JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalHistory has not and will never forgive the collaborators
in the Bush war of aggression -- starting with the senators and House members who voted for the authorization for use of military force, which everyone understood was the only carte blanche the lawless regime would need in a historical period where declarations of war are no longer made yet war is the every day reality.
Clinton, Kerry and Biden in particular will always be remembered as among the chief enablers of the murderous Bush war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Those who voted against it, and those who protested, did the right thing. For those who voted for it: NO EXCUSES.
If they didn't know...
they were criminally negligent.
The real facts were available to them from many sources. They were well-covered in the international press. People who were on the ground in Iraq, like Baradei, Blix and Scott Ritter, made amply clear that there were no Iraqi WMDs. And EVERYONE could understand that the connection to 9/11 was pure fiction from Cheney. So whoever voted for it was responsible for what happened, yes. Not necessarily criminal, but certainly dangerous if not removed from politics. No career should survive such a "mistake."
And are you seriously going to plead naivete for Clinton, Kerry and Biden?! PLEASE!!!
The U.S. government...
and hardly just "BushCo." Everyone in Congress who voted for it are also responsible, e.g., Clinton, Kerry, Biden. The media who transported obvious lies and played cheerleaders while ignoring the contradictory evidence are responsible. This is a system. This is a bipartisan-supported system of imperialism that also produced the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam, the Condor-backed dictatorships in South America, the 1980s massacres in Central America, the many years of starvation of Iraq prior to 2003.
Hello, the U.S. caused this...
The U.S. deliberately stoked a Sunni-Shi'a civil war as the response to the Iraqi (Sunni but mainly secular) insurgency against the U.S. invasion and war of aggression in their country.
Certainly it is not for the original destroyer of the house to now step in and protect it against opportunistic looters. On that much we can agree: no further military interventions by the U.S. imperialist forces.
However, your post obscures U.S. responsibility. The U.S. government was the prime wackadoodle in creating this situation and bears the moral responsibility. Eventually, reparations must be paid. The first step would be war crimes trials for the architects of this horror, Bush, Cheney, et al.
Thanks. It's not "Wikileaks."
Not that you're responsible for the headline Judi Lynn but the sources for this story are State Department cables. No claim is being made here by Wikileaks. Wikileaks did not "say" anything about Poroshenko. Everyone with Internet access is free to locate documents that mention Poroshenko in the SIPRNET cache of 250,000 State Department cables, which Wikileaks released in 2010. I wish media would finally start labeling these sources accurately, as classified U.S. government documents.
You and the Kellogg Eugenics Board
should decide who qualifies as stupid and unworthy of their rights, no? How about unworthy of life?
Because when a minority defining itself as the elite with superior qualities decides the majority are too stupid or otherwise unqualified for rights, the resulting rule is always wise and just, and not at all self-interested.
It's worked out wonderfully throughout history, no?
Honestly, I think your post is, indeed, evidence of IQ rates falling... somewhere, anyway.
Tangential, but just to highlight the awesome ignorance of what you wrote:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/26/1245231/are-we-getting-smarter-rising-iq-scores-in-the-twenty-first-century
(IQ rates basically measure not intelligence but conformity to organized education and have been rising constantly, but anyway... intelligence, whatever that is, remains pretty much where it has always been, the species being biologically the same through the millennia...)
Little chance of it, I think.
There is no answer to this one. So the m.o. for these kinds of events is to ignore it altogether. If the swarm doesn't intervene, there will be no arguments over their incredibly dense & silly talking points, and thus no 500-post thread that stays atop the forum for a week.
A week later, they will pretend it didn't happen, or else take some quote from 20 years ago or without context to show that Al Gore supports a strong defense and opposes terrorism, therefore agrees with the anti-Snowden party line, or Al Gore didn't really say what you crazy people think he said, etc. etc.
The ways of sophistry are manifold!
Germans still singing the Deutschlandlied.
