I’m confused. My first point was in direct opposition to the third sentence of the third paragraph of your OP. The sentence in question reads "If they were too chickenshit to overthrow The Devil Himself and his regime why should the rest of the world care?"
My point was that they weren’t chickenshit. In fact they did rise up against “The Devil Himself” and tried to overthrow him but lost because they were hopelessly outgunned. In all seriousness, am I not getting the meaning you intended?
Oh, undoubtedly. I was on the fence between pro and anti war for some time because of this very point. The fact that Saddam is gone for good is great news for everybody (well, everybody worth caring about). Personally, however, I’m moderately anti this war because a very convincing case can be made that the solution is now becoming worse than the problem. But that’s for another thread, IMO.
Whenever I see a thread with some alarming title, written by someone who registered last Thursday and yet has 100+ posts, I can almost predict how it’s gonna go down.
If only there was some sort of…I dunno…document.maybe…or a set of rules perhaps, explaining the board’s modus operandi and sense of decorum… that the young kids could read before making irritating asses out of themselves…
I’m no middle east expert either, but wasn’t Iraq a strictly secular and socialist society and therefore often villified by Bin Ladin, who would refer to Hussein as an “infidel”? And didn’t Iraq only become a magnet for “Mid East freaks who just gotta kill somebody” AFTER Hussein was overthrown?
And I do seem to recall a world leader who initially referred to the war on terrorism as a “crusade”.
There has been a lot of killing, but the situation in Iraq isn’t as bad as the media makes it. I see the media as very liberal and biased, and they are trying very hard to make President Bush look really bad. They are doign an excellent job at doing that. From what I heard though, we are at a point over there now that it took us 4 years to do in Germany to get to this point. The media is a bigger liar than any politician and you just can’t believe them anymore.
I apologize to anyone in the media, but if there is anyone in the media here, please try to focus on positive stuff. People, especially me, get sick and tired of watching negative stuff about everything.
I actually opened this thread thinking it would be a pitting of people who always preface their absurdly racist statements with that kind of disclaimer.
Of course, it turned out it was, but it took us until the second post to get there.
Wow! about 20 folks who have demonstrated they can identify a “fuckwit” but only 1 or 2 who care to address the post. We can do BETTER!
Matchka, you are falling into the same trap as the people you are bitching about. I don’t know the depth of your understanding of “THEM” people, but you seem to be carving a pretty big chip for your shoulder. See, I think the fanatical killers are bred by a culture that is merely suspicious of ‘outsiders.’ That goes for any of the slaughters you mentioned: Indians, Jews, Albanians–all, for different reasons, did not make themselves less obvious and so were able to be singled out. Once singled out as a group (?) the group could be observed and judged. This is human nature. If a single member of the group so observed gets out of line well, that’s because THEY’RE all in cahoots! Gotta watch them sneaky Indians, them unscrupulous Jews, them pink-eyed Albanians, them murderous Ay-rabs! Not to mention them two-faced Christians!
Once divided in this way the individual groups form sterotypes and then specifics are no longer needed in order to understand a strange action by another group–and so mutual understanding breaks down & the groups are further divided. Until you get groups of people who love their families and children and ways of life but who completely fail to understand one another.
And then come the loonies inherent in any population. Usually they get weeded out within the group, but sometimes they attain positions of influence and get others to do their twisted bidding. How big is Al-Qaeda as an organization? Is it larger than The Mafia? Hell. It could consist of 1,000 criminally insane or just confused individuals that act on a large scale and guess what? They indict their group in the eyes of the others, and their own group cringes and says, “How did that happen? Good thing the rest of us aren’t nuts like that!” How many attacks have there been in this aggravated part of the world? 10? 50? 100? Not bad given the current state of affairs. And still, given the number of individuals OVER THERE, I’d say that we are accounting for the loonies–and they are blowing themselves up! They’ll run out before the world ends.
What do you think the independent media’s for? The media is there to report everything; to uncover, to dig the dirt, to expose where there is wrongdoing. The media should report what it sees, not some whitewashed propagandistic viewpoint.
I can just hear Nixon saying the same words at the time of Watergate…!
I was watching a John Pilger documentary last night which was making the point that the media, and especially the American mass media, signally failed in their duty to do the things jjimm mentions. In the face of the threat of being frozen out from the key sources of Government information, they chose to embed rather than challenge. Since the war, there has been a greater willingness to investigate and as a result, many of the obfuscations, half-truths, spin and downright lies that characterised the prelude to war and the war itself have been exposed. To me that’s positive but some appear to prefer a media complete with pom poms and shiny uniforms.
Ben
You are quite right; there are many,many posters who have stuck the mark with their very first post. I wasn’t addressing/attacking low-count posters (of which I am one) so much as people who don’t look before they leap.
Are you in the media? I would guess not, since you assume the media reports everything. My uncle, who was a manager of a radio new station in Vancouver, then a Calgary based tv news program, said there were very few things you could talk about. If you think every news station reports ‘everything’ why on earth can I watch the 11 am, 12 pm, 5:30 pm, 6 pm and 11 pm news from all over the country, and get the same stories? So maybe you’re getting whitewashed propagandistic news now, and you don’t even know it. That’s worse IMO.
