Personally, I think you don’t know squat. Honestly, I expect this sort of ignorance from duffer or Starving Artist, but I’m a little surprised to hear it from you.
You honestly think that people just wake up one day and decide to be evil? And that we have no duty to understand their motivations? That, my dear, is wallowing self-righteously in ignorance.
And if we, as a nation, decide to go that route, then we deserve all the terrorist attacks that we’ll no doubt suffer. Personally, I’d rather take the intelligent approach.
Off limits??? I guess it’s only off limits when the accusations (or slurs) go against the current Powers That Be. They sure did fly in the other direction. Then we have superpatriot Charlie Daniels the great hero who bravely wrote a few songs and calls others cowards, super patriot Ted Nugent who faked insanity and rolled in shit to avoid the draft and wants everyone else to fight, a senator who back then was too sickly and frail to go, but was strong enough for football, and that great ace and terror of the Texas skies, Bush The Absentee Pilot himself. Besides, if the Soviet Union remark is about Clinton, well I wasn’t talking about him. In his favor, he didn’t have the fucking nerve to play the superpatriot warrior card. I don’t need any “counterbalance” or “fair and balanced” bullshit. There is enough of that fake “balance” in the papers and on the radio. There is no “fair and balanced” and there never was. fuck “fair and balanced” If you want that crap, turn the dial to Fox News.
I can sum up our current guys in one simple thought… We will fight to the last drop of your blood.
Off limits??? I guess it’s only off limits when the accusations (or slurs) go against the current Powers That Be. They sure did fly in the other direction. Then we have superpatriot Charlie Daniels the great hero who bravely wrote a few songs and calls others cowards, super patriot Ted Nugent who faked insanity and rolled in shit to avoid the draft and wants everyone else to fight, a senator who back then was too sickly and frail to go, but was strong enough for football, and that great ace and terror of the Texas skies, Bush The Absentee Pilot himself. Besides, if the Soviet Union remark is about Clinton, well I wasn’t talking about him. In his favor, he didn’t have the fucking nerve to play the superpatriot warrior card. I don’t need any “counterbalance” or “fair and balanced” bullshit. There is enough of that fake “balance” in the papers and on the radio. There is no “fair and balanced” and there never was. fuck “fair and balanced” If you want that crap, turn the dial to Fox News.
I’ll tell you one misrepresentation I’m sick of. People who work in education are hopelessly naive and have no inkling of how the ‘real world’ works, especially professors - it seems the more letters you have after your name, the more starkly the idjits portray you as such.
First of all, the people who use the amorphous concept of the ‘real world’ to bash the skulls of these supposedly oh-so-liberal educators, never get around to defining what the ‘real world’ actually consists of, or what exactly these liberal educators are doing that keeps them out of it. Don’t they get married? I believe they do. Don’t they have kids, mortgages? Sure they do. Don’t they pay their taxes? Why yes, I believe they do.
A seasoned professional educator will have worked ceaselessly and intimately with the young, the old, the rich, the poor, people of every conceivable creed and colour and, as a bonus, is most likely more plugged in to current events than the stuck up dipshits who constantly accuse them of spending their entire lives in ivory towers. Chances are that, if there is such a thing as a ‘real world’ educators probably know more about it than the average Limbaugh fan.
This is just a preposterously hilariously ridiculously ignorant post.
Saying that 9/11 was the result of the crusades is like saying that the Freedom Fries incident is a result of the French and Indian war.
It’s easy and fun to describe the current situation in the middle east as basically the obvious continuation of 2000 years of history. But it’s not even close to fair or accurate. Go back 20 and 50 and 100 and 200 and 1000 years and look at the middle east, and Islam in general, and tell me how you see a culture and a situation that is inevitably going to lead to 9/11.
I’m sure that in September of 1901, the extremist right wing Muslims were planning to attack the west due to their long-standing hatred dating back to the Crusades, and their hatred of our freedoms, but they thought to themselves “nah, let’s wait 100 more years, that will be a better time”.