No one thinks anything of it. Same song, different lyrics (actually the same lyrics but with the most offending stanza omitted). Just like the Russians did with the Soviet anthem (except they use different lyrics). Your comparison is telling because of the resort instead to the Horst Wessel Lied. Why not compare to the Deutschlandlied, since that's the obvious analogue? Both countries still have the same anthem as in the 1930s! I suppose you want to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, but imply Russia is continuous with the USSR but Germany is not continuous with the Nazi Reich, and also not equate present-day Russia with present-day Germany. Pretzels! How about you just give up trying to use the anthem as evidence of something so horrible? People grew up with the song and they like it. New lyrics. (As far as I'm concerned: all anthems, all flags = nationalist bullshit.)
And since people are generally prone to false dichotomies (you have shown this a few times with your knee jerk anti-communism among other things), they saw the sorry shape of Russian life in the 1990s under the Western-oriented plunder oligarchs around Yeltsin, with constant crises and impoverishment and lifespans literally shrinking, and they got nostalgic for a strong man and at least some aspects of the Soviet days. Sucks. You'd wish the West had learned the lesson of what happens when you apply extreme capitalism and punitive debt/austerity regimes on subjugated territories, but they're hot to repeat it in Ukraine.
This is not a legal proceeding and you are sticking to the fallacy.
Someone's word in court can be rendered impeachable as testimony, because they are known as a liar. And yet still, you cannot pretend that every factual statement they made is proven untrue simply because they said it.
In other words, court policy notwithstanding, no one is the famous Cretan who always lies; they will generally lie out of interest. E.g., the sun may still rise in the east, and that's still true if a Cretan said it, etc.
However, this isn't even your fallacy. You go even further: Your doctrine with regard to Putin and Russians seems to be that once someone is designated (by you) as a liar about anything, then you can make up any accusation against them that you feel like and consider it to be proven true. So this is a kind of hyper-fallacy. (I'm sure it has a name, do you by any chance recall it? "He's an asshole, so he's fair game for any bullshit I hurl"?)
If we look at Putin's interest, it's actually complicated. His government did not prompt or support the change in Kiev, but was taken by surprise. The February Kiev regime expressed immediate belligerence toward Russians. Given the close NATO-U.S. connections of the Yatsenyuk government, it's no surprise that Moscow (rightly or wrongly - and I'd say wrongly!) sought to secure Crimea, an overwhelmingly Russian peninsula with Russian bases and a population that welcomed annexation. The last thing Moscow now needs, however, is a destabilizing civil war in the rest of Ukraine, and so, logically, Putin has been looking to negotiate a solution.
As long as the ethnic Russians in the east are under violent attack from the Kiev government, there are doubtless pressures on Putin to help protect them, for example to allow volunteer Russian ethnic paramilitaries to get through the border. You say, " I doubt he has any interest in making any such statement" that he opposes separatism, and I'm sure it's true. Not as long as ethnic Russians are being killed by Kiev. This doesn't mean the Russian state has an interest in stoking the Donbass separatist movement, or attempting to seize territory that, again, will only bring enormous headaches: civil war, terrorism, refugees, trade war with the West. The Russian state's real interest is self-evident: a ceasefire.
If peace is reestablished and Ukraine continues to have semi-unfixed elections, sooner or later the toppling of the austerity government is practically guaranteed. In fact, it's clearly the Yatsenyuk side that would have the realpolitik interest in ethnic strife. If the issues are about ethnicity and fear, they can retain a solid base, which may explain their willingness to make a coalition with out-and-out fascists as their partners, even though these fascists, as you like to point out, are unpopular. If the issues become economic, however, they may be able to sell the IMF-EU austerity bullshit for a while, but inevitably will become very unpopular.
So much better!
Ha, thanks. I just went and found this on youtube. Quite good. Goes better than the SSB.
Now Mr. European History above, with the comparison of the Russian anthem to the Horst Wessel Lied (!!!), seems to have missed that the latter was a Nazi party song, and was never a national anthem -- unlike the Soviet national anthem which was repurposed into the new Russian anthem.
What's funny is that the Germans today sing the SAME Deutschlandlied that the Nazis also did, as this anthem dates back to the 1848 revolution. They now omit the "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles" stanza (which was originally meant as nation above religion or royalty, and acquired its warlike significance under the Nazis).
But it's the same goddamn song! Germans sing the same national anthem as under the Nazis (same lyrics, just without the third stanza), just as Russians sing the same one as under the Soviet Union (different lyrics!).
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