[OT] Photos from Brother Bush's Rape Room

[Bill Sloman]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<olPpc.65908$Fl5.51177@okepread04>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<jy3pc.682$Yg.520@fed1read05>...

Bill Sloman wrote:


"Mark Fergerson" <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message
news:VGroc.17841$k24.16765@fed1read01...


Bill Sloman wrote:



toor@iquest.net (John S. Dyson) wrote in message

news:<c7s6h5$2lli$1@news.iquest.net>...


In article <7c584d27.0405111733.177c8235@posting.google.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) writes:



Scott Stephens <scottxs@comcast.net> wrote in message

news:<zm9oc.27672$iF6.2845737@attbi_s02>...


Bill Sloman wrote:

<snip>

What, Spain was easier bought until their Socialists took
over? I thought Mordida was a New World invention.


Nah. Spain didn't need to be bribed. Aznar was the same sort of right-wing
nitwit as Dubbya, and 86% of the Spanish electorate though he was wrong to
support the invasion.

You don't keep track of U.S. Foreign Aid funding?


It is too small to be worth worrying about, even smaller when you
subtract out the subsidised arms sales to the right-wing dictators you
seem to be so fond of.

My point, which you blissfully ignored, is that we haven't sent Spain any
money in quite a while.

Not everybody needs to be bribed to do the right thing, or the wrong
thing - Spain was a bad example for you to pick, because Aznar's
ideological blinkers more or less lined up with Dubbya's.

Spain does do business with the U.S., like practically everybody else,
and Aznar could well have figured that Spanish sherry sales in the
U.S. would not have been hurt by a little collaboration.

That ties in nicely with _your_ point about "bribes and corruption". How
long do you thing will it be until Spain sticks its
"collective" hand out?

It would seek regional support from the rest of the E.U. before it
bothered approaching the U.S. - Spain, like Ireland, did very well out
of its E.U. membership when its economy first started catching up with
the more advanced European countries, while the days of Marsahll Plan
aid are long past.

that's how you got your
mandate for the first Gulf War, and it was time and money well-spent.

I see; it's a "moral war" if Euros get their cut of the
action. You could have said so earlier and prevented much
name-calling. What's _your_ price for a favorable opinion on
U.S. action overseas? Taking bids? I can't wait for you to
put it up on Ebay.


No war is ever moral. They cost too much.

So, your "solution" to the Middle East situation is what,
for the rest of the world to stay "hands off" and let the
locals kill each other off until only the most vicious
remain for the rest of the world to deal with?


Clearly you haven't been paying attention. My preference was for a
U.N.-mandated ocupation force in Irak, with enough Muslim paricipants
to let the Irakis think that they were being liberated, rather than
occupied.

"Think" being the operative word. Clearly you prefer a U.N. occupation.

I suspect that the Iraki's would have preferred a U.N. occupation -
they do seem to be (marginally) less upset by the non-US members of
the present occupation force.

The latest Guardian Weekly was pretty rude about Rumsfeld's
unwillingness to take advantage of the U.S. foreign service's
expertise on foreign cultures, and a few more Arab-speaking Muslim's
in the occupying force might well have fooled enough of the people
enough of the time to have prevented the current rash of
insurrections.

It would be better to have "insurrections" against a nice, homogenous
bunch of Euros and Arabs wearing blue helmets? Do you really believe no such
"insurrections" would occur in that scenario? You cannot possibly be that
naive.

UN occupation forces wouldn't have been homogenous, any more than the
current occupation forces are - each nationality supplies complete
units, who occupy specific areas. During the earlier months of the
current occupation, resistance was confined to isolated incidents, and
the current crop of insurrections, involving a significant proportion
of the populations of specific cities, is not only new but also pretty
much confined to U.S. occupied areas, which does suggest that
ham-handed U.S. tactics are contributing to the problem.

Works for me. We all need to reduce our nuke inventories;
might as well use 'em.


As simple idea, that even you can understand. Not a good idea, for
reasons that you probably couldn't understand.

If all that's left are the serious whackos (as would be the case after
they saw through a hypothetical U.N./Arab occupation), how else to deal with > them?

If the bulk of the population believed that the occupying forces were
really going to leave as soon as order had been restored, you could
fool enough of the people for long enough to avoid any serious
insurrections.

My price for supporting U.S. action overseas would depend on the action,
but in most cases it would be higher than my support would be worth (about > > $0.10 at a guess).

Why am I not surprised.


Your current administration was simply too gung-ho to worry about the
problems of holding down Irak once they had invaded it - one more
example of their short-sighted attitudes.

So, you're admitting that World Public Opinion is driven
by graft among leaders?


I don't believe that I said anything about World Public Opinion - the U.N.
mandate was the subject under discussion, which isn't quite the same thing
at all.

Sigh. "World Public Opinion" is indeed driven by leaders,
and their preferences are driven by the levels of bribes
offered, right?


Aznar was right behind Dubbya, but his enthusiasm only persuaded 14%
of the Spanish electorate. Sometimes the most energetic leaders can't
influence public opinion in the way that they'd like.

Wait till Socialist Spain sticks its hand out.

To the EU, if anybody - the U.S. is much less generous.

You make a difference without distinction.

So you claim, because you haven't got the wit to read the papers or
remember what actually happens when some leader tries to persuade the
electorate that black is white.

Name one that hasn't. Ever.

I already did - Aznar in Spain - who thought that the US-led invasion
of Irak was a good idea, when 86% of the Spanish electorate didn't,
and failed to persuade them to change their minds after the event,
which meant that he stopped theing their leader at the next election.
Why can't you pay attention?

BTW, you _have_ noticed who's running the U.N. recently,
haven't you?


Somebody called Koffi Anan

http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/

Yes, I know, thank you just the same. He's a native of Ghana. Now, just
for giggles, do you know the history of U.S. aid to Ghana vs. his opinion of > the U.S.?

No. Tell me about it, preferrably by a URL pointing to some non-US
historian's account of the events.

He seems to be doing pretty well, within the limits of the job.

Right. A dandy job in the former S.S.R.'s

He seems to know what needs to be done. Persuading politicians to do
the right thing can be more difficult. Putin and Dubbya both have
their own agendas and their own none-too-well-informed electorates.

The only opinion that matters in Irak at the moment is
the opinion of the Irakis as a group

Which group, the Shiites? The Sunnis? The recently
imported Al Qaeda sympathizers? Do you really hold the
illusion that they're any more homogenous philosophically
than the inhabitants of what was Yugoslavia?


The Shi'ites and the Sunnis seem to be united on one point at the
moment - they both want the U.S. occupiers to go home.

"Seem". All they're united on is the few points of Islam they agree on.
Everything else they kill each other over.

Congratulations.

Tito managed to keep Yugoslavia in one piece as long as he lived, and
you may yet get lucky and find the Iraki Tito, though your nitwit
prison guards have probably spoiled his (or maybe her) disposition by
ill-chosen "softening-up" procedures.

When Tito's iron grip relaxed, what happened? All those smoldering
centuries-old hatreds erupted into full flame, that's what. Nothing was
resolved.

That is not the way it looked to the refugees from former Yugoslavia
who were learning Dutch when I was, back in 1994/5.

Slobodan Milosevic deliberately revived all those century-old hatreds
for his own political advantage, and undid all that Tito had achieved
in short order, in a manner painfully reminiscent of Hitler's
exploitation of Germany's residual anti-Semitism. Milosevic is now
answering for his crimes before International War Crimes Tribunal in
The Hague.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/criminal/criminals.html

An "Iraki Tito" already existed in Iraq; his name was Saddam Hussein.
Same thing happened when he was deposed.

A totally false analogy. Tito was the leader of all the Yugoslavs.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who oppressed the Shi'ites and the
Kurds, and who ran the country for his own benefit and the benefit of
his extended family (who held most of the senior jobs). He came to
power as the head of political party, more like Stalin than Tito
(whose history looks more like George Washington's).

Oh, and please accentuate the actions of a few ill-trained, ill-
supervised idiots some more.

Well, I am replying to your posting ....

and a U.N. mandate might have helped that - most
likely not directly, but by diluting the US content in the army of
occupation. It is noticeable that the U.S. troops do seem to be seeing
rather more armed insurrection than the other coalition forces in Irak.

And what drives that, other than targeting by Al Qaeda?

Probably ignorance and arrogance - most American soldiers are
convinced that their way of doing things is the only way of doing
things, and don't realise that behavior that is tolerated in the U.S.
can be totally unacceptable for other cultures.

You really hate the U.S.

I don't. I am aware that U.S. newspapers don't publish much in the way
of foreign news, and that U.S. citizens tend to regard the U.S. as not
only God's Own Country, but also God's Only Country. This is a
tolerable cultural preference, but it makes your citizens somewhat
insensitive to cultural differences, and correspondingly unsuitable
for the roles of occupiers and administrators in foreign countries.
There are plenty of Americans who do transcend their background, but
there don't seem to be enough of them in Irak at the moment, in part
because of a stuoid turf war between Rumsfeld and Powell.

What's the matter, not getting enough Foreign Aid
(bribes and corruption) to suit you?

As far as I know, I don't get any. I'd prefer to earn my money doing
electronic design, but since I'm between jobs at the moment, I'm open
to offers.

While we're speaking of "tolerated behavior", what about using power
tools to extract confessions, as was "tolerated" in Saddam-era Iraq?

Saddam's behaviour wasn't tolerated, but endured. Getting rid of a
dictator who controls the armed forces and has a large and active
secret police force is not eay. If you had wanted to run Irak on that
basis, you'd have needed to install a much larger security apparatus.
As it is, you've taken a little too much of the brutal oppressor
approach, without installing enough brutal oppressors to make it work.

If opinion has a price, it isn't worth buying.


Tell that to your presidential candidates, who are planning on spending
millions on TV ads to try and shift public opinion their way.

Oh, I see; you believe that bullshit. Never mind.

Not having millions to spend, I don't have to have an opinion on the
effectiveness of TV ads. U.S. politicians who do have millions to
spend do seem to think that TV advertising is worth the money, as you
should have noticed.

You have absolutely no understanding of U.S. politics. Take it from a
native; believe _nothing_ you see on TV or read in the papers. That goes
double for political ads; the one thing you can assume is that when one
accuses another of something, they're trying to distract you from noticing
that _they_ did it.

Obviously a minority opinion. Your presidental candidates would be
spending their money in other ways if your opinion was widely shared.
In fact, I suspect that your scepticism is confined to the party
political propaganda coming from the side you don't support. Your
silly ideas about the U.N. sound exactly like the party line of the
isolationist idiots of the right wing of the Republican Party.

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Bill Sloman wrote:

(Two replies for no apparent reason. Browser burp?)

<some snippage in the interest of bandwidth conservation>

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message
news:<olPpc.65908$Fl5.51177@okepread04>...

You don't keep track of U.S. Foreign Aid funding?

It is too small to be worth worrying about, even smaller when you
subtract out the subsidised arms sales to the right-wing dictators you
seem to be so fond of.

Oh, and nobody else does that. Please remind me why Cuba
is such a hellhole (under its left-wing dictator) when
_only_ the U.S.A. doesn't trade with it?

My point, which you blissfully ignored, is that we haven't sent Spain
any money in quite a while.


Not everybody needs to be bribed to do the right thing, or the wrong thing -
Spain was a bad example for you to pick, because Aznar's ideological
blinkers more or less lined up with Dubbya's.

And how did they get so aligned?

That ties in nicely with _your_ point about "bribes and corruption". How
long do you thing will it be until Spain sticks its
"collective" hand out?