I’m sick of “theory” being used to mean “something that is not necessarily true” when that’s not the appropriate meaning for the context. It’s not used in that sense in “the theory of evolution” or “the theory of gravity”.
Actually, they do, because they realize on some level that their system cannot survive in the face of the example set by the West. That’s the underlying truth behind the “they hate our freedom” bumper-sticker sound bite.
Why would they, if they can strike at a more powerful and iconic representation of the way of life that threatens to make the next generation say, “Screw this repressive bullshit”.
Actually, it’d be used perfectly properly in those circumstances. Evolution and gravity are both facts. The theories we have to explain them are not absolute, however. Any theory can be falsified, so, yeah, they’re correct to use the word ‘theory’ like that, but incorrect if they suggest that simply because science doesn’t deal with faith, that that opens the door for a pink elephant to sneak in.
I’m sick of hearing my generation, that reached adulthood in the 1970s, referred to as a “lost generation” due to drug abuse. True, there were some casualties, and that’s a sad fact, but most of us are doing fine.
Yup! Sort of a version of “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they’ve see Paree?” that applies to entire countries and their socities.
This has been further exacerbated by the electronic and computer age where people all over the world are being exposed to ways of life that exist elsewhere in the world. It’s hard to get away with beating women for showing their faces or for leaving the house without a male family member when, more and more, their socities are privy to the way women live in the West. And this is only one element. Their entire way of life and most of what they believe in will disappear should the populace gain Western-style freedoms.
I am sick of the ignorance of political motivations. The people that forget that we were bombing the middle east and toppling middle eastern governments for the past 50 years under the auspices of the US government, and before that under the auspices of the British Empire. There really isn’t a big difference between the British Empire and the American empire, most of the areas of influence are the same, both countries are allied and generally go to every war together, dragging along the rest of the commonwealth.
I am tired of people who think that believing in God is anti-scientific. I am tired of people who think that it is skeptical to assume a negative when there is a lack of proof. That is NOT skeptical, it is ANTI-skeptical. People who believe in God do so because it has been proven to them, just because they can’t repeat the experience for someone else does not prove or disprove anything. I am tired of people thinking creation and evolution are at odds. I am tired of people who don’t even know what the words mysticism or metaphysics mean talking about how they are bullshit concepts. Metaphysics covers such concepts as color. Anyone saying metaphysics is bullshit must not believe in “red”. I am sick of them not realizing that most of the great scientists that people quote constantly, Newton, Einstein etc… focused specifically on metaphysics. I am sick of people who’ve never ever opened a mystic text talking shit about it. People who don’t realize that astronomy’s pursuit was the purview of astrologers, that gemmatria and geometry are the same thing. I am sick and tired that most people who argue for science so vehemently say things a real scientist wouldn’t say.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have put that part in my post about how I forgive and love terrorists and criminals, and how the fact that they perceived slights against them makes it perfectly OK to do what they do, and how I think instead of spending money hunting them down and killing them, we should spend money on interventions and aromatherapy. I mean, I did put that in my post. Right? Becuase, clearly, you’re responding to it?
This is nearly laughable. So we’ve been mainly going about our business, being our normal 20th century isolationist American selves, not really paying much attention to the middle east at all, certainly not like MEDDLING in it or having wars there or anything. And the terrorists, who live way over there living lives which are in no way ever affected by American foreign policy just can’t fucking STAND knowing that, on the other side of the globe, completely unrelated to them, are people who enjoy a high level of civil liberties and personal self-determination. Man, that just BURNS THEM UP! So they decided to attack us.
Surely THIS is a joke post, right? I mean, you came into a thread entitled “Misrepresentations you’re sick of”, dropped your virtual trousers and deposited one of the biggest steaming heaps of misrepresentation I’ve ever read. Yes, you got me. That’s exactly what I’m proposing. Rereading my OP again, I can’t help bug agree that when I wrote
the very clear subtext was “let’s all do what they want, become muslim, all of our women should start wearing burkas, etc.”.
