[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
By the way, just to dump a little more shit onto your “the US has good intentions and wants democracy” theory, I think it’s quite telling how President Obama had great things to say about democracy in Cairo a year or two ago, and just the other week, he and Hillary Clinton were eloquent in their support of the Tunisians and their quest for democracy in the middle east, but now that Egypt, a US ally, wants democracy, they can’t even bring themselves to utter the D-word.
Curious…unless you’ve been paying attention to US history.[/quote]
More blah blah blah from comrade ryan.
We’ll have to wait and see how Egypt plays out, Bam Bam is definitely in a tight spot here and I have my reservations that he’s the man for the job. The Suez canal is vitally important to the world, and that will definitely factor in. For the record, I’m hoping that he doesn’t fuck this up, but I’m not holding my breath.
[quote]John S. wrote:
Bigflamer it seem’s Ryan has a crush on you too. Hell he even writes down the dates I say something, I suspect he has a hate shrine in his house dedicated to me, soon you too can have one about you.[/quote]
Can you picture that? Creepy shit about what we’ve posted hung on his dorm room wall like some serial killer. lol
[/quote]
What is even creepier is that even when you are right he pulls it up to try and discredit you. I am pretty sure one of these days I am going to go answer the door and he is going to gun me down.
If I know one thing from this entire thread, it’s that when you say “I’ve covered it,” it means you probably haven’t even attempted to. But let’s get to it.
Actually, I did respond to it, but my response basically boiled down to the question you’ve been dodging this entire thread, and so you did not respond to it: essentially, you have yet to explain why it is OK for the US to kill 200,000 civilians but it’s not OK for the Afghani insurgents to kill a few dozen in one of their attacks. The answer, of course, is that it’s not, but this would entail you admitting that you are a hypocrite, so you can’t do that.
So you dodge.
No, this is simply pathetic, inexcusable rationalization by an American who can’t bring himself to seriously criticize his military. That’s the whole point–you’re not supposed to bomb innocent civilians, but we do anyway. By this logic, you would have absolutely no right to complain if the Taliban somehow got hold of a nuclear weapon and destroyed Washington D.C. (although I might not blame you for not complaining, hehe). After all, that’s where their enemies are, and they shouldn’t have been hiding in that metropolitan area.
Actually, you’re the one who argues that it’s alright, since we knowingly arouse the hatred of people around the world who finally get sick of us, and then attack us, and we use the civilian deaths as propaganda, and justification for further oppression. Your words.
Hmm…Vietnam proclaimed its independence in the same way the 13 colonies originally did, even using some of the same language; the US financed 80% of France’s efforts to reestablish control of the country:
After the French withdrew and Vietnam was partitioned, the US installed Ngo Dinh Diem in the south, and urged him to cancel the scheduled free elections, which he did, because the Communists would surely have won:
Once he was in power, illegitimately, he ruled in an authoritarian manner, and about 50,000 suspected “leftists” were killed in his inquisitions.
Needless to say, he was extraordinarily unpopular, but the US kept him in power, despite overwhelming popular opposition. After Diem was killed, the US lied about being attacked in order to have some pretext to start the shooting war in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, however, was fake.
“An undated NSA publication declassified in 2005, however, revealed that there was no attack on 4 August.[134] It had already been called into question long before this.”
“The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian’s work say.”
So sorry, friend. The US was in fact the aggressor in the Vietnam War, as anyone with a brain already knew.
But as I’ve already showed you, and which you ignored, our leaders straight-up admitted privately that they didn’t give a shit about the consequences of the war, which was stupid, unnecessary, and irresponsible anyway.
No, it’s not. It’s a fact. You’ve just demonstrated again that you just don’t know the history. Not my fault.
You would have no way of knowing this, because you seem not to know very much about the episodes we’ve discussed.
Now concerning your other assertions. I don’t have time to respond to all of your bullshit, just as you noted in the other thread when you were whining to JohnS. This discussion of ours started delving into the ridiculous when you started comparing the civil crimes of bank robbery and drunk driving, with that of terrorism. Just like you, I’ve got other shit going on, and while I enjoy posting on this forum, it’s not a life priority. But since I’m a thorough guy, here goes:
[quote]ryan wrote:
We toppled Iran’s democratically-elected government in 1953.[/quote]
But that’s just the thing: most of this is, perhaps not common knowledge, but not really that obscure. But you ignore it. That’s the issue: your double standard. You admit all of these instances in which we’ve slaughtered and tortured, but you’re saying, “Well, yeah, we’ve toppled democratically elected governments, slaughtered millions, and tortured hundreds of thousands, if not millions, but it’s stupid to say we’re terrorists!” Uh, why exactly?