It would seek regional support from the rest of the E.U. before it bothered
approaching the U.S. - Spain, like Ireland, did very well out of its E.U.
membership when its economy first started catching up with the more advanced
European countries, while the days of Marsahll Plan aid are long past.

We shall see. Two people cannot get by by doing each
others' laundry; the principle is the same with countries.
It's worse when they have long-standing disagreements
neither wants to let go of. Frinst, I still can't figure out
why there's a border between Spain and Portugal, but not one
between Andalusia and the rest of Spain.

I suspect that the Iraki's would have preferred a U.N. occupation - they do
seem to be (marginally) less upset by the non-US members of the present
occupation force.

We've been over that; again, why is the U.S.A. painted as
"the Great Satan", and by whom?

The latest Guardian Weekly was pretty rude about Rumsfeld's
unwillingness to take advantage of the U.S. foreign service's
expertise on foreign cultures, and a few more Arab-speaking Muslim's
in the occupying force might well have fooled enough of the people
enough of the time to have prevented the current rash of
insurrections.

It would be better to have "insurrections" against a nice, homogenous
bunch of Euros and Arabs wearing blue helmets? Do you really believe no
such
"insurrections" would occur in that scenario? You cannot possibly be that
naive.


UN occupation forces wouldn't have been homogenous, any more than the
current occupation forces are - each nationality supplies complete units,
who occupy specific areas. During the earlier months of the current
occupation, resistance was confined to isolated incidents, and the current
crop of insurrections, involving a significant proportion of the populations
of specific cities, is not only new but also pretty much confined to U.S.
occupied areas, which does suggest that ham-handed U.S. tactics are
contributing to the problem.

"Ham-handed". Yes, you do indeed hate the U.S.A. in spite
of your protestations. You would prefer "sensitivity" to
traditional Islamic methods of justice?

If the bulk of the population believed that the occupying forces were really
going to leave as soon as order had been restored, you could fool enough of
the people for long enough to avoid any serious insurrections.

Who's convincing them otherwise, but those who stand to
gain from further conflict? It sure isn't America.

Sigh. "World Public Opinion" is indeed driven by leaders,
and their preferences are driven by the levels of bribes
offered, right?


Aznar was right behind Dubbya, but his enthusiasm only persuaded 14%
of the Spanish electorate. Sometimes the most energetic leaders can't
influence public opinion in the way that they'd like.

Wait till Socialist Spain sticks its hand out.


To the EU, if anybody - the U.S. is much less generous.

As I said, we shall see. What we won't see are the
strings attached to said aid.

You make a difference without distinction.

So you claim, because you haven't got the wit to read the papers or
remember what actually happens when some leader tries to persuade the
electorate that black is white.

Name one that hasn't. Ever.


I already did - Aznar in Spain - who thought that the US-led invasion of
Irak was a good idea, when 86% of the Spanish electorate didn't, and failed
to persuade them to change their minds after the event, which meant that he
stopped theing their leader at the next election. Why can't you pay
attention?

Why can't you see that the electorates minds were
manipulated first one way, then another? Oh, wait, you
refuse to believe such manipulation occurs, right?

just
for giggles, do you know the history of U.S. aid to Ghana vs. his opinion

of > the U.S.?

No. Tell me about it, preferrably by a URL pointing to some non-US
historian's account of the events.

Ignoring your pasive-aggressive distrust of any U.S.
account, do your own damn homework. Unless of course, facts
don't interest you.

He seems to be doing pretty well, within the limits of the job.

Right. A dandy job in the former S.S.R.'s


He seems to know what needs to be done. Persuading politicians to do the
right thing can be more difficult. Putin and Dubbya both have their own
agendas and their own none-too-well-informed electorates.

"Persuading politicians to do the right thing" is a
contradiction in terms. Why do you not also note that _all
other_ politicians have their own agendas etc.?

Tito managed to keep Yugoslavia in one piece as long as he lived, and
you may yet get lucky and find the Iraki Tito, though your nitwit
prison guards have probably spoiled his (or maybe her) disposition by
ill-chosen "softening-up" procedures.

When Tito's iron grip relaxed, what happened? All those smoldering
centuries-old hatreds erupted into full flame, that's what. Nothing was
resolved.

That is not the way it looked to the refugees from former Yugoslavia who
were learning Dutch when I was, back in 1994/5.

Why were they refugees?

Slobodan Milosevic deliberately revived all those century-old hatreds for
his own political advantage, and undid all that Tito had achieved in short
order, in a manner painfully reminiscent of Hitler's exploitation of
Germany's residual anti-Semitism. Milosevic is now answering for his crimes
before International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/criminal/criminals.html

Sigh. How did those hatreds manage to smolder all that
time? Think it through.

An "Iraki Tito" already existed in Iraq; his name was Saddam Hussein.
Same thing happened when he was deposed.

A totally false analogy. Tito was the leader of all the Yugoslavs.

The "installed" leader. How many were happy with that?

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who oppressed the Shi'ites and the Kurds,
and who ran the country for his own benefit and the benefit of his extended
family (who held most of the senior jobs). He came to power as the head of
political party, more like Stalin than Tito (whose history looks more like
George Washington's).

More "hate America". Washington wasn't installed.

How did Tito maintain "peace"? The same way Hussein did;
by killing (or threatening to) any dissenters. Why do you
claim a false analogy?

Oh, and please accentuate the actions of a few ill-trained, ill-
supervised idiots some more.


Well, I am replying to your posting ....

That was really crude, compared to your previous
passive-aggressive methodology.

You suggest that such behavior as prisoner mistreatment
is "tolerable" in the U.S., while it's blatantly obvious
that it isn't. Please try to be less disingenuous.

and a U.N. mandate might have helped that - most
likely not directly, but by diluting the US content in the army of
occupation. It is noticeable that the U.S. troops do seem to be seeing
rather more armed insurrection than the other coalition forces in Irak.

And what drives that, other than targeting by Al Qaeda?

Probably ignorance and arrogance - most American soldiers are
convinced that their way of doing things is the only way of doing
things, and don't realise that behavior that is tolerated in the U.S.
can be totally unacceptable for other cultures.

You really hate the U.S.


I don't. I am aware that U.S. newspapers don't publish much in the way of
foreign news, and that U.S. citizens tend to regard the U.S. as not only
God's Own Country, but also God's Only Country. This is a tolerable cultural
preference, but it makes your citizens somewhat insensitive to cultural
differences, and correspondingly unsuitable for the roles of occupiers and
administrators in foreign countries. There are plenty of Americans who do
transcend their background, but there don't seem to be enough of them in
Irak at the moment, in part because of a stuoid turf war between Rumsfeld
and Powell.

Why do you think my only source of "news" is American
media? Trying to extract "ground truth" from the them, plus
BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc. is an exercise in detecting and
peeling back many different types of prejudicial
colorations. Sometimes identifying them is more interesting
than what they cover.

And why do you go on about American "cultural
preferences" while ignoring everyone else's? Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?

Personally, I have absolutely no respect for other
"cultures" (a word that always brings bacteria to mind) that
include such charming quirks as beating women half to death
for failing to take a male-relative escort into a public
street. Maybe you are more "sensitive" than I, but to me,
such "cultures" desperately need extermination.

What's the matter, not getting enough Foreign Aid
(bribes and corruption) to suit you?

As far as I know, I don't get any. I'd prefer to earn my money doing
electronic design, but since I'm between jobs at the moment, I'm open to
offers.

Well, look around. I used to be in the same boat until I
looked for something "outsource-proof". Realizing that one's
chosen field won't support you can be hard to accept, but
the world keeps changing. For me, electronics is now a
hobby. Just look for something legal you're good at, that
you like to do, and pays enough to meet your needs (and that
can't be outsourced, of course).

While we're speaking of "tolerated behavior", what about using power
tools to extract confessions, as was "tolerated" in Saddam-era Iraq?

Saddam's behaviour wasn't tolerated, but endured. Getting rid of a dictator
who controls the armed forces and has a large and active secret police force
is not eay. If you had wanted to run Irak on that basis, you'd have needed
to install a much larger security apparatus. As it is, you've taken a little
too much of the brutal oppressor approach, without installing enough brutal
oppressors to make it work.

What we see is a transitional half-measure that nobody's
happy with. There are enough elements in that society that
still believe in brutality to make a certain amount
necessary so that the occupation will be taken seriously,
but not so much that the change will be invisible to those
that don't agree with the first group.

I really believe that the U.S. doesn't want to run Iraq
at all. The question becomes; how to prevent it being run by
the local "traditionalist" brutalizers?

You have absolutely no understanding of U.S. politics. Take it from a
native; believe _nothing_ you see on TV or read in the papers. That goes
double for political ads; the one thing you can assume is that when one
accuses another of something, they're trying to distract you from noticing
that _they_ did it.

Obviously a minority opinion. Your presidental candidates would be spending
their money in other ways if your opinion was widely shared. In fact, I
suspect that your scepticism is confined to the party political propaganda
coming from the side you don't support. Your silly ideas about the U.N.
sound exactly like the party line of the isolationist idiots of the right
wing of the Republican Party.

The U.N. is merely another way to squeeze a little extra
power over others out of the usual techniques. If you
believe anything else, they've succeeded in fooling you.

As for my "minority" opinion, it certainly is, but one
that's growing. Both main "traditional" parties here are
seriously worried about the growing number of Independents
who've abandoned them because neither expresses their ideals.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Bill Sloman]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<q4src.769$PU5.36@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

(Two replies for no apparent reason. Browser burp?)

Google Groups burp - I got a "can't find adress" response and assumed
that the posting had been lost.

some snippage in the interest of bandwidth conservation

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message
news:<olPpc.65908$Fl5.51177@okepread04>...

You don't keep track of U.S. Foreign Aid funding?

It is too small to be worth worrying about, even smaller when you
subtract out the subsidised arms sales to the right-wing dictators you
seem to be so fond of.

Oh, and nobody else does that. Please remind me why Cuba
is such a hellhole (under its left-wing dictator) when
_only_ the U.S.A. doesn't trade with it?

Why should I bother? The right wing Cuban mafiosi in Florida are a
full bottle on the subject (if not entirely unbiased). Your
administration's enthusiasm for Batista and his heirs is just one
example of your enthusiasm for right-wing dictators perpared to do
favours for American businesses.

http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/batista.htm

My point, which you blissfully ignored, is that we haven't sent Spain
any money in quite a while.


Not everybody needs to be bribed to do the right thing, or the wrong
thing - Spain was a bad example for you to pick, because Aznar's
ideological blinkers more or less lined up with Dubbya's.

And how did they get so aligned?

Paranoid schizophrenics do tend to have similar delusions.

That ties in nicely with _your_ point about "bribes and corruption". How
long do you thing will it be until Spain sticks its
"collective" hand out?

It would seek regional support from the rest of the E.U. before it bothered
approaching the U.S. - Spain, like Ireland, did very well out of its E.U.
membership when its economy first started catching up with the more
advanced European countries, while the days of Marshall Plan aid are long > > past.

We shall see. Two people cannot get by by doing each
others' laundry; the principle is the same with countries.
It's worse when they have long-standing disagreements
neither wants to let go of. Frinst, I still can't figure out
why there's a border between Spain and Portugal, but not one
between Andalusia and the rest of Spain.

Try reading some history. There are elementary school books that you
should find accessible.

I suspect that the Iraki's would have preferred a U.N. occupation - they do
seem to be (marginally) less upset by the non-US members of the present
occupation force.

