That is a great line. It’s also a great variation on Mencken’s famous line.
Gosh, I wonder how anyone could possibly have got the idea that you were?
Oh. I guess that was how.
Uh, yeah, there were plenty of historical reasons to believe that freeing slaves was a good idea and that going to the moon was possible. That’s why many people ended up devoting so much energy and effort to trying to do those things, after all.
I mean, what the hell, did you seriously imagine that nobody perceived any reasons for, say, considering a moon voyage to be a doable project until it somehow just miraculously “happened”? “OMG, look, we’re on the moon! Who would even have thought that was possible?” FFS, dude.
No, if you’re seriously advocating that the US must “mandate secular societies onto Muslims” and kill them wherever they resist, it’s on you to back up that plan with plausible reasons why it would be a good idea. Historically, insisting that foreigners change their governmental and social structures to suit the insisters’ ideology and killing the foreigners who oppose that program has not been much of a win for peace and freedom.
Ah, so you’re no different than the murderous thugs that stormed the American embassy.
“Diplomacy be damned! They’re savages! We’ll *force *them to be like us with brute force!”
Who am I paraphrasing there? You or the angry, murderous mob?
Oil is a global market, and oil producers in the West, like oil producers anywhere else, are going to sell their product where they can get the best deal.
The idea that we can somehow achieve “energy independence” with an infrastructure and economy so dependent on a global commodity like oil, just because at present the world happens to be getting more of its oil out of our own back yard, is absurd.
Saying that we don’t need entanglement with Libya or other OPEC countries because we don’t source most of our oil directly from OPEC nowadays is like saying that we don’t need to worry about world grain markets because we can grow enough grain for our own requirements ourselves.
Uh, no. Commodities that are sold in a world market don’t somehow carry a magical guarantee of affordability or “independence” for us just because we’ve extracted them on our own soil.
I have to say I nearly pissed myself laughing at this.
You need to do some actual research if you want to be taken seriously.
Radical Islam spread not through the poor illiterate peasants or Fellaheen of the region, but through the educated, westernized classes of the region.
Said Qutb and all of his top men were educated in the West(Qutb IIRC was an engineer). If you look at the biographies of all the leaders of various Sunni radical groups, almost without exception they were educated in western universities as architects, engineers, pediatricians, or something similar.
The same was largely true in Iran. The revolution was not started by peasants with little formal education, but by the educated middle class chafing under the Shah.
You’ll notice that the people who took over the US Embassy were not farmers but college students.
Similarly, if you look at the 911 hijackers, you’ll notice they all seemed to be engineers, architects or something similar, most spoke multiple languages, and, I think without a single exception(I’d have to look over the list again to be sure) I think they all studied in the West and during the Intifada, Hamas was always vastly more popular at Bir Zeit University than it’s more moderate counterparts.
It shouldn’t be surprising since it’s the frustrated educated classes that drive most revolutions and Egypt and much of the Arab World has free education right college.
Um, that quote is usually attributed to Lenin, although, AFAIR, it could not be found in any of his published works.
I was also going to point out that we had freakin’ art exhibits (New York?) with a Crucifix stuck in a jar of urine.
(Which, I suppose, would only be further proof to him that the west has an immoral & decadent culture.)
Could you point to the place where “Arab & Persian culture” as an entity called us their enemy, please?
Because AFAICT, the people who have been calling us their enemy in this context are members of specific political, religious, cultural and criminal subgroups espousing specific forms of violently oppressive fundamentalist-Islamist ideology.
I have no problem at all agreeing that violently oppressive fundamentalist-Islamist ideology is our enemy (or one of our enemies, at any rate).
But naively equating violently oppressive fundamentalist-Islamist ideology with “Arab & Persian culture” as a whole, much less with “Islam” as a whole, strikes me as stupider than a large economy-size sale-priced bottle of stupid with a free sample pack of New Stupid and double coupons for stupid refills.
:dubious: Um, whose water and electric facilities are we talking about here? Those of all “Muslim countries”? The ones that you’re not advocating invading? And destroying the entire utilities infrastructure of countries that you’re not invading is appropriate because why, exactly?
I swear, it’s as though every other post of yours or thereabouts is written by Martin Jekyll, so we start rationally disputing his arguments and before you know it, shazam! it’s Martin Hyde again frothing at the mouth about the subhuman monsters and how we need to destroy them. Would you mind coming to some agreement with yourself about which one of you will post in this thread? Thanks.
