Send your ideas in today!

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Since so much of this is our own doing, should we attack ourselves? I mean considering Reagan/Bush armed and trained Bin Laden? And given that the anthrax they have may be our own US Army supply?

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991473

I don't have the links to stories reporting America's earlier relations with Bin Laden any more, sad to say.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Hee hee...
I searched google for "bin laden ties to the United States" and got:

TIES - Best prices on TIES at DealTime - Click Here!

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What others say about boorite!

See, but that's just it. I can step aside from the whole "political" thing and just see it as a larger version of picking up a baseball bat and going after the guy who beat up someone in your family. While there are certainly plenty of people jumping on this for political reasons, I'm just glad something is being done.

Frankly, the whole "Turn over Bin Laden by the end of the week or we'll bomb you..." "...okay, just one more extension, but we're serious..." crap was bugging me. I was glad something was happening because we needed to back up our threats or lose any credibility whatsoever.

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I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

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Are you saying that arguments presented here against the bombing are "ostensibly high-minded and intellectually clever?" Because they seem pretty straightforward to me. What is so hard to understand about them?

When you put down those of us who "piss and moan," are you saying we should be tougher when it comes to the suffering of others? I don't get it.

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You're confused because you think that I was talking about the people on this forum post. I was not.

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I must be picking up a different channel from yours.

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I can step aside from the whole "political" thing and just see it as a larger version of picking up a baseball bat and going after the guy who beat up someone in your family.

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Sorry to interrupt your back and forth.

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Two words: Richard Gere.

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I don't get it. Something about gerbils?

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Gere was booed for asking for peace and compassion instead of retaliation at a concert in support of the NYPD and FDNY.

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I used to be really arsed by the Sandalista liberals kidnapping the moral high ground until I realised it was their best trick. They never really do anything but tell you that whatever you did do was wrong.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

If the widow is running around the funeral parlor with a knife trying to kill the man who murdered her husband, and his entire family while she's at it, then bollocks to her emotional state. That's not the way we do things in a civilized society. No matter how mad we are.

Innocent people are going to die. Nobody's period of mourning takes precedence over that. I'm sorry if that sounds insensitive, but I think the opposite view is more so.

From that article:

What the fuck? The government is here to support us, to do what we tell them, not the other way around.

If there are Americans who "aren't receptive" to criticism of the fact that their elected officials are sending their countrymen off to kill innocents and possibly die themselves in a misguided war, those Americans are self-absorbed jerks. So are Americans who think that criticism of policy is tantamount to treason.

If we must kill Bin Laden -- a pointless exercise, if the stories about the autonomous modular structure of Al Qaeda are true -- and an action predicated on the as-yet-unproven (right? unless I missed something?) belief that he's responsible for the events of Sept. 11 -- but if we must, and we absolutely can't wait for the UN to approve of it first, then how about we at least make it a covert operation? Less bloodshed that way, hopefully.

And, tired as it sounds by now, I have to reiterate: the US should probably stop doing the sort of things that make people want to kill its citizens. Oh, I forgot, "we don't negotiate with terrorists". We just die at their hands. That's much better.

Damn it. I was trying not to get involved in this again.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

A widow loaded with state of the art bang-bang. Seriously, you're talking about a "grieving widow" who's bombing a country and driving millions of innocent civilians into the wilderness. We're supposed to think her (our) feelings are too tender right now to consider an alternative? We just can't be arsed?

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If the Richard Gere story hasn't convinced you of the truth of this,

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I never said I doubted that Americans would be unreceptive. I just said that's no reason to go along with what the government does.

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Indeed. Western atrocities in the middle east, often carried out by proxy, have gone a long way to poisoning the Arab world against the US. Actions like the sanctions against Iraq fulfill no useful purpose, unless you consider killing millions of civilians and fuelling emnity against the west useful.
However, I think it's naive to believe that pulling negative western influence out of the middle east would deter Muslim fundamentalists from acts of terrorism. They clearly suffer from cultural envy, because Islamic nations are unable or unwilling to pull themselves out of the middle ages and establish at least a semblance of democracy and human rights. American bullying of the middle east is a convenient excuse for groups like Al-Qaeda, and this is why they have to be destroyed. Having said that, I think incompetently aimed aerial blitzes are the wrong way to go about it.

Not in the strictest sense, no, although only a fool would completely disagree with that notion, despite it being the most panoramic of generalizations. What keeps an empire intact, however, or any form or rule (they weren't all empires, you know), is that remains an effective, profitable, and a reasonably secure form of rule with a tolerable level of justice meted out to those whom it governs. America may be a bit of a puppet show sometimes, -and we've stepped on some toes, as have all powerful nations- but we have done a lot of good as well, and if anything better has been thought up and used effectively, I'd like to see it. We didn't win the cold War -finally when the Berlin Wall came down- with tanks and missiles. We won it with Levi's jeans. We won it with being able to get a telephone in your apartment. We won it because people got tired of wearing Bulgarian shoes.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

The self-absorbed jerks of whom I speak are those who think that their grief for the dead gives them an excuse to be indifferent to the deaths which have yet to occur. Nobody has any right to be "unreceptive" to the fate of innocent lives just because other innocent lives have already been lost. If such unreceptiveness is, as you suggest, the reason so many Americans are willing to watch their government go off half-cocked into the Middle East, or the reason so many Americans these days are equating dissent with terrorist sympathizing, I think that speaks very poorly for us. I'm not saying you're wrong... I suppose I'm saying it makes me both sad and angry that you're right.