Dude, seriously, did you even READ my OP?
OK, deep breath, I’m obviously being a bit of an asshole this post, which I normally don’t do, but this is the pit and all, but I’m going to take a step back, assume that we just got off on the wrong foot here, and attempt to start from scratch, in the hopes of genuine communication taking place…
There are a lot of people out there right now who want to kill and hurt us. A good percentage of them are Islamic extremists. How should we proceed?
(1) First of all, we should hunt them down and kill them. We should use all of our resources to do this. When they try to kill us, we should stop them, and kill or catch them first. We should find out where they live, and kill them there. We should find out how they operate, and come up with plans to thwart those operations. We should use human spying, and electronic signal gathering, and money-tracing, and every other damn technique we should think of.
(2) BUT, we should also bear in mind the results of our actions. To slightly oversimplify it, if there’s a house in Baghdad with 5 terrorists making bombs, and we drop a bomb on it, kill those 5 terrorists, and kill 20 people in nearby houses, and 15 bereaved family members of those 20 people go on to be terrorists, we’ve increased the number of terrorists by 10. This is BAD. Heck, killing 20 innocent people is bad because it’s bad and because we’re the good guys. One advantage the bad guys always have is that they’re bad guys, and they’re unconstrained by moral restraints that sometimes govern us. If they hide behind human shields, well, that puts us in a tough spot. So, when we know there’s a house full of terrorists, sometimes we should drop the bomb, because we believe we can do so with few or zero civilian casualties. But sometimes we shouldn’t. Recognizing that dilemma does not equal weakness or cowardice.
(3) Furthermore, we should recognize that the US has NOT just been a happy bunch of people living on the other side of the world who were just minding our own business enjoying our free and happy lifestyle when suddenly, with zero provocation, the middle east decided to hate us. The big issue is Israel, obviously, but aside from that, we’ve been meddling in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Kuwait for decades. Now, I’m certainly NOT going to go on some “CIA evil interfering CIA assassins drugs hostages Rumsfeld GHWBush CIA meddling we’re-evil-they’re-good we suck Palestine CIA” rant here, but we should not pretend that we haven’t been involved. Obviously, the current situation, with us in Iraq and Afghanistan, is what it is. But we should be open and honest about what we’ve done in the past, what we’re doing now, and why. We need to make it clear to Arab Muslim kids growing up in Cairo and Beirut and Damascus and Tehran that we are not evil, we don’t hate them, we’re not trying to take over their homelands, we’re not trying to convert them. We need to do that both with our words and our actions. And we need to do that WITHOUT abandoning Israel (I’m VERY pro-Israel), WITHOUT giving up our legitimate economic interests and alliances in the region, WITHOUT compromising up our pro-democratic, pro-freedom ideals, WITHOUT ceasing our struggle to spread freedom and women’s rights and education and knowledge and enlightenment, WITHOUT abandoning the people of Iraq now that we’ve blown up their previous government, WITHOUT providing grist to the propaganda mills by first committing atrocities of our own like Abu Ghraib and then appearing to let the offenders off the hook, and WITHOUT letting the horrors of war and terrorism turn us into the racist xenophobes that our enemies claim we already are. Sound hard? It is hard. It’s fucking hard. But we sure as hell take even the first step on the road of genuine progress by sticking our fingers in our ears and chanting “They hate us for our freedom… they hate us for our freedom… they hate us for our freedom… they hate us for our freedom”. Reasonable people can disagree about what the best course of action is, because God knows it’s a the fucking Gordian knot to end all Gordian knots. But for the LOVE OF GOD, please realize that not everyone who disagrees with the way the current administration is handling the situation, and not everyone who might have the temerity to criticize actions the US has taken in the past, and not everyone who doesn’t want to nuke mecca, and not everyone who uses words like “understanding”; is a lily-livered military-hating CIA-bashing Christ-punching red-loving probably-gay hippie coward asshole.
