Get out of China's Face

[clockworkcanary]

As much as a few of ya like to talk about this stuff, you should almost have your own political subfolder here :) I could see some of ya as kinda-like the game show hosts lol.

[Captain Tars Tarkas]

Number 1 - Just because some drug addict with a radio show calls Clinton, lady Clinton, Lieberman, et al "Liberal" doesn't mean they are.  The Clintons are moderates, and Lieberman is supporting John McCain because he's drank the conservative Kool-Aid after 9-11.

Number 2 - Peace-keeping missions are a different child all together than invading a country because the leader has a mustache or whyever we invaded Iraq this week.

Number 3 - none of which has a switch to do with China's human rights violations, which should be dealt with economically but it  won't happen because big business - the very big business who libertarians worship - won't give up 1.5 billion potential customers.  Instead, you got Google and Yahoo blocking access to information and handing over other information to the Chinese government.  What do they think they are, US telecom companies?  The one good thing about China's rush to modernization is it will increase transparency in their government and their excesses will become open humiliation.  Thanks to their stupid obsession with face, that will result in the operators of the humiliation being brutally dealt with.  Thus the guy in charge of food inspection for export gets executed, Tibetian rioters get gunned down, and horror movies are banned.  China's desperate attempt to be a grown up country is making them look more and more like the people who sit in the front row of church but then go home to their brothel/crack house.



But if this thread continues to have abortion posts I'm out of here because there is nothing that's a bigger waste of time than talking about abortion on the internet.  Nothing. 

I never ding anyone Karma for political reasons, and I have only dinged two people and that was because they were annoying for other reasons.

[clockworkcanary]

"Just because some drug addict with a radio show calls Clinton, lady Clinton, Lieberman, et al "Liberal" doesn't mean they are.  The Clintons are moderates"

No kidding! Especially one who gets busted with viagra coming back from the Dominican Republic (referring to Rush)...wonder what he was doing there with those drugs?  Anyway, I always find it amusing how the right defines the left and people just listen and accept that...like they're ever gonna try to be accurate. 

We can play that game too.  I should start my own radio show and pull the ol' fallacy of equivocation error and define every conservative based on the most backward, toothless, racist, sexist, bible-thumping, high-school diploma-hatin', sibling-sleeping hick I can visualize/read about and label them all gansters and harp on them about their beastiality.  Point is that radio shows like Rush, Hannity, and Savage (well, Weiner is his real name) are about entertainment and infuriation, not education or accuracy.  Fox likes to feed hate news with one hand and smut with the other (while the former gets to accuse "libruls" of the latter).

As far as the China/Tibet situation: I dunno - it's either an oppressive communist regime as Tars described or back to the ultra-right wing theocracy it used to be.  Not sure if one extreme is really better than the other; sounds like either would suck.  Extreme left and extreme right wing authoritarian governments suck either way.  I call for moderates to balance that $h!t out.

[lester1/2jr]

all interventions are allegedly "humanitarian" and they all have the same result:  disaster.  mogidishu, bosnia, iraq, liberal democrat.  they are all us playing the worlds police and leaving people far worse off than when we came. 

did clintons "liberal" missile make the sudanese pharmacutical plant bombing less of a mistake?  did his coninuatin of sanctions that killed thousand of iraqis become more nice because he also favored social programs that liberals like.


and don't even get me started on joe lieberman.  He is as close as we have to a communist.  whteher it's wars in the middle east,  high taxes, late trimester abortion, open borders, to trying to ban vilent video games, there is no measure of state power he isn't enamored of and no aspect of our traditional culoture he doesn't want to extinguish.  he literally hates freedom

[clockworkcanary]

Yeah no one likes that turncoat, Lieberman.  I hear his favorite color is red!  Word is that he hates grammar just as much as freedom!

 

[lester1/2jr]

he's not a turncoat.  he's always been anti freedom

[Andrew]

all interventions are allegedly "humanitarian" and they all have the same result:  disaster.  mogidishu, bosnia, iraq, liberal democrat.  they are all us playing the worlds police and leaving people far worse off than when we came. 

That is a horrible opinion, and I rarely say that about someone's opinion.

There have been plenty of humanitarian interventions that were for very good reasons.  If you have one group of people, with guns and power, killing another group of people - then just sitting back and watching is awfully hard to agree with.  I am uncertain about why you believe Bosnia was a disaster.  Heck, I am uncertain why you think Somali was a terrible disaster.  If anything, the problem with Somali was that not enough was committed (by the UN, or us, your choice) to enforce a stable environment.  The worst part about the battle that resulted in a movie ("Black Hawk Down") is that it screwed with our resolve to deploy forces to stop genocide. 

Africa has had several conflicts over the years that killed countless numbers.  It's awful that more was not done to stop all that bloodshed.  Ditto on what happened in Cambodia.  When you have a country going to Hell, especially one with a root in ethnic and/or religious beliefs, averting that much bloodshed takes a huge amount of effort.  You are talking about changing "inertia" in many ways.  It takes force and weight. 

You need forces on the ground to enforce order, you need to rebuild or maintain the existing infrastructure, and you need time for everyone to settle the heck down.

[Allhallowsday]

Yeah no one likes that turncoat, Lieberman.  I hear his favorite color is red!  Word is that he hates grammar just as much as freedom!

I usually avoid these threads for my own reasons, but man, you are funny!  LOL!      

[lester1/2jr]

Yeah no one likes that turncoat, Lieberman.  I hear his favorite color is red!  Word is that he hates grammar just as much as freedom!