As for what action the US government ought to take, unpopular as it may make me to say this, I would not complain if the only actions we took were (a) trying to repair our relations with Middle Eastern states, and (b) using the available international justice system of which boorite speaks to attempt prosecution of the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks. This is how I think of it: if the US attacks Afghanistan (or anyplace else), then lives have been lost in the past, and lives will be lost in the future. If the US does not attack, then lives have been lost in the past, but none will be lost in the future.

Perhaps more importantly, the idea that sending forces in and killing Bin Laden (or any other terrorists) will help to prevent future atrocities is disingenuous. First, if Bin Laden dies, someone else will doubtless take his place. History has proven time and again that killing a man cannot and will not kill his ideas. Second, if the US causes any more violence in the Middle East, we'll only give them more reason to hate us. I believe that our current course of action is absolutely certain to perpetuate the cycle of violence and hatred (remember, we think we're getting retribution, but the terrorists thought they were too), and will inevitably result in more deaths on all sides. The US government's inability to see these facts, which seem obvious to me, make me very scared to think that it is likely the supreme military power on this planet.

In any case, as has been pointed out, the US government and the US people are two distinct entities, and I don't honestly believe that the latter has any significant power over the former, not even during election time. Which makes this whole discussion academic.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

I still maintain that when we capture Bin Laden, we dip him in pig fat, then give him a complete sex-change operation, and send him back to be with his people.

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

Oh, they don't run things. They're just propped up in public for the rubes to throw things at.

I am well aware that the preponderance of government that we actually take home and put on the mantle, regardless of whether we like it or not, is the product of unfathomably well-heeled corporate conglomerates and the lobbyists that they hire. I also believe that the parade of idiots that are arsed into office to front this horse shit -while providing these quiet little men in the grey suits with a steady stream of red herrings- also serves to help people find something to complain about, and, on occasion, sparks useful change when the outrage is too great. The one singular mechanism in place to aid this public awareness, (that, on occasion, leads to sufficient outcry to win one for Billy Bloke), is the fact that these clowns regularly trip over their dicks. They fuck up. The money and power goes to their heads and they do stupid things.

There should, without a doubt, be other ways to keep the attention of the people focused on their political machine in a manner that would cause them to keep the actions of it's governmental branches in check, but people watch a lot of TV. They aren't too bothered by anything short of a monumental fuckup or a swift boot to the purse strings. However: The laws are there. The ability to change government through votes and complaints for redress are there. We should all start using them a bit more liberally. THAT sort of liberalism, I am in favour of.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

I meant to be funny.
[Click to view comic: 'Is Terrorism Dead Yet?']

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

TOBOR BRING MESSAGE TO THE MASSES!
[Click to view comic: 'Historically Inevitable Tobor']

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"Nothing expresses the brutal grandeur of rectal polyps and anal fistulae quite like the mother-tongue of Goethe."

*sniff* *sniff*
Methinks I smell a commie!
I knew it was coming, Tobor *is* red, after all.

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

Now THAT says it all. Mad props to Spankling.

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What others say about boorite!

Probably not you personally, bunner.

But seriously, when you see someone doing something destructive or criminal, it's entirely appropriate to insist that he simply stop. Say you see someone speeding violently through a pedestrian zone or beating the fuck out of an old lady. No matter what the perpetrator's ostensible motives (getting to an important meeting, fighting terrorism, whatever), the idea of offering "viable alternatives" needn't enter into it.

"Stop beating that lady!"

"You got a better idea?"

The principle is an elementary one: First, do no harm. Then we can talk about what to do.

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What others say about boorite!

Oh. OK.

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What others say about boorite!

I want to try to say succinctly what I was trying to say before, and then I want to shut up about this. We'll see if that works.

It sounds to me like Obi is saying that we should be patient as innocent people are killed because it's not polite, or won't be productive, to discuss the issue with most Americans right now -- they're too wrapped up in their own grief to be bothered. I think this is realistic, but surprisingly heartless. It reminds me of the story of Kitty Genovese. If I've misinterpreted you, Obi, I apologize.

However, being patient as innocent people are killed is probably exactly what I'm going to do anyway, since it's not like I have any control over the actions of the US military, especially not with my opinion being in the minority here. So I probably don't have any room to talk. Ironically, this puts me in the position of doing exactly what Obi said.

I hope that most of the people who are angry with the United States understand that it's the government and the military they're really angry at. Most of us -- notably the thousands who died in the World Trade Center towers -- just happened to be born here.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!