We've been over that; again, why is the U.S.A. painted as
"the Great Satan", and by whom?

The U.S. is described as "the Great Satan" in Iran, probably because
they encourage the Iraki invasion in the 1980's - check out Rumsfeld's
role in that encouragement. Try going over the argument again, and see
if you can produce a response that doesn't damage your own case.

The latest Guardian Weekly was pretty rude about Rumsfeld's
unwillingness to take advantage of the U.S. foreign service's
expertise on foreign cultures, and a few more Arab-speaking Muslim's
in the occupying force might well have fooled enough of the people
enough of the time to have prevented the current rash of
insurrections.

It would be better to have "insurrections" against a nice, homogenous
bunch of Euros and Arabs wearing blue helmets? Do you really believe no
such "insurrections" would occur in that scenario? You cannot possibly be
that naive.


UN occupation forces wouldn't have been homogenous, any more than the
current occupation forces are - each nationality supplies complete units,
who occupy specific areas. During the earlier months of the current
occupation, resistance was confined to isolated incidents, and the current
crop of insurrections, involving a significant proportion of the
populations of specific cities, is not only new but also pretty much
confined to U.S. occupied areas, which does suggest that ham-handed U.S.
tactics are contributing to the problem.

"Ham-handed". Yes, you do indeed hate the U.S.A. in spite
of your protestations. You would prefer "sensitivity" to
traditional Islamic methods of justice?

Calling someone "ham-handed" isn't exactly evidnece of hatred. How
would you describe the U.S. occupation tactics? They sure aren't
subtle. The rest of the coalition did seem to be able to do better
without resorting to the sharia

http://i-cias.com/e.o/sharia.htm

If the bulk of the population believed that the occupying forces were
really going to leave as soon as order had been restored, you could fool
enough of the people for long enough to avoid any serious insurrections.

Who's convincing them otherwise, but those who stand to
gain from further conflict? It sure isn't America.

That's the point - it is the U.S. behaviour that is convincing them
otherwise. You march in, claiming to be "liberators" then behave
almost as badly as Saddam's secret police ....

Sigh. "World Public Opinion" is indeed driven by leaders,
and their preferences are driven by the levels of bribes
offered, right?


Aznar was right behind Dubbya, but his enthusiasm only persuaded 14%
of the Spanish electorate. Sometimes the most energetic leaders can't
influence public opinion in the way that they'd like.

Wait till Socialist Spain sticks its hand out.


To the EU, if anybody - the U.S. is much less generous.

As I said, we shall see. What we won't see are the
strings attached to said aid.

Your grasp of foreign policy makes it clear that you don't see very
much at all.

You make a difference without distinction.

So you claim, because you haven't got the wit to read the papers or
remember what actually happens when some leader tries to persuade the
electorate that black is white.

Name one that hasn't. Ever.


I already did - Aznar in Spain - who thought that the US-led invasion of
Irak was a good idea, when 86% of the Spanish electorate didn't, and failed
to persuade them to change their minds after the event, which meant that he
stopped theing their leader at the next election. Why can't you pay
attention?

Why can't you see that the electorates minds were
manipulated first one way, then another? Oh, wait, you
refuse to believe such manipulation occurs, right?

Because the approval ratings didn't change. The Spanish electorate
thought that the invasion was a bad idea when it was taking place, and
kept on thinking the same thing until they got the chance to dump
Aznar.

just
for giggles, do you know the history of U.S. aid to Ghana vs. his opinion
of the U.S.?

No. Tell me about it, preferrably by a URL pointing to some non-US
historian's account of the events.

Ignoring your pasive-aggressive distrust of any U.S.
account, do your own damn homework. Unless of course, facts
don't interest you.

Your opinion doesn't rate as fact. The newspapers I read don't think
that U.S. aid to Ghana is worth reporting - as I've said before, U.S.
foreign aid is negligibly small - and I'm not going to waste my time
finding out which right-wing anti-UN website had cooked up your latest
conspiracy theory. It isn't as if you show any sign of knowing what
your are talking about.

He seems to be doing pretty well, within the limits of the job.

Right. A dandy job in the former S.S.R.'s


He seems to know what needs to be done. Persuading politicians to do the
right thing can be more difficult. Putin and Dubbya both have their own
agendas and their own none-too-well-informed electorates.

"Persuading politicians to do the right thing" is a
contradiction in terms. Why do you not also note that _all
other_ politicians have their own agendas etc.?

Politicians have been known to do the right thing. Why should I have
expanded my comment to cover _all_ politicians?

Tito managed to keep Yugoslavia in one piece as long as he lived, and
you may yet get lucky and find the Iraki Tito, though your nitwit
prison guards have probably spoiled his (or maybe her) disposition by
ill-chosen "softening-up" procedures.

When Tito's iron grip relaxed, what happened? All those smoldering
centuries-old hatreds erupted into full flame, that's what. Nothing was
resolved.

That is not the way it looked to the refugees from former Yugoslavia who
were learning Dutch when I was, back in 1994/5.

Why were they refugees?

Because there was a war going on there. Weren't you paying attention
at the time? Anybody who could, got out of the country.

Slobodan Milosevic deliberately revived all those century-old hatreds for
his own political advantage, and undid all that Tito had achieved in short
order, in a manner painfully reminiscent of Hitler's exploitation of
Germany's residual anti-Semitism. Milosevic is now answering for his crimes
before International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/criminal/criminals.html

Sigh. How did those hatreds manage to smolder all that
time? Think it through.

The same way nitwits in your southern states still sing "Dixie". Try
doing some thinking of your own.

An "Iraki Tito" already existed in Iraq; his name was Saddam Hussein.
Same thing happened when he was deposed.

A totally false analogy. Tito was the leader of all the Yugoslavs.

The "installed" leader. How many were happy with that?

He wasn't "installed". He lead the most successful part of the
Yugoslav resistance during WWII and ended up in control of the country
in 1945.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who oppressed the Shi'ites and the Kurds,
and who ran the country for his own benefit and the benefit of his extended
family (who held most of the senior jobs). He came to power as the head of
political party, more like Stalin than Tito (whose history looks more like
George Washington's).

More "hate America". Washington wasn't installed.

Like Tito, he lead the American resistance to the British occupiers of
the U.S. and did well enough to make serious political capital out of
it. If you knew what you were talking about, you could find real
weaknesses in the analogy - Washington never had to face anything
comparable to Tito's call to Moscow in the late 1930's when he was at
real risk from Stalin's purges - but you can't do any better than
claim that making the anology means that I "hate America". I do
despise some American's - and you just got added to the list - but not
becasue they are Americans, but because they are members of the
international conspiracy of pompous nitwits.

How did Tito maintain "peace"? The same way Hussein did;
by killing (or threatening to) any dissenters. Why do you
claim a false analogy?

Because he Tito didn't kill anybody guilty of anything less than armed
insurrection. His system did imprison some dissenters, but they were
tried and convicted by an independent judiciary. Tito's Yugoslavia was
a civilised country under siege (the Australian army turned out to
trained some infiltrators who were smuggled into Yugoslavia, captured,
tried and shot, in the 1950's, while I was till at school). Saddam's
Hussein's Irak was a simple despotism. If you weren't an ignorant
idiot, I wouldn't need to point this out.

Oh, and please accentuate the actions of a few ill-trained, ill-
supervised idiots some more.


Well, I am replying to your posting ....

That was really crude, compared to your previous
passive-aggressive methodology.

I adapt my tone to the quality of the material to whihc I am
responding. You flunked.

You suggest that such behavior as prisoner mistreatment
is "tolerable" in the U.S., while it's blatantly obvious
that it isn't. Please try to be less disingenuous.

Jon S. Dyson was claiming that the prisoner mistreatment was "merely"
obscene hazing, which fitted some reports I'v heard about your
fraternity initiation rituals, which has included stuff that would
have got the perpetrators expelled from any Australian university.

and a U.N. mandate might have helped that - most
likely not directly, but by diluting the US content in the army of
occupation. It is noticeable that the U.S. troops do seem to be seeing
rather more armed insurrection than the other coalition forces in Irak.

And what drives that, other than targeting by Al Qaeda?

Probably ignorance and arrogance - most American soldiers are
convinced that their way of doing things is the only way of doing
things, and don't realise that behavior that is tolerated in the U.S.
can be totally unacceptable for other cultures.

You really hate the U.S.


I don't. I am aware that U.S. newspapers don't publish much in the way of
foreign news, and that U.S. citizens tend to regard the U.S. as not only
God's Own Country, but also God's Only Country. This is a tolerable
cultural preference, but it makes your citizens somewhat insensitive to
cultural differences, and correspondingly unsuitable for the roles of
occupiers and administrators in foreign countries. There are plenty of
Americans who dotranscend their background, but there don't seem to be
enough of them inIrak at the moment, in part because of a stupid turf war
between Rumsfeld and Powell.

Why do you think my only source of "news" is American
media? Trying to extract "ground truth" from the them, plus
BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc. is an exercise in detecting and
peeling back many different types of prejudicial
colorations. Sometimes identifying them is more interesting
than what they cover.

You seem to spend too much time detecting and peeling back, and not
enough on the background facts.

And why do you go on about American "cultural
preferences" while ignoring everyone else's? Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?

The American cultural preference is for an amazing small amount of
foreign news. In the papers I read (in the UK, the Netherland and
Australia), more than half of the first few oages of the paper will be
devoted to foreign news. In U.S. papers, finding any foreign news
requires an exhaustive search.

Personally, I have absolutely no respect for other
"cultures" (a word that always brings bacteria to mind) that
include such charming quirks as beating women half to death
for failing to take a male-relative escort into a public
street. Maybe you are more "sensitive" than I, but to me,
such "cultures" desperately need extermination.

Where would that be? It doesn't happen in Iran, which isn't great on
women's rights ...

What's the matter, not getting enough Foreign Aid
(bribes and corruption) to suit you?

As far as I know, I don't get any. I'd prefer to earn my money doing
electronic design, but since I'm between jobs at the moment, I'm open to
offers.

Well, look around. I used to be in the same boat until I
looked for something "outsource-proof". Realizing that one's
chosen field won't support you can be hard to accept, but
the world keeps changing. For me, electronics is now a
hobby. Just look for something legal you're good at, that
you like to do, and pays enough to meet your needs (and that
can't be outsourced, of course).

While we're speaking of "tolerated behavior", what about using power
tools to extract confessions, as was "tolerated" in Saddam-era Iraq?

Saddam's behaviour wasn't tolerated, but endured. Getting rid of a dictator
who controls the armed forces and has a large and active secret police
force is not eay. If you had wanted to run Irak on that basis, you'd have
needed to install a much larger security apparatus. As it is, you've taken > > a little too much of the brutal oppressor approach, without installing
enough brutal oppressors to make it work.

What we see is a transitional half-measure that nobody's
happy with. There are enough elements in that society that
still believe in brutality to make a certain amount
necessary so that the occupation will be taken seriously,
but not so much that the change will be invisible to those
that don't agree with the first group.

I don't believe that brutality is ever a good idea. A little clinical
violence can sometimes be necessary, but no more than is needed to
immobilise the aggressor.

I really believe that the U.S. doesn't want to run Iraq
at all. The question becomes; how to prevent it being run by
the local "traditionalist" brutalizers?

If you didn't want to run Irak, you would have worked out an answer
before you went in.

You have absolutely no understanding of U.S. politics. Take it from a
native; believe _nothing_ you see on TV or read in the papers. That goes
double for political ads; the one thing you can assume is that when one
accuses another of something, they're trying to distract you from noticing
that _they_ did it.

