Prelude to the Apocalypse

[quash]

As much as I dislike Hillary, even I had to feel a little bad for her during the latest Benghazi kangaroo court. Not to say she didn't do anything wrong, but the GOP is really grasping for something they're not going to get. The fact of the matter is that whatever failure of communication that occurred did not start with Hillary and it almost certainly didn't end with her.

If she is at fault, then so are many, many others. To focus on her exclusively is to politicize what happened.

The GOP's desperation is really showing right now, and they are scrambling to get anyone but Trump chosen as their candidate. Let's hope they don't succeed with that.

[Mischief Maker]

As much as I dislike Hillary, even I had to feel a little bad for her during the latest Benghazi kangaroo court. Not to say she didn't do anything wrong, but the GOP is really grasping for something they're not going to get. The fact of the matter is that whatever failure of communication that occurred did not start with Hillary and it almost certainly didn't end with her.

If she is at fault, then so are many, many others. To focus on her exclusively is to politicize what happened.

The GOP's desperation is really showing right now, and they are scrambling to get anyone but Trump chosen as their candidate. Let's hope they don't succeed with that.

The GOP has been grasping for Hillary scandals ever since Cookiegate.

Remember that Ken Starr was appointed special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons' Whitewater real estate investments, it was only after that well proved to be dry that he went on a fishing trip that resulted in the Lewinskygate presidential impeachment. Boy, remember a time when we were young and innocent and thought a blowjob was the biggest threat to the national security of the United States?

Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" is kinda like Bill Cosby's rape allegations. We'll never know with absolute certainty that he did it, but the sheer number of accusations makes it a pretty safe bet. Same with the sheer number of attempted Clinton "-gates."

[BryanM]

I really wish they would stop helping her get elected.

But goddamn are they stupid. Sigh.

Mike Ramirez illustrates the Golden Ratio of Conservative Hypocrisy: 1500:1

Anything bad that happens during a Democrat administration is 1500 times worse than that same thing happening during a Republican administration.

An illuminating cartoon.

Ramirez won a goddamn pulitzer. As far as the sacks of human garbage that draw these things go, I at least am unaware of any drunk driving or wife beating on his part. So. Maybe in a relative sense he does sort of deserve it?

[EmperorIng]

What do you call someone who only managed to get where they are based on their spouses' position?

A flash of reason in a hyperbole-soaked topic.

[Ed Oscuro]

@ quash: O'Malley used the "carnival barker" line.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/some-othe ... 17079.html#

Santorum is really running again? Wow

http://recode.net/2015/10/22/here-are-t ... andidates/

It's official: A wireless meat thermometer is more interesting than Bobby Jindal.

Speaking of little-known scandals, I present froggate.

[BryanM]

In Rhode Island history, the $120 million they gave to a base-baller to try to make his MMORPG despite him having no experience or history in game development.... well, that probably ranks up there with Fukushima when it comes to government incompetence.

It was before Linc's time but he wasn't a fan.

[Mischief Maker]

I really wish they would stop helping her get elected.

I'd say the DNC is the bigger culprit here, what with scheduling so few debates, putting almost all of them on weekends, and penalizing candidates for taking part in non-sanctioned debates.

You wouldn't want too many people seeing Bernie Sanders outshining Hillary, would you?

Don't forget, a Sanders Nomination (and campaign finance reform in general) is a direct threat to the media. When a candidate raises billions in campaign cash, where does the majority of it go? Expensive primetime TV advertising! What happens to CNN's bottom line if the big-money candidate loses the primary (again)?

[BryanM]

And of course the millionaire TV actors they employ stand to lose tens of thousands annually to taxes. That moment where Cooper looked completely befuddled at the guy saying he's not a capitalist (capitalists being rather monstrous people, something the old guy knows first hand) and people cheering in response and he meekly goes "uh... anyone else want to say they're not a capitalist?" just to check if he still had a hold on reality.

More debates wouldn't have helped much imo tho. Liberals are human garbage. Margaret Thatcher versus Mister fuckin' Rogers. Like that should even be a contest. Our future is foretold in the beginning of this song.

Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed. I know I have.

[quash]

Hey Ed, what was that about not starting a war in Syria?

You should be more careful as to who you call a know-nothing on the internet. I know a hell of a lot more than most people and that is by profession.