I don't get it.  honestly.  are you saying he doesn't vote the way i said he did?  check the records, he has voted yay on all of those and far far more. 


andrew-  I really don't see how our national defense purposes were served in somalia or bosnia.  I don't see how getting in between factions who have been killing each other for thousands of years, since before there ever was a united states, is in anyones interest.   and there is always a reason why it didn't work "oh we should have used more troops"  if we had they would have said "of we shuold have used less troops".


sure there are interventions that make sense, such as helping out after the tsunami and we could probably have  prvented the rwandan genocide, but the more political/ statecraft oriented interventions end up using all the troops and goodwill we've accomulated to lend such a helping hand.  what would we do today if there was another genocide in rwanda?  pul troops out of iraq?

how about darfur?  another oil rich muslim country?  I guess if you liked mogidishu that would be just fine but include me out

[clockworkcanary]

Yeah no one likes that turncoat, Lieberman.  I hear his favorite color is red!  Word is that he hates grammar just as much as freedom!

I usually avoid these threads for my own reasons, but man, you are funny!  LOL!      

Heheheh thanks!

[clockworkcanary]

"I don't get it.  honestly.  are you saying he doesn't vote the way i said he did? "

Heheh no Lester - you take me far too seriously; I wasn't addressing that.  I was just doing my part to demonize him even further, with his favorite color being red and all. 

But really, I don't know how the voting record you mentioned has to do with a specific economic system ...perhaps you meant "Totaltitarian" or "Authoritative" rather than "Communism" specifically, but then they are definitely correlated heavily (as Fascist governments do many of the same things you mentioned). 

At any rate, it's hard to swallow ol' Indie rocker Joe being a commie when I'm sure he embraces Capitalism just like any other American plus he's constantly polishing ol' McCrypt's knob.  It's just that whole "commie" demonization thing reminds me so much of the 80s (and prior era) that I found it a little funny.

[lester1/2jr]

ok.  Yes i agree red bating in 2008 is ridiculous. I wasn't saying he was part of a "conspiracy so vast", I jsut meant he always votes for spending bills and bills that give the state more control. 

[soylentgreen]

In short, yes, America has occasionally made a muddle of things, but it has generally done so in an attempt to do right, and in the big picture, has succeeded more often than it has failed.  On our current attempt to fix things overseas, the jury is still out.  But I for one think that Uncle Ben wouldn't be that disappointed with all we have tried to do.  Thanks for your thoughtful and well-written post!

Sorry, I've been very overwhelmed with family issues.  This thread topic(and all it's peripheral subjects) are very difficult to discuss to begin with.  Put the discussion in an environment where you have only cold, naked words and a few vague smiley faces, and the talk can get very tense and misunderstood.  Without the inflection of human voice, conversations like this can(and, as you correctly maintain, on the internet often do) spiral into catastrophe.

I want to thank you, Indiana, for your courteous replies and your general efforts to maintain both decorum and reason.  Like you, after this past few days, I sort of expected that my karma might have taken a serious hit as firstly, the subject matter was particularly frank and on a topic most have very strong feelings about...and secondly, it was a kind of a Spalding Gray(with a side of Dennis Miller-lite snarky allusions) run-on that may have made more sense when I wrote it than when it was read.

I have to kind of smile when I think about just how different our viewpoints are on some serious subjects.  I suspect underneath however, we are both sincerely motivated by the drive to have a community in the immediate and a nation at large where that is not something to be feared, dreaded, avoided or most importantly, stifled.  And THAT is what I was raised to consider being an American was all about.






Interestingly, as to the subject of this thread(Oh yeah! ), apparently Hillary Rodham(btw, why does everyone continue to refer to her using the Rodham?...Everyone knows who she is!  Is there a Bizarro Hillary Clinton we should all keep our eyes peeled for?)Clinton has suggested Bush have the US boycott the Olympics Opening Ceremonies.  Well, that's a start.  I just don't understand exactly what kind of point that would really make.   It's one instance and one that carries very little substance in the scheme of the whole Olympics games. 

I know it's a bit of a harsh(and more honestly, easy from my position of not being an athlete expecting to compete there) suggestion, but I still think a boycott would send the clearest signal.  And if it were the folks who were actually to compete who did the boycotting and not the posturing politicians who instigated it, it would be a clarion call to the world at large.  A beacon of hope for the countless folks under one heel or another that there are people out there, people who have, relatively speaking, everything handed to them, who do put being a fellow human being above all else.

(Ugh, I'm too much of a romantic sometimes.)

ps...I do get a kind of mythic chill in thinking about the determination to carry the Olympic torch around the world to China and the efforts to stop or extinguish it.  The symbolic power of both sides of that struggle almost make me misty.  I can envision a kind of torch "underground", the flame passed from one depot to another.  The hopeful souls keeping kindled the sincerity of the symbol.  While all the while, just as sincere folks comb the Earth looking to salvage it from what they see as a corruption of it's integrity (the French skating judges notwithstanding )and an exploitation of the honor of hosting the games. 

Why didn't we see this kind of vocal outcry in 1936? 

[lester1/2jr]

boycott the Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

this strikes me as exactly the type of empty gesture you'd expect from washington.  Either go or don't go. 

[Captain Tars Tarkas]

Boycotting the Opening Ceremony is enough of a gesture to embarrass China further without punishing the athletes or injecting politics into the actual sporting events part of the Olympics.