Obviously a minority opinion. Your presidental candidates would be spending
their money in other ways if your opinion was widely shared. In fact, I
suspect that your scepticism is confined to the party political propaganda
coming from the side you don't support. Your silly ideas about the U.N.
sound exactly like the party line of the isolationist idiots of the right
wing of the Republican Party.

The U.N. is merely another way to squeeze a little extra
power over others out of the usual techniques. If you
believe anything else, they've succeeded in fooling you.

The U.N. doesn't seem to have a lot of power, which makes nonsense of
your proposition. If you really believe what you claim, someone has
clearly succeeded in fooling you.

As for my "minority" opinion, it certainly is, but one
that's growing. Both main "traditional" parties here are
seriously worried about the growing number of Independents
who've abandoned them because neither expresses their ideals.

Your ideas seem to be independent of much basis in facts. Try reading
a bit more before you make up your mind.

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[KLM]

Berg beheading: No way, say medical experts
By Ritt Goldstein
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE22Ak03.html

American businessman Nicholas Berg's body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass;
a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz)
on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert
separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.

"I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic,
" Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons,
said from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, when this journalist asked forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD
and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been "staged",
Nordby replied: "Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it."

Questions of when the video's footage was taken, and the time elapsed between the shooting of the video's segments,
were raised by both experts, reflecting a portion of the broader and ongoing video controversy.
Nordby, speaking to Asia Times Online from Washington state, noted: "We don't know how much time wasn't filmed,"
adding that "there's no way of knowing whether ... footage is contemporaneous with the footage that follows".

While the circumstances surrounding both the video and Nick Berg's last days have been the source of substantive speculation,
both Simpson and Nordby perceived it as highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation.
A factor in this was an apparent lack of the "massive" arterial bleeding such an act initiates.

"I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds
... if it was genuine," said Simpson. Notably, the act's perpetrators appeared far from so.
And separately Nordby observed: "I think that by the time they're ... on his head, he's already dead."

Providing another basis for their findings, in the course of such an assault, an individual's autonomic nervous system
would react, typically doing so strongly, with the body shaking and jerking accordingly.
And while Nordby noted that "they rotated and moved the head", shifting vertebrae that should have initiated such actions,
Simpson said he "certainly didn't perceive any movements at all" in response to such efforts.

During the period when Berg's captors filmed the decapitation sequence, circumstances indicate that he had already been dead
"a quite uncertain length of time, but more than ... however long the beheading took", Simpson stated.
Both Simpson and Nordby also noted the difficulty in providing analysis based on the video, the inherent limitations presented by this.
But both also felt that Berg had seemed drugged.

A particularly significant point in the video sequence occurred as Berg's captors attacked him,
bringing the supposedly fatal knife to bear. "The way that they pulled him over, they could have used a dummy at that point,
" reflected Simpson regarding what the video portrayed. Separately, Nordby said Berg does not "appear to register any sort of surprise
or any change in his facial expression when he's grabbed and twisted over, and they start to bring this weapon into use".

Subsequently, Nordby said it was likely that the filming sequence was manipulated at the point immediately preceding this,
allowing Berg's corpse to be used for the decapitation sequence. Nordby also emphasized that the video
"raises more questions than it answers", with the most fundamental questions of "who are you, and how did you die",
being impossible to answer from it. But broad speculation exists regarding a number of factors surrounding
both Berg's death and the video, and its timing in regard to revelations of US prison atrocities.

In a May 13 article, the Arabic newsgroup Aljazeera reported that a Dubai-based Reuters journalist first broke the story,
"but while Fox News, CNN and the BBC" were able to secure the video from the "Arabic-only website" that hosted it,
Aljazeera was unable to locate it. And also on May 13, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US Central Intelligence Agency
had determined that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the individual who beheaded Berg.

Since Secretary of State Colin Powell's United Nations presentation of February 5, 2003, al-Zarqawi
has been portrayed as the single most dangerous element facing the Bush administration's "war on terror".
Powell's UN presentation has since been widely accepted as empty; nevertheless, al-Zarqawi appears
to have surpassed even Osama bin Laden as the administration's No 1 terror target. And on May 15,
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the Coalition Provisional Authority's chief Iraq military spokesman,
declared that al-Zarqawi will be eventually caught, though that may prove particularly difficult.

On March 4, Brigadier-General David Rodriguez of the Joint Chiefs of staff revealed that the Pentagon didn't have
"direct evidence of whether he's [al-Zarqawi] alive or dead", providing commentary on the nature of prior "evidence"
linking al-Zarqawi to attacks and bombings. But that same day, AP reported that an Iraqi resistance group claimed
al-Zarqawi had been killed the April prior in the US bombing of northern Iraq.

Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it
"very likely" that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi's alleged killing of
Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is
an administration ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg's death have fueled added speculation.

According to e-mails sent from a US consular officer in Baghdad, Beth Payne, to the Berg family,
Nick Berg was being held in Iraq "by the US military in Mosul". A May 13 AP report notes that
a US State Department spokesperson subsequently said this was untrue, an error,
and that Berg was being held by Iraqi authorities. But another May 13 AP report quoted
"police chief Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi" as claiming that reports of Iraqi police having held Berg were "baseless".

And Berg is seen on the beheading videotape in what appears to be US military prison-issue clothing,
sitting in what appears to be a US military-type white chair, virtually identical to those photographed
as used at Abu Ghraib prison. However, the taking of hostages has occurred in the region, and beheadings are not unheard of.

According to a February 2003 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), on September 23, 2001,
radical Islamists captured a group of 25 Kurdish fighters in the Iraqi village of Kheli Hama.
"Some prisoners' throats had been slit, while others had been beheaded," HRW reported,
noting that the television station KurdSat had broadcast pictures of the dead that September 26.
The report also noted that a videotape "apparently filmed" by those committing the atrocities had been found.

The strict Islamist community in Iraq denied that the acts were committed by their people, stating that the incident was fabricated.

Additional reports of beheadings also exist, with the victims usually noted as killed
with a bullet before the beheading occurs. But HRW's report also raised an issue that the Berg video's makers,
and Berg's father, both raised: prisoner exchange.

HRW noted that Iraq's radical Islamists did pursue exchanges of captives, and the Berg video
specifically noted that his captors claimed they were killing him as their attempts to exchange Berg
had been rebuffed by US authorities. Berg's father, Michael, has pressed the administration of US President George W Bush
as regards what the facts of this allegation are, with the administration denying any knowledge that such a trade was offered.
And added questions still exist.

Because Iraq's radical Islamists speak in a particular manner, and live by a closely proscribed code,
apparent contradictions between these ways and the way Berg's captors appeared has generated speculation.
Some observers have speculated on the possibility that the individuals weren't native Arabic speakers.
Conversely, it is reported that in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law allows for beheadings in cases of severe crimes,
the condemned is heavily drugged with tranquilizers prior to the execution, reportedly leaving them
in a state similar to that which Berg appeared in during parts of the video.

Again, Nordby emphasized that the video "raises more questions than it answers".

Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm.
His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning Herald,
Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with the Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Bill Sloman wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<q4src.769$PU5.36@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

(Two replies for no apparent reason. Browser burp?)


Google Groups burp - I got a "can't find adress" response and assumed
that the posting had been lost.

Stuff happens.

some snippage in the interest of bandwidth conservation

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message
news:<olPpc.65908$Fl5.51177@okepread04>...

Please remind me why Cuba
is such a hellhole (under its left-wing dictator) when
_only_ the U.S.A. doesn't trade with it?

Why should I bother? The right wing Cuban mafiosi in Florida are a
full bottle on the subject (if not entirely unbiased). Your
administration's enthusiasm for Batista and his heirs is just one
example of your enthusiasm for right-wing dictators perpared to do
favours for American businesses.

What has that to do with current economic conditions in
Cuba when they're free to trade with the entire planet
except the U.S.?

Who's doing favors for whom in order to help keep Castro
in power _now_? How do they benefit from the misery of the
average Cuban?

My point, which you blissfully ignored, is that we haven't sent Spain
any money in quite a while.


Not everybody needs to be bribed to do the right thing, or the wrong
thing - Spain was a bad example for you to pick, because Aznar's
ideological blinkers more or less lined up with Dubbya's.

And how did they get so aligned?


Paranoid schizophrenics do tend to have similar delusions.

Another symptom of Extreme Liberal Hate Speech (at least,
that's what it's called here; you likely call it "balanced
thinking") is to use that kind of terminology when
discussing your ideological enemies. Your emotions are
overriding your brain. Kindly address the question instead
of yielding to your tendency to outbursts.

We shall see. Two people cannot get by by doing each
others' laundry; the principle is the same with countries.
It's worse when they have long-standing disagreements
neither wants to let go of. Frinst, I still can't figure out
why there's a border between Spain and Portugal, but not one
between Andalusia and the rest of Spain.


Try reading some history. There are elementary school books that you
should find accessible.

Oh, I _so_ respect you, too. I'm quite aware of the
historical events thank you just the same, it's the
underlying motivations of those events that are opaque to
me. Odd how that sort of thing never makes it into anyone's
history books.

I suspect that the Iraki's would have preferred a U.N. occupation - they do
seem to be (marginally) less upset by the non-US members of the present
occupation force.

We've been over that; again, why is the U.S.A. painted as
"the Great Satan", and by whom?

The U.S. is described as "the Great Satan" in Iran, probably because
they encourage the Iraki invasion in the 1980's - check out Rumsfeld's
role in that encouragement. Try going over the argument again, and see
if you can produce a response that doesn't damage your own case.

Speaking of history, who first used that phrase WRT the
U.S.? Also, who else uses it now? Think it through.

During the earlier months of the current
occupation, resistance was confined to isolated incidents, and the current
crop of insurrections, involving a significant proportion of the
populations of specific cities, is not only new but also pretty much
confined to U.S. occupied areas, which does suggest that ham-handed U.S.
tactics are contributing to the problem.

"Ham-handed". Yes, you do indeed hate the U.S.A. in spite
of your protestations. You would prefer "sensitivity" to
traditional Islamic methods of justice?

Calling someone "ham-handed" isn't exactly evidnece of hatred. How
would you describe the U.S. occupation tactics? They sure aren't
subtle.

Since you finally asked (rather than assume that you
know) what I think, I'll tell you. The invasion was a
perfectly executed military operation that devolved into an
example of how not to occupy a possibly hostile area. The
problem is not BTW U.S. military thought, but rather the
failure to take Arab cultural mentality into consideration
(this on the part of those who decide policy, not those who
decide strategy and tactics). The fault lies not with the
military commanders or the line soldiers, but the civilian
policy-makers who failed to make them aware of the fact that
local loyalties are not determined the way they are in the
"West". Such loyalties and their consequences shift rapidly
in response to proclamations from Islamic authorities which
pop up "out of nowhere" and declare themselves only shortly
before they call for action, justifying their calls with
appeals to one or another of the Pillars of Islam. Since
Muslims are conditioned to answer such appeals without
question, a soldier never knows who will be shooting at them
from day to day.

The soldiers were quite ready for opposition from
uniformed enemy forces; they were not prepared for sporadic
opposition from what they saw as "civilians", which has a
completely different meaning in Islamic countries. For
instance, no Muslim sees anything wrong with terrorists
caching weapons in mosques; the parallel of caching weapons
in churches wouldn't occur to Xtians.

Then there's the rapid influx of non-Iraqi "fighters" who
assimilated invisibly into the local scene; they're hard to
identify as potential enemies beforehand (although it does
have a sort of side benefit; see below).

