[Moderator Hat ON]
Collounsbury, you were let back on your own promise of better behavior in GD…jacking-off references and mocking nicknames are not appropriate for your new standard of behavior. Post like this again in this forum and you will be banned.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Wow, if Coll’s measured response to an ignorant partisan hijack could lead to his banning, then I guess the SDMB has truly devolved into an insturment for the promotion of ignorance. Looks like one of the best threads I have seen on this board for over a year is about to die an inglorious death. Pity.
CTB, remain cool. Col is just under double public probation.
Col, please, also remain cool, in times like this, we really appreciate you.
I second the above. Please, pretty please with sugar on top, **Collounsbury, ** if you need to vent, by all means do so, but in the Pit. I’d hate to see you banned again!
If you don’t care for yourself, then do it either a) as an exercise in diplomacy, or b) for those of the rest of us who would like to learn something from an actual exchange of informed views.
Collounsbury, this has got to be one of the most informative threads I have seen on this subject. I thank you.
All
Apologies for the delay, it is reporting season at present and I need to get some items cleared out. Sorry, my temper slipped and the Milly name is a usage that slipped in, as of course we get along so very well. I apologize for that, I should not have. The substance, however remains, as I meant a rebuttal rather than venting.
I would like to type up some thoughts on issues and challenges for the next few months, but as noted this is a busy time for me for scheduling and the rather more obvious reasons. I may disappear for a bit because of that.
I would like, however to point all to the following art on BBC, quite good in my opinion:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2952867.stm
(Aside why is the server down every noon my time?)
Hello-
I just wanted to thank you for your time spent on this. Very informative.
The SDMB servers go down at roughly the same time every day for replication and maintenance. It hits me at 11am, so I assume you are an hour ahead.
-Tcat
Down for board maintenance.
Thanks for the great thread
[aside]
LOL … I was expecting to see a clever editorial cartoon!
Collounsbury … for some reason, I though you were born and raised in Texas. When I see all the Britishisms in your posts, I’m wondering if I am incorrect about your point of origin?
[/aside]
Texas?
Texas?
Good lord no.(*) I am a … well NYC/New Englander(**) by origin. Nice old colonial family of ancient traditions in mediocrity. Centuries of not getting ahead nor behind but ostentatiously staying put.
My Britishism come from being an impressionable youth and long exposure to parts of the world where British English is de facto.
Now I have to go, off to the weekend, meet some fine returning diplomats who skedaddled when the going got hot, so I can mock them and have them buy me beers.
(Of course it was the guvmints that pulled them. Lucky nobody can tell me to skedaddle but me)
[sub]
(*: with all due respect to Texans and Southerners in general, family tradition requires me to dislike you all in a vaguely peevish sort of manner with pretensions, even though we’re just mediocrities with the odd eccentric going off to travel the world and die in foreign places now and again. Having few hobbies, I like to adhere pointlessly to random family traditions.)
(**: If there is any one place I have spent more formative years in it is NYC, although Matt noted in the past the bizarre Montreal English I picked up also from my time there.)
[/sub]
Lunchtime my time too.
It’s an anti-Arabic world conspiracy…
Here’s a pretty good article by Fareed Zakaria on this subject:
One of the lessons of colonialism is that if you just walk into an illiberal country and say, “Ok, vote!”, you wind up with a mess. Iraq needs to build up the trappings of liberal society before democracy will be stable. Rule of law, respect for institutions, constitutions, etc. And the people have to ‘buy in’ to the concept.
If you had Iraqis just start voting today, the votes would break along tribal and ethnic lines. Winners of elections would use their power to gain advantage over the losers. Eventually, you’d wind up with a civil war.
The other problem is that if the U.S. tries to go slowly, there will be rising resentment towards what people will ultimately see as an occupation.
This too happened during British Colonialism. The British would leave too soon and let chaos reign behind them, or they’d try to stay for the long run and have to resort to increasingly tough measures to suppress rising anger towards them. Made worse by the early colonialist’s tendency to see these countries as things to be exploited.
As Letterman said last night - “So now the Iraqis are fee to build a democratic country where the people will vote and in ten years hate America”.
That’s fine with me. Anyone who says that Iraqis shouldn’t vote against U.S. wishes isn’t really a liberator. The only thing the U.S… should insist on is no support for terrorism, basic human rights, no WMD. Other than that, if the Iraqis want to vote in a theocracy, that’s their right. The world will still be a better place for not having 24 million more enslaved people on it.
One interesting idea that has been gaining popularity (and I’m still not sure if I agree with it) is the idea of an Iraqi trust fund, administered with open bookkeeping, that would collect revenue from Iraqi oil and distribute it to the country to help rebuild infrastructure and a comfortable middle class.
The argument against that is, who the hell are we to take the Iraqi’s oil and put it in a trust fund for them?
We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Americans.
For the record, an apology that repeats the offense is not an apology.
For once you have posted a correct statement. However, it seems to be irrelevant, since the offense was not repeated.
This is the kind of sideways slap that, while apparently within the rules of the SDMB, is the kind of crap that fills threads these days, and is making this place much more unpleasant to hang out in.
Whatever happened to polite discourse? Can we not disagree without having to fill messages with cheap shots and little digs?
Try again, Tom.
As Gaudere pointed out, “mocking nicknames are not appropriate for your new standard of behavior”.
Which is what he did, in his alleged apology. It’s as if he said to a Jewish person, “I’m sorry I called you a kike.” That is NOT an apology.
Just to be clear, any apology shouldn’t be directed at me personally, but at the board and the moderators, for violating the rules, once again.
I’m not sure, but I’m not seeing how that is repeating the offense. If he were to say, “Sorry for calling the kike a bad name.” it would be repeating, sure.
Can we agree to drop it, Milroyj? I’d appreciate it.
So it’s OK to call people Kikes in the first place?