I don’t steal from Mencken, because I don’t much like him. Vonnegut I borrow, Wilde I steal. Twain, I plunder.
I am having a bit of trouble comprehending the level of vitriol and hatred displayed by some posting here. The only explanation I can come up with is to ascribe it to either trolling or simple pig ignorance and refusal to examine reality. At least one of our friends seems to think that the appropriate response to mob violence in Egypt and Libya (and apparently anyone else who deviates from some hypothetical model of a US subservient secular society) is to bomb any offending population into the Stone Age. That hardly seems rational.
Thank you!
As I was reading through the thread since my last post I was mentally sketching the outlines of a long, cited response that was intended to: explain your partial misapprehension about the relationship of trade to the collapse of the Soviet Union; disabuse you of the notion that similar tactics would be feasible or desirable in the contest with theocratic Muslim countries; and point out how hard it is to reconcile your ‘just don’t trade with them’ posts with your ‘kill those who resist us’ posts. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it – it seemed an awful lot like homework for a thread in the pit, and you appeared to be driven much more by emotion than by logic, so I wasn’t sanguine about the chances of making any progress. But, still, you weren’t exactly frothing at the mouth, and I was reasonably confident in the obvious truth of some of my points, so I figured there was a decent shot of at least getting *closer *to common ground.
But, now, I don’t have to do any of that! You’ve blown past “Archie Bunker with a thesaurus” and nose-dived right into virulent racism*, and I don’t have to say anything more to you in this thread … or anywhere else, ever! (And apparently, by your logic, this will eventually bring you around to my way of thinking . . . although to be sure, evidently, I should also go to your house to rip our your plumbing and wiring.)
- => I suppose we could argue about the term “racism” vis-à-vis something like “religious & cultural bigotry,” but this is close of enough for government work.
I would think we have some credit to draw on, here. We just recently took a hand at killing some hundred thousand or so innocent Muslims, I would think we can charge against that account for the foreseeable future without running low. Ten thousand of theirs against one of ours seems a reasonable proportion, but many Islamists are too ignorant to grasp the subtle points of moral relativism in a humanist context.
Especially when you consider that the violent mobs in question comprised maybe a few thousand people at most, and that their governments have repudiated their actions.
It is a horrible thing when even a few innocent people get killed by oppressive violent thugs, and it’s horrible if even a few thousand people are willing to be oppressive violent thugs.
But to deliberately advocate destroying the lives of MILLIONS to punish the acts of a few thousand oppressive violent thugs is incomprehensible. It’s like burning down an entire state park because a poisonous spider bit you while you were hiking in it.
And use what instead? You will never in your life drive or ride in a car that is not directly or ultimately powered by hydrocarbons. Solar, nuclear, wind, whatever, they just can’t take the place of hydrocarbons in our industrial/transportation infrastructure.
What I want to know is exactly what we’re supposed to do about it? Invade Libya? Egypt? What kind of fucking sense does that make?!
So, silence is not acceptance? Apart from those small, vocal and violent groups, the vast majority of North Africa and southwest Asia is horrified by the violent rhetoric and terrorism? Maybe you’re right. Maybe the fringe loonies are too hard to identify and bring to justice. Or just maybe there is gladness in the hearts of the quieter majority when a blow is struck. It’s not one sided–Individual Americans will generally denounce violence and war, and yet we take no useful action to persuade our leadership to sue for peace, sincerely, at every opportunity. There is distrust and hatred on both sides for generations now. It’s a cross-cultural problem.
This is just awesome. 
And copies of the work are regularly vandalized or cause local shit-storms when they feature in new exhibits, in the US and elsewhere in the world. It is also often the target of censorship legal motions. The artist who made this photo has received countless death threats, as well his gvt. art grants have been shut down due to pressure from Christian lobbies.
If you wanted an example of just how much more enlightened and tolerant our religious types are, you couldn’t have picked a *worse *example than Piss Christ.
You just named the harm.
We could give them an opportunity to even the score–Maybe gift Texas or Arizona to the people of Iraq?
I looked in vain for the smiley in this post, and ended up disappointed.
Oh well, another one bites the dust. <plonk>