[Ed Oscuro]

You know you're a big man when you revisit weeks-old posts to try and settle scores...and you try to do this with strawman arguments and show you don't really understand the topic

- quash mistakes effect for cause: There's already a war in Syria, did you not notice this? Austere was arguing this for a long time.
- I never said that Administration policy in Syria was perfect anyway. I disagreed with those who think the Administration was trying to worsen that conflict. "Starting a war" would mean something like invading Iraq. Everything has been destabilized since then and we're hardly the only country that is trying to intervene, even just in Syria. You can disagree that the Obama Administration policy in Syria is going to fix things, but saying that they've "started a war" is saying a lot more.
- I've also never said that I would just disregard somebody's posts just because I didn't feel like having a discussion, which is what the "ignorance" comment I remember was all about

Finally, it is kind of cute that people complain so much about "THE EVIL MEDIA" but then have no qualms about posting random links whenever they think it lets them settle a score.

Kind of like the Republicans in their last debate.

[quash]

There is nothing to settle dude lol. I just remembered your smarminess because you are particularly smarmy.

Rationalize all you want, we have had our hands in that pot from the beginning. We are just now seeing the next stage of escalation. Don't worry, I'll be here to point out when the next stage is about to happen. And you'll still be here denying that we ever had anything to do with it until now.

Also "random links" lol. As if everything I've linked hasn't been totally pertinent to the discussion at hand. I don't feel like or have the time to write out long, detailed responses to everything you say so I give you and everyone else a piece to inform yourselves with. Apparently that is asking a little too much.

[quash]

I mean, as far as I can tell you are basically saying that the US can't be faulted with starting conflict there because we didn't invade right as the war broke out (or before, even).

Maybe that's not what you mean, but that is what is being communicated. I am not the only person who has read your posts like this either so perhaps it would help to elaborate.

Even so, that is misleading at best and disingenuous at worst. We saw an opportunity to take down Assad and tried to do it without using our own military, which ended up backfiring on us and before we knew it we had a much more ruthless and organized group to deal with in ISIS.

We may not have had "boots on the ground" until now, but that was to prevent massive political backlash more than anything. Obama could barely find support for airstrikes, let alone an invasion. But now, with things going more sour every day, we may very well just see the invasion of Syria we've all been waiting for.

[BryanM]

It's shocking that if you blow up a feudal-capitalist society, it regresses to a tribal-feudal one and the wars between would-be kings that phase of development entails. It's like no one listens to Marx on anything I tells ya.

Also depressing to reflect on how tight Saddam's angus was when Bush was telling him he was gonna straight up murder him. It could have been feasible he'd have handed the entire country over to us in return for not killing a number of his inner circle. (But nah better murder over a million people through aggression instead lol)

Only military geniuses like "arm the moderates"* Petraeus could have possibly found a less humane and less successful strategy than a war of conquest.







* Because moderates are the ones who are willing to murder and be murdered for political gain amirite?

[Ed Oscuro]

There is nothing to settle dude lol. I just remembered your smarminess because you are particularly smarmy.

If you want to discuss the topic then I'll be happy to do that - if you just want to make full posts of personal attacks then you're wasting your time

I mean, as far as I can tell you are basically saying that the US can't be faulted with starting conflict there

No. That's what you would think if you don't know how to read:

- I never said that Administration policy in Syria was perfect anyway.

Referring to the Obama Administration policy here. I didn't hide that in a gigantic block of text, you have no excuse for misinterpreting me here.

The whole problem can probably be summed up in two statements:
- Muslim extremism is a social cancer that will spread on its own if left alone
- All the powers in the region have their own agendas or biases (Iran towards Shi'a, while Russia had a policy of pushing extremists out of the Caucasus, only to now apparently feel like it has to deal with them)

The question of "who's to blame" really doesn't matter anymore, unless you're 16 years old. If we broke it with Bush, didn't we buy it? And, what's more, people forget that we have hindsight on two trends, not just one:

- Everybody agrees that intervention can inflame a situation, but nobody is advocating just leaving IS alone
- But leaving the fight to just local strongmen (Musharraf in Pakistan, the Assad regime in Syria) is a good way to have the issue blow up, because these groups were more interested in their own power base than in controlling terrorist groups throughout the region (Al Qaeda was left to grow in Saudi Arabia, and as noted before Russia tried to export its problem). Bashir Al-Assad basically replays the policies of his father, who was literally murdering entire towns as far back as the early '80s. Nobody should forget that these groups span the entire spectrum from liberal dissidents to extreme terrorists; the causes of terrorism aren't just foreign occupation, but also local conditions.

I don't think that totally ignoring the situation is a solution, and if we tried, local powers would just push the problem off onto somebody else, while happily slaughtering dissidents. At the end, our goals aren't worse than anybody else's.

The question is simply what tactic to use. We could just leave it to the local powers, or we could try cooperation only - I don't think this is workable. We could also try sharing responsibilities while limiting our own involvement, which seems to be the Obama Administration policy. We could also try taking on the whole problem ourselves, without regard for other players, which was more or less the starting point for the Bush Administration.

