I hear this touted over and over again; “they hate us for our freedoms.”
Tommy Chong was put in jail for selling bongs over the internet. Serious hard core criminal shit, I know.
My question is, why hate us for our freedoms when people like Tommy Chong are going to jail for selling bongs?
Go hate the people in Amsterdam.
Or “they hate us for our freedoms” is just propaganda.
that’s why they’re taking them away,
then they won’t hate us anymore.
[quote]Petedacook wrote:
I hear this touted over and over again; “they hate us for our freedoms.”
Tommy Chong was put in jail for selling bongs over the internet. Serious hard core criminal shit, I know.
My question is, why hate us for our freedoms when people like Tommy Chong are going to jail for selling bongs?
Go hate the people in Amsterdam.
Or “they hate us for our freedoms” is just propaganda. [/quote]
This is obvious and blatent propaganda! Both sides are guilty.
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.[/quote]
Best post of the thread!
Well, he broke the law. So he pay’s the price, right? Selling bongs is probably not illegal in Amsterdam. It’s illegal in the U.S.
That said, I think sentences like this are a bit ridiculous. The fact that this was all part of ‘Operation Pipe Dream’, a nationwide crackdown on paraphenalia sellers. It’s a ‘sting’ operation. I like sting operations in cases where a guys is tring to solicit murder or planning to blow up a mall. Maybe a congressman on the take. A guy selling crack at the local grammar school. But this?
We spend our tax dollars to fund this? I thought you could walk into a head-shop and buy shit like this over the counter? You can’t sell it on the internet? Someone educate me as to what the law is not and what exactly he’s in jail for.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
danmaftei wrote:
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.
Best post of the thread![/quote]
It is mighty big of you to admit that you are an asshat.
Bravo!
[quote]Marmadogg wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
danmaftei wrote:
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.
Best post of the thread!
It is mighty big of you to admit that you are an asshat.
Bravo![/quote]
Please. Is it my support for gay rights? My dislike of the war on drugs? Is it my athiesm? Is it dedicating my professional life to cleaning our air and waterways?
Exactly which thing is it that makes me an asshat conservative?
I suspect Dan is talking about those that advocate premptive nuclear strikes and other absurdities.
Many people do hate us for our freedoms, or rather the luxuries they afford us. Americans have it easier than practically anyone else on the planet, yet this country is full of whining bitch-men. And then lately we can’t seem to keep our noses out of anything. Another thing, the U.S. has, throughout history, been the biggest middle-man there ever was in many conflicts throughout the world. All this adds up to a lot of people not liking us.
A whole other thread could be devoted to zealots and other idiots, on top of that.
They hate us because we don’t bow to Mecca five times a day, and our glorious existence is proof that Allah isn’t the way to happiness.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
danmaftei wrote:
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.
Best post of the thread!
It is mighty big of you to admit that you are an asshat.
Bravo!
Please. Is it my support for gay rights? My dislike of the war on drugs? Is it my athiesm? Is it dedicating my professional life to cleaning our air and waterways?
Exactly which thing is it that makes me an asshat conservative?
I suspect Dan is talking about those that advocate premptive nuclear strikes and other absurdities.
[/quote]
Your intellectual dishonesty knows no bounds.
That is why you are an asshat.
Cheers!
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
The liberal side of T-Nation has made me lose faith in my party…
Thankfully, the conservative side went far and beyond my pre-conceived notion that they too are asshats.[/quote]
Sir, you win the giant series of tubes 
[quote]doogie wrote:
They hate us because we don’t bow to Mecca five times a day, and our glorious existence is proof that Allah isn’t the way to happiness.[/quote]
More propaganda!
They aren’t particularly fond of the cultural by-products of our legal system.
Plenty of people around the world share similiar views, even in Western nations. Hell, there are people in this country who voice them. The conservatives often complain loudest about this very issue. How’s that for irony?
But all of this is a red herring. It’s not the real issue.
Charley Reese once wrote something very sensible about the WoT and the mainstream justifications made for it:
He keeps repeating that canard that “terrorists hate freedom.” Nonsense. There is no terrorist in the world who is a terrorist because he hates freedom. By far, the majority of terrorists are fighting for freedom of some group that doesn’t have it. In the case of Iraq, it is freedom from American occupation; with the Irish Republican Army, it was freedom from British rule; with the Palestinians, freedom from Israeli occupation; and so forth. It is absurd to suppose that a human being sitting around suddenly stands up and says: “You know, I hate freedom. I think I’ll go blow myself up.”
Listen to Charley.
Hating someone for their freedom is pretty lame. Even lamer is using this statement to rally a nation of non-thinking idiots to follow your misguided leadership. It should be no surprise that this administration can not see past their own rhetoric and offer up such silly analysis. Where did they get it from–my 7 yr old neice?
No, they likely hate us because we are imperialists and we take whatever we want whenever we want and we are the big, bad bullies on the block–and worse we call everything we do “right and good” and claim that democracy is the only way yet are allied with many crazier and more violent authoritarian regimes than Iraq ever was.
This regurgitated garbage that Islamists would be peace-loving gardeners if only the West would stop its imperialist ambitions not only defies ordinary explanation and common sense, but it is the height of Western conceit that we can constantly explain what really motivates them to do the things they do, rather than merely believing the reasons they are more than happy to tell us.