This is to my mind another example of "planning for the
last war", except in terms of psychology as opposed to
technology.

What's the cure? To somehow convince the general populace
that it's not in their best interests to support fellow
Muslims who are willing to blow them up bystander-wise in
order to supposedly preserve their independence (keep them
under the thumb of Islamic extremists). This is a matter of
ideology, but Muslims are forbidden from discussing ideology
with "infidels".

Got any ideas?

The rest of the coalition did seem to be able to do better
without resorting to the sharia

http://i-cias.com/e.o/sharia.htm

Uh, excuse me? I can see clearly how it informs Muslim
military thought, but not U.S. policy, strategy, or tactics.

If the bulk of the population believed that the occupying forces were
really going to leave as soon as order had been restored, you could fool
enough of the people for long enough to avoid any serious insurrections.

Who's convincing them otherwise, but those who stand to
gain from further conflict? It sure isn't America.

That's the point - it is the U.S. behaviour that is convincing them
otherwise. You march in, claiming to be "liberators" then behave
almost as badly as Saddam's secret police ....

One last time; those degenerate prison guards you refer
to are in grave trouble for their actions, the kind of
actions that simply are not acceptable within the U.S. Have
you not noticed that it's daily, detailed news fare here?
Get over that or there's no point continuing.

Your grasp of foreign policy makes it clear that you don't see very
much at all.

Right. And of course, your Socialist perspective is so
much better.

Why can't you see that the electorates minds were
manipulated first one way, then another? Oh, wait, you
refuse to believe such manipulation occurs, right?

Because the approval ratings didn't change. The Spanish electorate
thought that the invasion was a bad idea when it was taking place, and
kept on thinking the same thing until they got the chance to dump
Aznar.

I'm sure a certain train station bombing (and threats of
more to follow) had no bearing on the matter, right?

just
for giggles, do you know the history of U.S. aid to Ghana vs. his opinion
of the U.S.?

No. Tell me about it, preferrably by a URL pointing to some non-US
historian's account of the events.

Ignoring your pasive-aggressive distrust of any U.S.
account, do your own damn homework. Unless of course, facts
don't interest you.

Your opinion doesn't rate as fact. The newspapers I read don't think
that U.S. aid to Ghana is worth reporting - as I've said before, U.S.
foreign aid is negligibly small - and I'm not going to waste my time
finding out which right-wing anti-UN website had cooked up your latest
conspiracy theory. It isn't as if you show any sign of knowing what
your are talking about.

There's that hate speech again. Don't like being reminded
that your favorite news sources are biased, do you? Find any
source you like, and read the numbers.

He seems to be doing pretty well, within the limits of the job.

Right. A dandy job in the former S.S.R.'s


He seems to know what needs to be done. Persuading politicians to do the
right thing can be more difficult. Putin and Dubbya both have their own
agendas and their own none-too-well-informed electorates.

"Persuading politicians to do the right thing" is a
contradiction in terms. Why do you not also note that _all
other_ politicians have their own agendas etc.?


Politicians have been known to do the right thing. Why should I have
expanded my comment to cover _all_ politicians?

Because it's true. For a while there I thought your
"bribes and corruption" comment indicated a clearer
understanding of politics on your part, but you apparently
think it's solely restricted to your ideological enemies.

When Tito's iron grip relaxed, what happened? All those smoldering
centuries-old hatreds erupted into full flame, that's what. Nothing was
resolved.

That is not the way it looked to the refugees from former Yugoslavia who
were learning Dutch when I was, back in 1994/5.

Why were they refugees?

Because there was a war going on there. Weren't you paying attention
at the time? Anybody who could, got out of the country.

And the causes of the war were how old?

Slobodan Milosevic deliberately revived all those century-old hatreds for
his own political advantage, and undid all that Tito had achieved in short
order, in a manner painfully reminiscent of Hitler's exploitation of
Germany's residual anti-Semitism. Milosevic is now answering for his crimes
before International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/criminal/criminals.html

Sigh. How did those hatreds manage to smolder all that
time? Think it through.

The same way nitwits in your southern states still sing "Dixie". Try
doing some thinking of your own.

Exactly! Finally you get it! BTW, how many of your
neighbors hold secret swastika-worship parties?

An "Iraki Tito" already existed in Iraq; his name was Saddam Hussein.
Same thing happened when he was deposed.

A totally false analogy. Tito was the leader of all the Yugoslavs.

The "installed" leader. How many were happy with that?

He wasn't "installed". He lead the most successful part of the
Yugoslav resistance during WWII and ended up in control of the country
in 1945.

Sigh. You know perfectly well that Tito wouldn't have
lasted ten minutes after the Nazis were shoved out without
Soviet support.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who oppressed the Shi'ites and the Kurds,
and who ran the country for his own benefit and the benefit of his extended
family (who held most of the senior jobs). He came to power as the head of
political party, more like Stalin than Tito (whose history looks more like
George Washington's).

More "hate America". Washington wasn't installed.

Like Tito, he lead the American resistance to the British occupiers of
the U.S. and did well enough to make serious political capital out of
it. If you knew what you were talking about, you could find real
weaknesses in the analogy - Washington never had to face anything
comparable to Tito's call to Moscow in the late 1930's when he was at
real risk from Stalin's purges - but you can't do any better than
claim that making the anology means that I "hate America". I do
despise some American's - and you just got added to the list - but not
becasue they are Americans, but because they are members of the
international conspiracy of pompous nitwits.

Despise me all you like, it bothers me not at all. Your
statements belie your protestations about hating the U.S.

Washington also never had to suppress anyone who wanted
him ousted; rather he had to refuse being crowned king. How
many calls for kingship were made for Tito?

How did Tito maintain "peace"? The same way Hussein did;
by killing (or threatening to) any dissenters. Why do you
claim a false analogy?

Because he Tito didn't kill anybody guilty of anything less than armed
insurrection. His system did imprison some dissenters, but they were
tried and convicted by an independent judiciary. Tito's Yugoslavia was
a civilised country under siege (the Australian army turned out to
trained some infiltrators who were smuggled into Yugoslavia, captured,
tried and shot, in the 1950's, while I was till at school). Saddam's
Hussein's Irak was a simple despotism. If you weren't an ignorant
idiot, I wouldn't need to point this out.

There's your ideological bias again. "Independent
judiciary" in a Soviet satellite state indeed.

Oh, and please accentuate the actions of a few ill-trained, ill-
supervised idiots some more.

Well, I am replying to your posting ....

That was really crude, compared to your previous
passive-aggressive methodology.

I adapt my tone to the quality of the material to whihc I am
responding. You flunked.

Ask me if I care about your opinion of me. The point you
keep evading is, you continue to ascribe the worst behavior
of a very few to all U.S. soldiers in Iraq without
justification other than your hatred of the U.S. Then you
assume a cultural approval of that behavior in the U.S.

This is simply false.

You suggest that such behavior as prisoner mistreatment
is "tolerable" in the U.S., while it's blatantly obvious
that it isn't. Please try to be less disingenuous.

Jon S. Dyson was claiming that the prisoner mistreatment was "merely"
obscene hazing, which fitted some reports I'v heard about your
fraternity initiation rituals, which has included stuff that would
have got the perpetrators expelled from any Australian university.

John S. Dyson is not the entire U.S. news media, nor is
he on any of the military tribunals trying (and sentencing)
the soldiers who participated.

Oh, and since when does Australian University fraternity
etiquette have anything to do with the subject under
discussion? On one hand, you want the U.S. to have
sensitivity for foreign cultures; on the other, no one
elsewhere is required to reciprocate.

In America we call that attitude "hypocrisy". What do you
call it?

Why do you think my only source of "news" is American
media? Trying to extract "ground truth" from the them, plus
BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc. is an exercise in detecting and
peeling back many different types of prejudicial
colorations. Sometimes identifying them is more interesting
than what they cover.

You seem to spend too much time detecting and peeling back, and not
enough on the background facts.

That's the point. I assume from the beginning that _all_
news sources have one bias or another, from their general
tone. None of them can be trusted to report bare facts.

So, who do you trust to present "background facts"
without bias? I trust no one, which is why I examine as many
as possible.

And why do you go on about American "cultural
preferences" while ignoring everyone else's? Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?

The American cultural preference is for an amazing small amount of
foreign news. In the papers I read (in the UK, the Netherland and
Australia), more than half of the first few oages of the paper will be
devoted to foreign news. In U.S. papers, finding any foreign news
requires an exhaustive search.

That was a rather sloppy evasion. I asked you "Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?"

Can I help it if your favorite papers like to mind
others' business? Why do you insist that your particular
cultural obsessions must be shared by America, but not the
other way around? And again, why do you think I put any
particular trust in the U.S. media?

Personally, I have absolutely no respect for other
"cultures" (a word that always brings bacteria to mind) that
include such charming quirks as beating women half to death
for failing to take a male-relative escort into a public
street. Maybe you are more "sensitive" than I, but to me,
such "cultures" desperately need extermination.

Where would that be? It doesn't happen in Iran, which isn't great on
women's rights ...

Actually I was thinking primarily of that bastion of
civil rights, Saudi Arabia.

However you're making a fatal mistake if you think that a
country with exclusively State-supported news media (and
severe restrictions on foreign journalists) will permit the
reporting of events that will make them look bad. Just
because you don't read it in "official media", what makes
you think it doesn't happen? Know any refugees from Iran
(sources of ground truth)? Wanna put the question to, say,
Maleki, an Iranian denizen of some of the sci.physics hierarchy?

I don't believe that brutality is ever a good idea. A little clinical
violence can sometimes be necessary, but no more than is needed to
immobilise the aggressor.

See, that's insensitivity to the local culture. If you
don't go as far as they would, they don't take you seriously.

Being a Buddhist I happen to agree with you BTW re:
brutality. However, it doesn't work to go halfway. If you
want a serious hardass to listen to reason, first you must
knock him on his ass and make him believe you will kill him
if he doesn't cooperate. Some simply won't listen unless you
break bones. Damn shame, but the alternative is to kill them
outright and regret it forever.

I really believe that the U.S. doesn't want to run Iraq
at all. The question becomes; how to prevent it being run by
the local "traditionalist" brutalizers?

If you didn't want to run Irak, you would have worked out an answer
before you went in.

"I" should have worked an answer out? You mistake me for
a policymaker?

Personally I think the current situation was planned to
bring in as many foreign terrorist types in order to "bunch"
them for easier disposal. Time will tell.

You have absolutely no understanding of U.S. politics. Take it from a
native; believe _nothing_ you see on TV or read in the papers. That goes
double for political ads; the one thing you can assume is that when one
accuses another of something, they're trying to distract you from noticing
that _they_ did it.

Obviously a minority opinion. Your presidental candidates would be spending
their money in other ways if your opinion was widely shared. In fact, I
suspect that your scepticism is confined to the party political propaganda
coming from the side you don't support. Your silly ideas about the U.N.
sound exactly like the party line of the isolationist idiots of the right
wing of the Republican Party.

The U.N. is merely another way to squeeze a little extra
power over others out of the usual techniques. If you
believe anything else, they've succeeded in fooling you.

The U.N. doesn't seem to have a lot of power, which makes nonsense of
your proposition. If you really believe what you claim, someone has
clearly succeeded in fooling you.

Look again. They have enough power to influence _your_
opinions.

As for my "minority" opinion, it certainly is, but one
that's growing. Both main "traditional" parties here are
seriously worried about the growing number of Independents
who've abandoned them because neither expresses their ideals.

