-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Ultra 2 Legit 2 Magnus: Your attitude totally explains why your buildings get rammed into.
Thank you for your anti-chronological thinking, lack of ethical sense even within the anti-contextual framework, and (shortly thereafter) an apparent attempt to misrepresent my statements as racial slurs against all Arabs of any philosophy.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
"...attempt to misrepresent my statements as racial slurs against all Arabs of any philosophy."
"All"? Perhaps not literally. But you certainly made a broad enough generalization. You can't claim a statement isn't racist just because you put a mild qualifier on it. "Man, those camel jockeys are just fucking shitbags. Mostly." See, that doesn't work. And just because you used less blatantly ofensive language doesn't mean there was a significant difference.
"What a really shitty thing to say, UM."
Well, he was only responding in like kind.
"It's not as though we invaded them and then were attacked, you know."
We didn't? I guess that might be true, since you used the word "invade", and you're probably limiting its defintiion to "using our military to kill them and take their land". But the last time I checked there was not shortage of ways to fuck with a group of people without literally invading.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Also, Russia is deeply, deeply invested in it's own War on Terror. Nobody tries this sort of thing in Russia? Partly that's because Al Qaeda already got what it wanted from them. And after driving the Soviets out, "they" (or rather, ideologically sympathetic groups in Afghanistan, who may or may not have been technically "Al Qaeda," but it doesn't really matter) took the war right to their doorstep in Chechnya and Dagestan.
I mean, if you had a purchased/stolen/captured nuclear weapon in, say, Pakistan, you'd have to smuggle it across a lot of ocean to blow up Washington D.C. You could just drive it into Moscow.
I mean, let's say the world goes topsy turvy and a Renewed Grand Islamic Caliphate is founded. We may have soldiers within its borders today, but Russia has territory. (OK, for values of Russia that include the entire Commonwealth.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Lee: Man, I could just feel the love soon as I clicked in here.
That should be the forum description.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by TSN: You can't claim a statement isn't racist just because you put a mild qualifier on it.
At no point did I suggest that race was a factor. Any attempt on the part of a reader to claim otherwise is either error on the reader's part or an attempted ad hominem.
But, since I "never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" (if you'll forgive the use of the quotation in this context), I must presume that it was a simple misreading.
At no point did my more venomous statements get directed at the entire population of the Arab world. Where I did engage in general statements that could be construed as attacks, it was in reference to the leadership, religious or otherwise, prevalent in the region.
So, I would say that there are a few labels which would fit. While not anti-Muslim, my statements were anti-Islam insofar as the more horrid formulations. This certainly extends to the adherents of those formulations, which is hardly a racial attack.
While not anti-Arab, my statements were anti-Arab-countries'-leadership-styles.
And so on. To claim that my statements were racist would be akin to equating an attack on American uber-right-wing psycho-religious militiamen to the statement "kill whitey!". Such an equation is wrong and unsupportable, just like the one you made.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
"...a largely-backward region of the world where the culture and philosophy are ill-prepared for the bounty of the 21st Century."
That certainly sounds to me like a generalization about the entire Mid-East. You're essentially saying that their whole society (and, by extension, those who choose to live in it) is just less good than ours.
"But unfortunately, this isn't a world where you can just fence in some corner of the globe."
This sounds as though you're saying that you wish we could just wall the whole place in. That doesn't seem very fair to the people you claim you're not including in your statements.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
There is this tendency among pacifists to believe that violence solves nothing. Violence can solve a great many things. But when the problem is elementary violence, then I think you'll have to admit that the pacifists have a point.
If the situation was that some foreign power, England, say, decided that George W. Bush and his conservative supporters in the Republican Party presented a danger to international peace and stability, and managed (somehow, remember this is entirely hypothetical) to cripple American infrastructure, overwhelm US defenses, and capture our leaders; If it were British soldiers now occupying the White House and other strategic areas, securing resources, enforcing curfews, making arrests of key figures they suspected of continued resistance; If there were pale and pinkish lads perched on the backs of camoflage Land Rovers firing their large caliber machine guns blindly (because they couldn't tell the Democrats, Green and Libertarians from the Republicans) into the crowds of protesters (and don't tell me for a second that there wouldn't be protestors) throwing some rocks, how would it be then?
Would there be celebrations in the streets and hugging of our liberators? How would you expect the recently liberated American public to react? How about when they started helping us to rebuild, writing our new constitution, installing our new leaders? What would happen when it came out that certain higher ups in the British governement and military were profiting off this? When it came out that American dissidents in captured prisons had been subject to humiliation and even several instances of torture? Wouldn't you expect some uproar? Isn't this what the NRA has dreamed about lo these many years? And granted that ther would be violent resistance, wouldn't there then be savage retaliatory violence from our occupiers? Might there even be some armed militia groups fighting to suppress the violence of these resistance fighters? I think the real question would be whether any of this violence was getting anyone anywhere.
Registered: Sep 2000
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