and freedoms, they can’t come up with a way to halt encroachment by more aggressive and forceful groups who have no such concerns. In other words, their desire to treat everyone fairly results in an inability to effectively condemn or halt harmful influences that may be taking hold, and eventually they lose their freedom to those they could not or would not stop in the name of freedom and fair play.
I worry about this in your country and I worry about it in mine. How to put a stop to insidious take-over by harmful factions without sacrificing freedom and fair play is, in my opinion, one of the greatest conundrums countries like ours face, and I fear that there is no satisfactory answer. It appears to me that there are only two possibilities: One, for the government to stand by and watch helplessly as its country goes down the drain, and the other for the government to stand up strongly and say, “This threat cannot be allowed to continue and must be stopped at once!”, and then take the necessary steps to stop it.
It is possible to bring a halt to harmful organizations and political and religious groups if they come to be deemed sufficiently and outrageously harmful. The Ku Klux Klan here in America has been virtually outlawed, and as I understand it Nazism in any form is illegal in Germany. In my opinion, if radical Muslim extremists continue to murder and terrorize countries around the world and work insidiously to take them over, the time will eventually come when Muslims will become persecuted and outlawed, and they will have to practice their religion in secret or face the consequences.
If the 99.99 percent of the Muslim population that is peace-loving and decent does not begin to rise up and demand that these atrocities being committed in their name be put to a stop, it is inevitable that they will eventually feel the repressive force of the law and militia to protect the rest of society from them. As has been quoted around here often, all that is necessary for evil men to succeed is for good men to do nothing. If good Muslims don’t begin to rise up and put an end to this nonsense, they are the ones who will eventually bear the brunt of its inevitable repression.
Sorry, the above post was in response to gum’s post #606.
Are you calling me a racist, Zoe?
Did you happen to read somewhere I work [as a volunteer] for muslim women?
Nowhere did I mention all muslims are radical. Those who are [mainly young men] give us enough trouble, though and infringe on our freedom.
These ‘incidents’ happen every day.
Did you know that 43% of our muslim community is in favor of a muslim party [in the Netherlands] which upholds the sharia laws?
And our museum dedicated to the Dutch resistance is still open too. :rolleyes:
Starving Artist, ofcourse you’re right about our defence budget. We’ve relied on our bigger brothers in the last century. Our army in WWII - consisting of ten constables on a bike [hehehe] was captured in no time.
That, I believe, if one of the reasons[li] the Netherlands is your ally in this damn war. [/li]We owe you.
As we would owe Canada, the UK and all the others who liberated the Netherlands in 1945.
Posted by SA
We have some of those people. We call them a-socials. They are the ones that say they’re ‘sick’, get 80% of their last earned salary and often work at the sly to make more money.
The government isn’t completely crazy though and checks on the anti-socials regularly.
The rest, who are genuine ill , will benefit from what they - and we - pay for each month by taxes.
It works. Kind of. 
[*] That, and the fact that we consider you, the American people, our friends.
This is going to evolve into a GD about the welfare state, but I just wanted to add some more details.
SA - to an extent, you’re right, but it really doesn’t degenerate into that. As Gumsaid, there are some people who are exploiting the system, but the problem in Sweden is not those that do that.
It’s the public sector in itself. Taxes are now a littleover 50% of the GDP and there are as many, or a little more people working in the public sector as in the private. The problem isn’t someone who, rightfully or not, draws unemployment money, it’s that for every $1000 they get, it’s costing the state 2000.
One reason behind this was that during the 70’s and early 90’s, people who lost their jobs weren’t put on the dole. They were hired by the public sector. Anotherway to avoid unemployment, was for the goverment to subsidize or buy industries that were losing money.
FF to now. Coinciding with the slump in the economy 10 years ago was a huge influx of refugees from former Yugoslavia and the ME. The down and out Swedes on the dole saw this people come here, get dole, apartments. This created a lot of tension, among the poorer Swedes and the refugees. Today, there are quite a lot of young males, 15-25, with a Muslim background, who are not touting a Muslim agenda, but being assholes in general. I can understand, though not support, why they behave that way. They live in housing projects from the 60’s, speak Swedish poorly, and know they are losers who will never get a real job, being effectively shut out from the marketplace. Having so many Swedes say that they are the problem behind the failing economy (they’re not), they start thinking about ways to get ahead. For many, the answer is “import-export” and “biznizz - bada-bing”. Too many have mentally OD’d on Tony Montana.
The situation now is tense and in this welfare society of ours, there are parts of town where I wouldn’t walk, and hesitate to drive. The town has a population of around 260’ and of these 60’ are Muslims. Many of these speak little or no Swedish, have their sat dishes pointed towards the Arabian peninsula and put their kids in schools where the working language is Arabic.
We did a piss poor job in receiving all these refugees and on top of that, everything about what’s happened in the past 15 years for them has been sorely mismanaged.
I’d say that the welfare state could work well, providing it was better managed and that there were demands put on those that receive welfare. The crux of the problem, really, is that all those that work with re-distributing the taxes, need victims to justify their jobs. They are therefore, probably on a subconscious level, not really interested in solving the problems, no matter what they say. Because if they did, they would be out of their jobs.
Because they actually are, perhaps? I posted the Al Jazeera link because I thought [silly me!] that you might actually be interested in what the people in the ME think. If you had bothered to Google ‘fallujah massacre’ you would have got 91,600 hits - if you want one from a western news source try
http://www.newsgateway.ca/Fallujah_video_massacre.htm - which has info from a number of sources
or, from our very own Channel 4 news
As for Allawi being a criminal and a puppet, this is also well documented - why don’t you use Google [78,200 hits for allawi criminal] Are you seriously advocating that Saddam should be tried for crimes of the past, while giving Allawi a free pass on things like bombing a school bus in the 1990s. He was also one of the enforcers in Saddam’s regime - so his hands are equally bloody, aren’t they?
Or does the fact that he later became a CIA operative wash all his crimes away like magic? Like he’s a born-again terrorist, perhaps?
http://counterpunch.org/whitney07192004.html
You think I will believe cites that propose this B.S?
Churchill gassed the Kurds, do you want him to be put up for war crimes? Sometimes we carry out things which aren’t always necessarily moral, but somehow try and get us to the right goal. The world isn’t black and white.
Your links are aload of bollocks. http://counterpunch.org/karmi07172004.html
but this is interesting.
And people seem to overlook that this logic applies to both sides.
You do know he’s dead, right?
Hang on, are you now defending the right of the insurgents to perform ‘immoral acts’ in pursuit of a goal they believe to be right. Or just talking out of your arse?
Gum, I don’t know you well enough to know if you are a racist. If you are a volunteer working with Muslim women, then I would assume that you are not.
There is a lot of difference in saying that the radical Muslims infringe on your freedom and in saying that you are no longer free – as you did in your first response to me.
Look at the list that you gave in your first post. This is not really a time to hyperbolize. We need an accurate picture.
Everyone who criticizes the Muslim faith is killed?
This happens to all the young women all the time?
How do the Muslims know who is homosexual? Are all homosexuals threatened with this specific threat? Threatening someone with death is a very serious crime in the States and I feel sure that it is in the Netherlands also. What is being done to the men who make these threats? (If you had said that homosexuals are threatened and harassed, I would have been more inclined to believe you.)
This happens every day?
I’m not trying to minimize the frustration and anger and fear that people in the Netherlands must feel when these things do happen. My memories of your country are pure gold! Just tell us the truth without exaggeration for effect.
I wish you and your country a return to the peacefulness I knew there. You certainly seem to be doing your part with the volunteer work. I salute you for that.