Your ideas seem to be independent of much basis in facts. Try reading
a bit more before you make up your mind.

Really? You haven't seen the nervous outbursts of both
Republican and Democratic leaderships over their losses to
Independents? They're keeping it to a dull roar just now,
but it'll heat up as our Presidential election nears, a
phenomenon that's become more obvious the last few
elections. Try reading a bit more before _you_ make up your
mind.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Bill Sloman wrote:

"Kevin Carney" <carneyke@us.ibm.combo> wrote in message news:<c82vjl$6l2$1@news.btv.ibm.com>...

Rich,
You are a toad ! I'm with Fred....


That is, you are another loose cannon with a psychopathic streak. Do
you sincerely want Dubbya to make a pre-emptive strike to take out the
entire Muslim population because Al Q'iada use the Koran to justify
their own particular variety of psychopathology?

If you do, stroll over to the nearest secure psychiatric hospital and
have yourself committed before you lose your temper with your family
or your colleagues and implement a final solution to a transient
domestic problem.

Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 24 May 2004 16:26:42 -0700) it happened Mark Fergerson
<nunya@biz.ness> wrote in <fxvsc.23529$PU5.20030@fed1read06>:
Bush cannot ride a bike, win a war, run an oil company.
Rumsfeld gave the command to torture, rape, and of cause little soldier
boy had donnit.
Both little soldier meatball, and little rumsfeld creep are war criminals,
violating Geneva treaty.
It is a facist club, and by supporting them you are the same.
JP

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Mon, 24 May 2004 16:26:42 -0700) it happened Mark Fergerson
nunya@biz.ness> wrote in <fxvsc.23529$PU5.20030@fed1read06>:
Bush cannot ride a bike, win a war, run an oil company.

Kerry can't ride a bike either (and whined that a Secret
Service agent made him fall off at that).

Whereas the business in Iraq isn't over, hence it's too
soon to tell whether you're right about Bush, we have proof
that Kerry couldn't win a war.

I don't believe Kerry can run anything but a BS campaign,
FTM.

Rumsfeld gave the command to torture, rape, and of cause little soldier
boy had donnits.

Cites to support claim?

Both little soldier meatball, and little rumsfeld creep are war criminals,
violating Geneva treaty.

Cites to support claims?

It is a facist club, and by supporting them you are the same.

What the HELL makes you think I support any of them? Have
you actually read what I wrote?

I've been hammering Bill Sloman solely for his
narrow-mindedness and typical Liberal hypocrisy. Got a
problem with that?

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Bill Sloman]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<fxvsc.23529$PU5.20030@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<q4src.769$PU5.36@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

<snipped irrelevnt stuff>

some snippage in the interest of bandwidth conservation

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message
news:<olPpc.65908$Fl5.51177@okepread04>...

Please remind me why Cuba
is such a hellhole (under its left-wing dictator) when
_only_ the U.S.A. doesn't trade with it?

Why should I bother? The right wing Cuban mafiosi in Florida are a
full bottle on the subject (if not entirely unbiased). Your
administration's enthusiasm for Batista and his heirs is just one
example of your enthusiasm for right-wing dictators perpared to do
favours for American businesses.

What has that to do with current economic conditions in
Cuba when they're free to trade with the entire planet
except the U.S.?

You asked for an explanation of why Cuba is "such a hellhole" - it
isn't - and I referred you to the probable source of of your deluded
opinion.

Who's doing favors for whom in order to help keep Castro
in power _now_? How do they benefit from the misery of the
average Cuban?

The average Cuban isn't miserable, just poor when compared with the
Cubans in the U.S. The Cuban economic problem is shared with a number
of other countries who could make a good living from growing
sugar-cane, if the European Community didn't subsidise European
sugar-beet growers - US sugar production is (like that of Australia)
protected but not subsidised.

My point, which you blissfully ignored, is that we haven't sent Spain
any money in quite a while.


Not everybody needs to be bribed to do the right thing, or the wrong
thing - Spain was a bad example for you to pick, because Aznar's
ideological blinkers more or less lined up with Dubbya's.

And how did they get so aligned?


Paranoid schizophrenics do tend to have similar delusions.

Another symptom of Extreme Liberal Hate Speech (at least,
that's what it's called here; you likely call it "balanced
thinking") is to use that kind of terminology when
discussing your ideological enemies. Your emotions are
overriding your brain. Kindly address the question instead
of yielding to your tendency to outbursts.

If you think that Bush and Aznar are paranoid schizophrenics, you
don't know much about mental disease. Neither of them seems to be
fully in touch with reality, and it isn't all that surprising that
they both seem to embrace the same sort of seductive delusions. The
reference was merely to the fact that similar defects in reasoning can
lead to similar defective conclusions.

You've conventiently missed this point by carrrying on about "liberal
hate speech", which doesn't get your argument anywhere.

We shall see. Two people cannot get by by doing each
others' laundry; the principle is the same with countries.
It's worse when they have long-standing disagreements
neither wants to let go of. Frinst, I still can't figure out
why there's a border between Spain and Portugal, but not one
between Andalusia and the rest of Spain.


Try reading some history. There are elementary school books that you
should find accessible.

Oh, I _so_ respect you, too. I'm quite aware of the
historical events thank you just the same, it's the
underlying motivations of those events that are opaque to
me. Odd how that sort of thing never makes it into anyone's
history books.

They may not get into the sort of history book that you read, but good
history books do cover this sort of subject - "The Dutch Republic: Its
Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806" by Jonathan Israel (ISBN:
0198207344) has loads of stuff on why borders ended up where they are,
with exhaustive discussions of the economic, religious and political
detail. I've not read anything comparable about Spain, but I sure
something exists.

I suspect that the Iraki's would have preferred a U.N. occupation - they
do seem to be (marginally) less upset by the non-US members of the present
occupation force.

We've been over that; again, why is the U.S.A. painted as
"the Great Satan", and by whom?

The U.S. is described as "the Great Satan" in Iran, probably because
they encourage the Iraki invasion in the 1980's - check out Rumsfeld's
role in that encouragement. Try going over the argument again, and see
if you can produce a response that doesn't damage your own case.

Speaking of history, who first used that phrase WRT the
U.S.? Also, who else uses it now? Think it through.

Why should I bother? You think that the U.S. forces are having a hard
time because they have been demonised by their opponents, while I
think they are having a hard time because the expect their opponents
to behave like the inhabitants of the U.S.

During the earlier months of the current
occupation, resistance was confined to isolated incidents, and the current
crop of insurrections, involving a significant proportion of the
populations of specific cities, is not only new but also pretty much
confined to U.S. occupied areas, which does suggest that ham-handed U.S.
tactics are contributing to the problem.

"Ham-handed". Yes, you do indeed hate the U.S.A. in spite
of your protestations. You would prefer "sensitivity" to
traditional Islamic methods of justice?

Calling someone "ham-handed" isn't exactly evidnece of hatred. How
would you describe the U.S. occupation tactics? They sure aren't
subtle.

Since you finally asked (rather than assume that you
know) what I think, I'll tell you. The invasion was a
perfectly executed military operation that devolved into an
example of how not to occupy a possibly hostile area. The
problem is not BTW U.S. military thought, but rather the
failure to take Arab cultural mentality into consideration
(this on the part of those who decide policy, not those who
decide strategy and tactics). The fault lies not with the
military commanders or the line soldiers, but the civilian
policy-makers who failed to make them aware of the fact that
local loyalties are not determined the way they are in the
"West". Such loyalties and their consequences shift rapidly
in response to proclamations from Islamic authorities which
pop up "out of nowhere" and declare themselves only shortly
before they call for action, justifying their calls with
appeals to one or another of the Pillars of Islam. Since
Muslims are conditioned to answer such appeals without
question, a soldier never knows who will be shooting at them
from day to day.

Which is not that far from what I was saying. I'm more worried about
the parochial attitudes of the soldiers, officers and administrators
in Irak, but Rumsfeld's dumb trick of shutting out inputs from the
State Department isn't helping.

The parochial attitudes arise in part from lack of exposure to
international news - see below - but U.S. newspapers can get away with
minimal coverage of world news because of the parochial attitude of
U.S. society as a whole.

The soldiers were quite ready for opposition from
uniformed enemy forces; they were not prepared for sporadic
opposition from what they saw as "civilians", which has a
completely different meaning in Islamic countries. For
instance, no Muslim sees anything wrong with terrorists
caching weapons in mosques; the parallel of caching weapons
in churches wouldn't occur to Xtians.

Then there's the rapid influx of non-Iraqi "fighters" who
assimilated invisibly into the local scene; they're hard to
identify as potential enemies beforehand (although it does
have a sort of side benefit; see below).

This is to my mind another example of "planning for the
last war", except in terms of psychology as opposed to
technology.

What's the cure? To somehow convince the general populace
that it's not in their best interests to support fellow
Muslims who are willing to blow them up bystander-wise in
order to supposedly preserve their independence (keep them
under the thumb of Islamic extremists). This is a matter of
ideology, but Muslims are forbidden from discussing ideology
with "infidels".

Got any ideas?

The rest of the coalition did seem to be able to do better
without resorting to the sharia

http://i-cias.com/e.o/sharia.htm

Uh, excuse me? I can see clearly how it informs Muslim
military thought, but not U.S. policy, strategy, or tactics.

A couple of paragraphs earlier you are complaining about the inability
of the U.S. military to understand the attitudes and motives of the
Muslim population. So why the "excuse me" now?

If the bulk of the population believed that the occupying forces were
really going to leave as soon as order had been restored, you could fool
enough of the people for long enough to avoid any serious insurrections.

Who's convincing them otherwise, but those who stand to
gain from further conflict? It sure isn't America.

That's the point - it is the U.S. behaviour that is convincing them
otherwise. You march in, claiming to be "liberators" then behave
almost as badly as Saddam's secret police ....

One last time; those degenerate prison guards you refer
to are in grave trouble for their actions, the kind of
actions that simply are not acceptable within the U.S. Have
you not noticed that it's daily, detailed news fare here?
Get over that or there's no point continuing.

That is the U.S. party line. The rest of us see rather too much
continuity with Rumsfeld's rejection of the Geneva conventions for the
Afghan captives now held on Cuba, who don't seem to have been treated
much better.

Your grasp of foreign policy makes it clear that you don't see very
much at all.

Right. And of course, your Socialist perspective is so
much better.

I don't think my perspective is specifically socialist -
internationalist is probably more accurate, if you want a one word
label.

Why can't you see that the electorates minds were
manipulated first one way, then another? Oh, wait, you
refuse to believe such manipulation occurs, right?

Because the approval ratings didn't change. The Spanish electorate
thought that the invasion was a bad idea when it was taking place, and
kept on thinking the same thing until they got the chance to dump
Aznar.

I'm sure a certain train station bombing (and threats of
more to follow) had no bearing on the matter, right?

I'm sure that it got more people out to vote. Aznar's party's initial
attempts to blame the outrage on the Basque ETA terrorists didn't
improve their standing either, but none of this made any signficant
difference to the attitude of the Spanish electorate - they didn't
think that Spanish troops had any business in Irak at any stage in the
proceedings.

just
for giggles, do you know the history of U.S. aid to Ghana vs. his opinion
of the U.S.?

No. Tell me about it, preferrably by a URL pointing to some non-US
historian's account of the events.

Ignoring your pasive-aggressive distrust of any U.S.
account, do your own damn homework. Unless of course, facts
don't interest you.