It has become tired. The Islamic culture of conquest and dominance predates the US. It was sharply curtailed with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. What has changed? Only one thing - Islamic societies never went through an Enlightenment, and their inability to keep pace with the modern science of war via their own culture’s produce forces them to turn to international roguery to pursue their ambitions - terror, trafficking in weaponry, and using what commodities they do control as leverage.
Use common sense - Islamic societies simply can’t make the kinds of weapons they need to re-establish the caliphate. There is no Muslim equivalent to Lockheed, no Islamic universities producing engineers to create a 20th century war machine. So terror is the tactic of choice.
But the ideology hasn’t changed.
The idea that if only the West would stop its imperialism, the Islamists would have no grievance and therefore would not attack the West is shoddy and oversimplified cause-and-effect - if this were true, where are the dividends from protecting Muslims in the Balkans and the millions of dollars in aid to Muslim countries?
Fact is, Islamists are going to do what they want, regardless of our actions, for they are motivated by an independent ideology that only cares about its self-righteous zealotry.
And one other thing - the almost unbearable irony is that Islamists believe in and practice the purest form of imperialism. They want dominance, they want territory. They want non-Muslims to submit to their rule. Tragically, the group of people in the world that are the most unapologetic endorsers of imperialism are the ones that are painted as helpless victims of that ideology - imperialism - that they openly support and approve of. Wow. Moronic.
Islamists aren’t anti-imperialists trying to throw off an aggressor in the name of liberation - they want a harsher form of domination. They want Taliban-type governments. They actively seek tyranny. But they are somehow victims of imperialism?
To continue to try and characterize them as poor victims of Western imperialism is a sad joke.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Islamists aren’t anti-imperialists trying to throw off an aggressor in the name of liberation - they want a harsher form of domination. They want Taliban-type governments. They actively seek tyranny. But they are somehow victims of imperialism?
[/quote]
Under our own definition of self-governance they have the right to any form of government they wish. The US cannot impose democracy on anyone. They must choose it themselves–thus it is “self-governance”. We would like this to happen but it isn’t realistic. Give them tyranny and they will accept democracy.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Under our own definition of self-governance they have the right to any form of government they wish. The US cannot impose democracy on anyone. They must choose it themselves–thus it is “self-governance”. We would like this to happen but it isn’t realistic. Give them tyranny and they will accept democracy. [/quote]
But, Islamism and Islamic terror didn’t begin with the war in Iraq. That was our reaction to what they did (for better or for worse, depending on your opinion).
What ‘imperialism’ generated all this terror before?
And don’t try Israel. The ‘plight’ of the displaced ‘Palestianians’ is of recent vintage and was only used by Arab countries when it was convenient. Other Muslim nations don’t give a whit about Palestinians.
Oh, and your completely value-neutral approach to democracy is nothing short of nihilism, which no bona fide liberal should endorse. Under your theory, a duly elected Hitler could liquidate as many Jews as he wanted - after all, democracy produced him.
Iraqis absolutely must choose democracy for it to work. But, like Germans and the Japanese before them, the way to the choice to democracy must be cleared of the clutter of totalitarianism.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Under our own definition of self-governance they have the right to any form of government they wish. The US cannot impose democracy on anyone. They must choose it themselves–thus it is “self-governance”. We would like this to happen but it isn’t realistic. Give them tyranny and they will accept democracy.
But, Islamism and Islamic terror didn’t begin with the war in Iraq. That was our reaction to what they did (for better or for worse, depending on your opinion).
What ‘imperialism’ generated all this terror before?
And don’t try Israel. The ‘plight’ of the displaced ‘Palestianians’ is of recent vintage and was only used by Arab countries when it was convenient. Other Muslim nations don’t give a whit about Palestinians.
Oh, and your completely value-neutral approach to democracy is nothing short of nihilism, which no bona fide liberal should endorse. Under your theory, a duly elected Hitler could liquidate as many Jews as he wanted - after all, democracy produced him.
Iraqis absolutely must choose democracy for it to work. But, like Germans and the Japanese before them, the way to the choice to democracy must be cleared of the clutter of totalitarianism.[/quote]
I am not a “liberal”. I am nothing. I have many nihilistic beliefs. I have many liberal beliefs. I have few conservative beliefs.
I do not believe democracy is the end-all-be-all form of government my 6th grade civics teacher would like me to believe. There are pluses and minuses to all forms of government–it is really a sad place we live in (a democracy) when we can not discuss these pluses and minuses with out being called “anti-American”.
I do not agree that we are imperialistic. This is the complaint we hear most from these so called terrorists every time they appear with new propaganda videos. I do not believe there is any excuse for killing and violence. I don’t think it solves anything. Not from our perspective–not from theirs.
The Palestinian plight is as old as the Jewish plight. The fact of the matter is there are a number of displaced peoples around the world that have historically not had a place in the world court to be heard–the Kurdish people are a good example. The only reason we empathize with the Jewish state of Israel is because of our (America’s) guilt over not getting involved in Europe until we were scared Russia was going to take Eastern Europe. It’s not like Jews were well loved in this country before then.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
…
But, Islamism and Islamic terror didn’t begin with the war in Iraq. That was our reaction to what they did (for better or for worse, depending on your opinion).
What ‘imperialism’ generated all this terror before?
…
[/quote]
Wow. Are you still on about how the occupation of Iraq is a front in the war on terror? Please, explain to us how Iraq was linked to 9/11 and Al Qada.
Perhaps you should read up on history. Start with wikipedia and look for Iraq and Iran.