There’s this, but perhaps I’ll retract this one–not because I think it’s improbable that the attempts occurred, but because I can’t seem to find any independent sources confirming them.
Well then, even letting your contention stand–that assassination is an appropriate response to the seizure of assets–if we did not want him to seize our assets, perhaps we should not have supported a corrupt dictator that turned the island into a narco-state controlled in part by the mafia.
“All of this” is largely fabricated. Cuba has emigration rates comparable to other countries in the region, which you can verify if you don’t believe me, despite being the only one burdened by a crushing American embargo.
So we have to prevent democracy to save democracy? Interesting…I had never thought of it that way.
Of course this is complete bullshit, as you know. Your statement is not even logical if you want to believe it–if we wanted a democratic Italy, all we had to do was sit back, and anyway, it wasn’t our place to interfere even if we thought there was fraud going on. And even if you don’t agree, it’s STILL no argument to subvert democracy to save it. That’s just asinine.
But that’s the thing–we don’t want democracies abroad, in general, because democracies frequently disagree with our foreign policy objectives. As if this were not obvious from the sheer number of dictators we have supported through our existence.
And furthermore, I find it interesting that you’re only now interested in considering other factors–you didn’t seem interested in considering anything else while you were busy blaming the Viet Cong for our murder of over half a million Cambodians. Nor did context appear to matter to you while you were busy blaming insurgents for deaths caused by our drones. Interesting.
Sure, in isolation, it’s not at all the most terrible thing that’s ever happened. But it’s part of a much larger pattern of interference suppression of democracy.
I’ll accept this as a concession.
While I appreciate the fact that you seem to be trying, in a half-assed way, to sort of kind of admit that I’m right, it is not acceptable for you be OK with murder and torture when we do it and not when middle eastern terrorists do it on 1/10 or 1/5 of the scale. Like I said before, you’re only concerned with context when it’s the US accused of wrongdoing. And the US is accused far more than anyone else.
While this is true, it is also true that the USSR did not come close to intervening on the scale that we did. And even if they had, the argument is not, “terrorism is wrong UNLESS there’s a big rival nation for you to compete with,” it’s “terrorism is wrong.” Or at least, that’s what I interpreted your argument to be, since as I’ve said before, you’re all-of-a-sudden interested in context when evaluating morality, when it was unimportant before.
While I will not comment on many of your specific points here, because I don’t want to open another big can of worms, I have to point out that you’re losing the plot–the debate had nothing to do with the cause of these things, or what changes might prevent them, but the reason for my disdain of the military, which you’ve admitted (albeit in a roundabout way) is justified.
Again, two things: lots of countries have been in similar situations as the US with respect to foreign considerations, but none has engaged in a more extensive or systematic campaign of intimidation, torture, and murder. If you want to consider, somehow, our military or its leaders to be morally superior to middle eastern terrorists, I can’t stop you. You may even be right–barely–but all I ask is that you not feign outrage when I express a fully justified disgust with our imperial overreach, and to please not repeat such phrases as “thank a vet for your freedom!” or some such trash, when you know full well that 90% of our military actions have been designed to thwart the freedom of others.
Perhaps the body count is not the highest–I don’t know, it’d be hard to come up with a final tally anyway, because different people would count different things–but with more than 50 military or CIA interventions in foreign countries since WWII, if there’s a close competitor for the crown, I don’t know about them. You may not agree, but don’t act like it’s an entirely unreasonable claim to make.
And I remember telling you that, even if I decline to argue its legality, that has nothing to do with it; morality is the issue, not legality, and I gave you an example or two illustrating the importance of the distinction.
Moreover, you made an argument that the US has gone out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, but as I pointed out (and I don’t think you addressed this), your argument rests on some shaky assumptions, that at any rate you cannot expect other people to necessarily share.
I think you might have missed the post in which I called your assumptions into question. If you really can’t find it, let me know, and I’ll find it and repost it.
I must admit, I do get frustrated when people deploy blatant double standards in an attempt to deny the obvious.
But I have to end by thanking you for finally addressing most of my points and being relatively civil about it, and for that, I’ve removed a couple of nasty lines that I was going to post at the beginning of this message.