Your opinion doesn't rate as fact. The newspapers I read don't think
that U.S. aid to Ghana is worth reporting - as I've said before, U.S.
foreign aid is negligibly small - and I'm not going to waste my time
finding out which right-wing anti-UN website had cooked up your latest
conspiracy theory. It isn't as if you show any sign of knowing what
your are talking about.

There's that hate speech again. Don't like being reminded
that your favorite news sources are biased, do you? Find any
source you like, and read the numbers.

Why should I bother? Whatever the U.N.'s faults, they'd have to do
very badly to do worse than your occupation forces in Irak.

He seems to be doing pretty well, within the limits of the job.

Right. A dandy job in the former S.S.R.'s


He seems to know what needs to be done. Persuading politicians to do the
right thing can be more difficult. Putin and Dubbya both have their own
agendas and their own none-too-well-informed electorates.

"Persuading politicians to do the right thing" is a
contradiction in terms. Why do you not also note that _all
other_ politicians have their own agendas etc.?


Politicians have been known to do the right thing. Why should I have
expanded my comment to cover _all_ politicians?

Because it's true.

And your evidence is?

For a while there I thought your
"bribes and corruption" comment indicated a clearer
understanding of politics on your part, but you apparently
think it's solely restricted to your ideological enemies.

When Tito's iron grip relaxed, what happened? All those smoldering
centuries-old hatreds erupted into full flame, that's what. Nothing was
resolved.

That is not the way it looked to the refugees from former Yugoslavia who
were learning Dutch when I was, back in 1994/5.

Why were they refugees?

Because there was a war going on there. Weren't you paying attention
at the time? Anybody who could, got out of the country.

And the causes of the war were how old?

Milosevic had realised that he could do well by championing Serb
interests, and was too stupid to realise that he was setting the scene
for a civil war - as I'd already written in the paragraph below. You
really aren't paying attnetion.

Slobodan Milosevic deliberately revived all those century-old hatreds for
his own political advantage, and undid all that Tito had achieved in short
order, in a manner painfully reminiscent of Hitler's exploitation of
Germany's residual anti-Semitism. Milosevic is now answering for his
crimes before International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/criminal/criminals.html

Sigh. How did those hatreds manage to smolder all that
time? Think it through.

The same way nitwits in your southern states still sing "Dixie". Try
doing some thinking of your own.

Exactly! Finally you get it! BTW, how many of your
neighbors hold secret swastika-worship parties?

None that I know of. They'd want to be discreet if they did - it would
be a criminal offense in this country. There was certainly a
significant pro-Nazi and pro-German minority in the Netherlands before
and during WWII - quite a few of them died fighting with the Germans
on the Russian front, and the rest (including the people who buit the
house we now live in) made themselves scarce in 1945.

An "Iraki Tito" already existed in Iraq; his name was Saddam Hussein.
Same thing happened when he was deposed.

A totally false analogy. Tito was the leader of all the Yugoslavs.

The "installed" leader. How many were happy with that?

He wasn't "installed". He lead the most successful part of the
Yugoslav resistance during WWII and ended up in control of the country
in 1945.

Sigh. You know perfectly well that Tito wouldn't have
lasted ten minutes after the Nazis were shoved out without
Soviet support.

Who else would have thrown him out? Only the Russians had significant
forces in the area.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who oppressed the Shi'ites and the
Kurds, and who ran the country for his own benefit and the benefit of his
extended family (who held most of the senior jobs). He came to power as
the head of political party, more like Stalin than Tito (whose history
looks more like George Washington's).

More "hate America". Washington wasn't installed.

Like Tito, he lead the American resistance to the British occupiers of
the U.S. and did well enough to make serious political capital out of
it. If you knew what you were talking about, you could find real
weaknesses in the analogy - Washington never had to face anything
comparable to Tito's call to Moscow in the late 1930's when he was at
real risk from Stalin's purges - but you can't do any better than
claim that making the anology means that I "hate America". I do
despise some American's - and you just got added to the list - but not
becasue they are Americans, but because they are members of the
international conspiracy of pompous nitwits.

Despise me all you like, it bothers me not at all.

Your judgement isn't up to much.

Your statements belie your protestations about hating the U.S.

Only from your bizarre perspective.

Washington also never had to suppress anyone who wanted
him ousted; rather he had to refuse being crowned king. How
many calls for kingship were made for Tito?

Washington had to suppress the "Whiskey Rebellion" in 1794

http://www.whiskeyrebellion.org/

The proposal to have Washington crowned king in 1787 was anachronistic
at the time. Tito was the head of the Yugoslav communist party in 1945
and any proposal that he should have been crowned king of Yugoslavia
would have been seen - correctly - as purely satirical.

How did Tito maintain "peace"? The same way Hussein did;
by killing (or threatening to) any dissenters. Why do you
claim a false analogy?

Because he Tito didn't kill anybody guilty of anything less than armed
insurrection. His system did imprison some dissenters, but they were
tried and convicted by an independent judiciary. Tito's Yugoslavia was
a civilised country under siege (the Australian army turned out to
trained some infiltrators who were smuggled into Yugoslavia, captured,
tried and shot, in the 1950's, while I was till at school). Saddam's
Hussein's Irak was a simple despotism. If you weren't an ignorant
idiot, I wouldn't need to point this out.

There's your ideological bias again. "Independent
judiciary" in a Soviet satellite state indeed.

There's your fatuous ignorance again. Yugoslavia may have started off
as a Soviet satellite state, but evolved quite rapidly to the point
where Tito's likeliest threat was a Russian invasion. In 1949 it did
not join the Warsaw Pact.

http://www.grupa.org.yu/political%20system.html

Oh, and please accentuate the actions of a few ill-trained, ill-
supervised idiots some more.

Well, I am replying to your posting ....

That was really crude, compared to your previous
passive-aggressive methodology.

I adapt my tone to the quality of the material to whihc I am
responding. You flunked.

Ask me if I care about your opinion of me. The point you
keep evading is, you continue to ascribe the worst behavior
of a very few to all U.S. soldiers in Iraq without
justification other than your hatred of the U.S. Then you
assume a cultural approval of that behavior in the U.S.

I don't. There is a long gap between toleration and approval.

This is simply false.

Since it is a straw man of your invention, this is obviously true.

You suggest that such behavior as prisoner mistreatment
is "tolerable" in the U.S., while it's blatantly obvious
that it isn't. Please try to be less disingenuous.

Jon S. Dyson was claiming that the prisoner mistreatment was "merely"
obscene hazing, which fitted some reports I'v heard about your
fraternity initiation rituals, which has included stuff that would
have got the perpetrators expelled from any Australian university.

John S. Dyson is not the entire U.S. news media, nor is
he on any of the military tribunals trying (and sentencing)
the soldiers who participated.

Oh, and since when does Australian University fraternity
etiquette have anything to do with the subject under
discussion? On one hand, you want the U.S. to have
sensitivity for foreign cultures; on the other, no one
elsewhere is required to reciprocate.

Australian university "fraternity" etiquette is a subject that I once
knew something about, having attended an Australian university. I
don't know anything about the obscenity thresholds for the Dutch
equivalents, or the German "sword-fighting" student groups, who are
even odder.

I do know that cultural differences do exist.

In America we call that attitude "hypocrisy". What do you
call it?

Why do you think my only source of "news" is American
media? Trying to extract "ground truth" from the them, plus
BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc. is an exercise in detecting and
peeling back many different types of prejudicial
colorations. Sometimes identifying them is more interesting
than what they cover.

You seem to spend too much time detecting and peeling back, and not
enough on the background facts.

That's the point. I assume from the beginning that _all_
news sources have one bias or another, from their general
tone. None of them can be trusted to report bare facts.

So, who do you trust to present "background facts"
without bias? I trust no one, which is why I examine as many
as possible.

Not enough, if you thing that Yugoslavia was a Soviet satellite state.

And why do you go on about American "cultural
preferences" while ignoring everyone else's?

Why do you think that I ignore everyone else's? Nice line, but quite
false.

Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?

The American cultural preference is for an amazing small amount of
foreign news. In the papers I read (in the UK, the Netherland and
Australia), more than half of the first few oages of the paper will be
devoted to foreign news. In U.S. papers, finding any foreign news
requires an exhaustive search.

That was a rather sloppy evasion.

It wasn't addressing the question you wanted to answer, but rather the
source of the problems the U.S. occupying forces are creating for
themselves in Irak.

I asked you "Which
prejudices do you see in your favorite news sources? Do you
even bother to look for them, or only if they disagree with
yours?"

Which is a clearly rhetorical question, which it would be a waste of
time answering. I don't have a "favourite" news source, but I do read
the relatively liberal Dutch "Volkrant" newspaper every day, and the
similar U.K. "Guardian Weekly" every week. I'm aware of their
particular perspectives, but I'm also aware that they take pride in
reporting all the news.

Can I help it if your favorite papers like to mind
others' business?

They aren't "minding other people's business" but keeping track of
developments that may affect their readers, who trade and travel over
the whole world. American business trades and travels over the whole
world, and I can't really understand how the American media gets away
with reporting as little foreign news as it does.

Why do you insist that your particular
cultural obsessions must be shared by America, but not the
other way around?

Ignorance of foreign cultures puts you at a disadvantage, as has been
made obvious in Irak. Some cultural obsessions are useful, while
others can be crippling.

And again, why do you think I put any
particular trust in the U.S. media?

You can't be sceptical about stuff you never get to see. It would have
taken a very ostrich-like attitude to be ignorant of Tito's and
Yugoslavia's special status if you had lived in Europe or Australia.

Personally, I have absolutely no respect for other
"cultures" (a word that always brings bacteria to mind) that
include such charming quirks as beating women half to death
for failing to take a male-relative escort into a public
street. Maybe you are more "sensitive" than I, but to me,
such "cultures" desperately need extermination.

Where would that be? It doesn't happen in Iran, which isn't great on
women's rights ...

Actually I was thinking primarily of that bastion of
civil rights, Saudi Arabia.

However you're making a fatal mistake if you think that a
country with exclusively State-supported news media (and
severe restrictions on foreign journalists) will permit the
reporting of events that will make them look bad. Just
because you don't read it in "official media", what makes
you think it doesn't happen?

One of my acquaintances in Cambridge was an Iranian woman who went
back to visit her family from time to time, and didn't much enjoy the
experience - she once mentioned how she'd once nipped out to the shops
without remembering to put on her headscarf, and how she'd gotten
dirty looks from the more obviously orthodox males, which lead on to a
more general discussion of women's lives in Iran.

Know any refugees from Iran
(sources of ground truth)? Wanna put the question to, say,
Maleki, an Iranian denizen of some of the sci.physics hierarchy?

I don't believe that brutality is ever a good idea. A little clinical
violence can sometimes be necessary, but no more than is needed to
immobilise the aggressor.

See, that's insensitivity to the local culture. If you
don't go as far as they would, they don't take you seriously.

You can humiliate them without hurting them, which works just as well
- in your terms - and much better, in mine.

Being a Buddhist I happen to agree with you BTW re:
brutality. However, it doesn't work to go halfway. If you
want a serious hardass to listen to reason, first you must
knock him on his ass and make him believe you will kill him
if he doesn't cooperate. Some simply won't listen unless you
break bones. Damn shame, but the alternative is to kill them
outright and regret it forever.

Having bones broken is memorable, but public humiliation is just as
effective.

I really believe that the U.S. doesn't want to run Iraq
at all. The question becomes; how to prevent it being run by
the local "traditionalist" brutalizers?

If you didn't want to run Irak, you would have worked out an answer
before you went in.

"I" should have worked an answer out? You mistake me for
a policymaker?

"You" in English is both plural and singular. In this case the meaning
you=US is as clear at the start of the sentence as it is at the end -
or do you claim to be the entire US invasion force? If anything, I
mistook you for an ntelligent debater.

Personally I think the current situation was planned to
bring in as many foreign terrorist types in order to "bunch"
them for easier disposal. Time will tell.

Planned? You do have to be kidding.

You have absolutely no understanding of U.S. politics. Take it from a
native; believe _nothing_ you see on TV or read in the papers. That goes
double for political ads; the one thing you can assume is that when one
accuses another of something, they're trying to distract you from
noticing that _they_ did it.

Obviously a minority opinion. Your presidental candidates would be
spending their money in other ways if your opinion was widely shared. In
fact, I suspect that your scepticism is confined to the party political
propaganda coming from the side you don't support. Your silly ideas about
the U.N. sound exactly like the party line of the isolationist idiots of
the right wing of the Republican Party.

The U.N. is merely another way to squeeze a little extra
power over others out of the usual techniques. If you
believe anything else, they've succeeded in fooling you.

The U.N. doesn't seem to have a lot of power, which makes nonsense of
your proposition. If you really believe what you claim, someone has
clearly succeeded in fooling you.

Look again. They have enough power to influence _your_
opinions.

Or they do enough good to have earned my - moderately positive -
opinion of them. Your negative opinion of the U.N. is unjustified, and
shared by some remarkably foolish isolationists.

As for my "minority" opinion, it certainly is, but one
that's growing. Both main "traditional" parties here are
seriously worried about the growing number of Independents
who've abandoned them because neither expresses their ideals.

Your ideas seem to be independent of much basis in facts. Try reading
a bit more before you make up your mind.

Really? You haven't seen the nervous outbursts of both
Republican and Democratic leaderships over their losses to
Independents? They're keeping it to a dull roar just now,
but it'll heat up as our Presidential election nears, a
phenomenon that's become more obvious the last few
elections. Try reading a bit more before _you_ make up your
mind.

Sure. Nader probably cost Gore the last election. Having grown up in a
country - Australia - who use the "single transferable vote" to allow
you to express both your approval for an unelectable but attractive
candidate like Nader, and your preference for the less unattractive of
the two mainstream parties, I'm aware of the basis of the anxiety of
your politicians.

If your parochial crew looked outside its borders for once, they could
see a whole range of solutions for this particular problem. Europe
(excluding the UK) goes in for proportional representation and
coalition governments.

As it is, they will continue to tackle the obvious weakness of the
two-party system by making it even more difficult for indepent
candidates to get a look in, conveniently ignoring the intentions of
your founding fathers, by slavishly worshipping the antiquated
constitutional machinery they put in place.

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<fDvsc.23578$PU5.6696@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:

"Kevin Carney" <carneyke@us.ibm.combo> wrote in message news:<c82vjl$6l2$1@news.btv.ibm.com>...

Rich,
You are a toad ! I'm with Fred....


That is, you are another loose cannon with a psychopathic streak. Do
you sincerely want Dubbya to make a pre-emptive strike to take out the
entire Muslim population because Al Q'iada use the Koran to justify
their own particular variety of psychopathology?

If you do, stroll over to the nearest secure psychiatric hospital and
have yourself committed before you lose your temper with your family
or your colleagues and implement a final solution to a transient
domestic problem.

Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.

I'm sure that Muslims pay as much attention to the Koran as Christians
pay to the Bible. You should be too busy loving your neighbour to
waste time posting transparent rubbish - or is her husband home at the
moment?

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Tim Auton]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote:
[snip]

Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.

Care to point us to the relevant passages? There are numerous
searchable translations on-line. It shouldn't be too hard for you to
find.


Tim
--
Love is a travelator.

 

[Mike Baudrillard]

"Richard Henry" <rphenry@home.com> wrote in message news:<JBbpc.521$wn1.298@fed1read01>...

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:7c584d27.0405141404.84ba86c@posting.google.com...

Probably ignorance and arrogance - most American soldiers are
convinced that their way of doing things is the only way of doing
things, and don't realise that behavior that is tolerated in the U.S.
can be totally unacceptable for other cultures.

The behavior that has been in the news lately would never be tolerated in
any US state or Federal prison.

Top marks for confrontational irony. It took years of hard lobbying by
Amnesty to get *most* of the USA to accept that using female inmates
for sex was at least worth a slap on the wrist. It was like taking a
bone from a dog.

It was fought most of the way by the labor unions. Asking for
legislation to protect female inmates from rape was not popular. It
was usually conceded with great reluctance. The US is the number one
black spot for custodial rape.

 

[Mike Baudrillard]

Paul Burridge <pb@notthisbit.osiris1.co.uk> wrote in message news:<guv0a0lcf4f6djs6jk7rd64m1drbc4v2s3@4ax.com>...

On Mon, 10 May 2004 18:28:47 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:

On Mon, 10 May 2004 23:02:47 GMT, "Tom Del Rosso"
tdnews01@att.net.invalid> wrote:

In news:Fajmc.28720$Ia6.4539796@attbi_s03,
Scott Stephens typed:

http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm

In the heading: "US based Jewish pornographers".

This new set of pictures may be real, but that kind of puts the source
into question.

---
Well, of course the _pictures_ are real, but it's not hard to dress up
a bunch of folks to look like GIs and a few women to pretend they're
_not_ whores and stage the whole thing, then put the pictures into
circulation and let the cards fall where they may...

Not sure if the word is out yet, but the pictures purporting to be of
the British Army abusing prisoners have now been officially confirmed
as fakes - as many of us had suspected all along from the
discrepancies in them.

Still produced by members of the British Army though. Soldiers of one
sort or another decided to scam the Daily mirror.

I only hope they'll track down the hoaxers and
deal with them suitably harshly - they've caused untold damage already
and the Arabs will just assume the finding of falsity is a cover-up.
It would be nice to see the 'newspaper' editor who published the fake
photos and stood by them initially, lynched in public, preferably in
Iraq.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<38xsc.24406$PU5.341@fed1read06>...

Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Mon, 24 May 2004 16:26:42 -0700) it happened Mark Fergerson
nunya@biz.ness> wrote in <fxvsc.23529$PU5.20030@fed1read06>:

<snip>

I've been hammering Bill Sloman solely for his
narrow-mindedness and typical Liberal hypocrisy. Got a
problem with that?

"Hammering"? Someone has delusions of adequacy .... I see it more as a
jester flapping his bladder.

Nice to see that he can spell hypocrisy even if he doesn't know what
the word means, but I don't know why he capitalised Liberal. In an
Australian context he'd be identify my attitudes with those of the
Liberal Party, which is the right-wing half of Australia's two-party
system, whose opinions I do not share, but - granting his rather
shallow knowledge of political matters outside the US - this is
probably not what he intended.

And I don't know where he gets the narrow-mindedness from - I don't
think much of his opinions, but disdain for the ill-informed isn't
usually characterised as narrow-mindedness.

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Tim Auton]

bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman) wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<38xsc.24406$PU5.341@fed1read06>...
Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Mon, 24 May 2004 16:26:42 -0700) it happened Mark Fergerson
nunya@biz.ness> wrote in <fxvsc.23529$PU5.20030@fed1read06>:
snip
I've been hammering Bill Sloman solely for his
narrow-mindedness and typical Liberal hypocrisy. Got a
problem with that?

"Hammering"? Someone has delusions of adequacy .... I see it more as a
jester flapping his bladder.

Nice to see that he can spell hypocrisy even if he doesn't know what
the word means, but I don't know why he capitalised Liberal. In an
Australian context he'd be identify my attitudes with those of the
Liberal Party[...]
[snip]

Not only that, but he seems to equate liberal with left-wing. I
presume he is an authoritarian, which is rather confusing as he
doesn't seem to like laws which intrude on personal freedoms (judging
by his condemnation of Sharia).


Tim
--
Love is a travelator.

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Bill Sloman wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<fDvsc.23578$PU5.6696@fed1read06>...

Bill Sloman wrote:


"Kevin Carney" <carneyke@us.ibm.combo> wrote in message news:<c82vjl$6l2$1@news.btv.ibm.com>...


Rich,
You are a toad ! I'm with Fred....


That is, you are another loose cannon with a psychopathic streak. Do
you sincerely want Dubbya to make a pre-emptive strike to take out the
entire Muslim population because Al Q'iada use the Koran to justify
their own particular variety of psychopathology?

If you do, stroll over to the nearest secure psychiatric hospital and
have yourself committed before you lose your temper with your family
or your colleagues and implement a final solution to a transient
domestic problem.

Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.


I'm sure that Muslims pay as much attention to the Koran as Christians
pay to the Bible. You should be too busy loving your neighbour to
waste time posting transparent rubbish - or is her husband home at the
moment?

Actually, they pay much more attention to it. Such
enforcement of religious heterogeneity is part of the
"culture". Those who don't pay attention to the details are
swiftly yanked back into line, which is part of the Muslim
world's problem; free thought is not encouraged, and logical
thought is positively discouraged when its consequences
differ with the Q'uran (or associated texts).

As for loving my neighbor, I'm no Xtian because the
fundament of it is abdication of responsibility for one's
actions.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Mark Fergerson]

Tim Auton wrote:

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote:
[snip]

Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.

Care to point us to the relevant passages? There are numerous
searchable translations on-line. It shouldn't be too hard for you to
find.

One such translation (actually, three of them):

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/

See:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/033.qmt.html#033.016

(mind you, "Unbeliever" and "Hypocrite" are equated within
the Q'uran)

et. seq. To me, an unbeliever, it sounds as if Allah will
do the punishing, but you know people, they just have to
take any old law into their own hands.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/008.qmt.html#008.012

et. seq. are a bit more specific, but then we have:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/009.qmt.html#009.038

and:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/009.qmt.html#009.044

which are less clear.

Much clearer is:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/033.qmt.html#033.060

which refers to an event in ancient Medina but is
"interpreted" to be more general due to the immediately
following passages. Specifically:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/033.qmt.html#033.062

You might want to browse this:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/quranindex.html

keeping this in mind:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/qmtintro.html

Apparently, if you don't read Arabic, you're doing it
wrong. I have George Sale's translation (1880) which isn't
held in too low regard.

You also might want to look at this:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/

which is considered the "other leg" of Islam, although
it's said to be merely the inspired writings of the Prophet,
not Allah's direct word.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Tim Auton]

Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote:

Tim Auton wrote:
Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote:
[snip]
Have you ever actually read the Q'uran? It specifically
requires Muslims to kill not only "infidels" who fail to
comply with Islamic law, but also Muslims who fail to answer
the call. Islam is as dangerous to Muslims as it is to
everyone else.

Care to point us to the relevant passages? There are numerous
searchable translations on-line. It shouldn't be too hard for you to
find.

One such translation (actually, three of them):

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/

See:
[references snipped]

All I saw was a load of stuff saying you should be vigorous in defence
if attacked, vigorous in fighting oppression, not afraid to die in the
service of Allah, you'll go to hell if you're naughty and Muslims must
answer the call and fight when required.

In an Islamic state with Shari'ah law the death penalty exists, as it
does in the US and many other societies, but it is not imposed for any
transgression as you suggest.

Indeed, Islam is specifically tolerant of unbelievers (even though
they are, in the eyes of Allah, wrong). I don't have a good reference
for the Sunnah, but the following quotes some relevant parts even
though the misconception it relates to isn't directly what we're
talking about:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/notislam/misconceptions.html#HEADING8


Tim
--
Love is a travelator.