My personal preference would be to look for a way to let self-interested, more local powers take charge of the situation, while trying to scare everybody straight just enough to keep a lid on the genocides and political massacres. The Obama Administration has tried this, for what it's worth, though they made a huge mistake with the "red line" talk they didn't intend to follow through on immediately. At the same time, it does seem that they had an about-face to let Russia handle more of the problem, which they should have done from the beginning.

[Skykid]

Muslim extremism is a social cancer that will spread on its own if left alone

Debatable, and a very Republican viewpoint.

By this point Musilm extremism is certainly enjoying itself, which is a shame because ISIS and other radical groups are a byproduct of thirty years of US foreign policy.

Terrorising the middle east for its oil and other stories, many of which include creating and then ousting various dictators, is bad for Christian-Muslim relations.

ISIS and other cells are a response to tyranny. Sometimes I think the religious part is merely an excuse, the rest is just about getting even.

I think of them like a really fat SJW who just got triggered by cake, only in this case it may have been the carpet bombing of their village and the wiping out of their entire extended family.

[BulletMagnet]

Sometimes I think the religious part is merely an excuse, the rest is just about getting even.

No need for an "I think"; no matter what religion/belief system you're talking about, the extreme elements almost never gain a foothold among people who feel generally secure/provided for/etc. The ones who are willing to put it all on the line are the ones with the least to lose (or who are led to believe that what they have is somehow under threat), and are the ones that the most ambitious and/or ruthless among us always go to when they need someone to do their dirty work for them. I don't care how much of a "believer" you say you are, you only put that much purported faith in the spiritual realm when the physical one isn't doing it for you.

[BryanM]

Muslim extremism is a social cancer that will spread on its own if left alone

Debatable, and a very Republican viewpoint.

Agree. An eye for an eye is never enough. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send ten of theirs to the morgue. Such is war.

We lost 3,000 lives to a few Saudi Arabians armed with Microsoft Flight Simulator, about comparable to a month of traffic accidents. In retaliation we murdered over a million people in the entirely wrong country.

I give jihadists a lot more props than I give ourselves: at least they can get the countries that attacked them right.

Aside from the poor bastards in Afghanistan who think we're still the Russians. Did you know our drone program there only gets the correct assassination target about 10% of the time? Yeah I know - I'm amazed it's as accurate as it is, too. You'd expect it to be closer to 3 or 5% right

[Mischief Maker]

ISIS and other cells are a response to tyranny. Sometimes I think the religious part is merely an excuse, the rest is just about getting even.

In the interests of giving the ant farm a shake, let me offer a quote from Sam Harris:

Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation every bit as oppressive as any ever imposed on a Muslim country. At least one million Tibetans have died as a result, and their culture has been systematically eradicated. Even their language has been taken from them.

Never underestimate the volatile mixture of a culture that makes women dress like ninja ghosts to protect men from their own erections, then promises an all-out-can-eat sex buffet as payment for Martyrdom.

[BryanM]

Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?

Do banks still work in Tibet?

[Skykid]

ISIS and other cells are a response to tyranny. Sometimes I think the religious part is merely an excuse, the rest is just about getting even.

In the interests of giving the ant farm a shake, let me offer a quote from Sam Harris:

Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?

This is a really terrible and incomparable example. Besides the Tibetans went absolutely loco in the run up the Olympics, and monks were running around the streets with machetes trying to hack up tourists.

You probably got the western version of those events: "Chinese thug policemen attack Tibetan monks for no reason, ands here's some footage from six years ago of Indonesian policeman beating on bystanders to prove it"

Along with the rest of western propaganda surrounding Tibet:

- Richard Gere takes a break from shoving hamsters up asshole to visit Dalai Lama
- Sharon Stone is glad Chinese people died in Earthquake, is retribution for Tibet
- Dalai Lama really nice guy

And other CNN rhetoric.

I'm waiting for the point when we talk about Tibet prior to Communist occupation, when it historically belonged to China since 500 years ago, that people were living in squalor and serfdom under the monks and dying in the streets, that its literacy and education has improved ten times what it was when it was a domain of serfdom and squalor, and other stories.

Basically I don't give a fuck about the Chinese government, they get plenty of shit utterly and unforgivably wrong, but I don't want to hear any bleeding-heart white man nonsense about a place the Americans worked extraordinarily hard to 'liberate' by way of whipping up popular western sentiment, only so they could get to its oil and uranium resources and cement some new missile bases over China and Russia.

[BryanM]

Basically I don't give a fuck about the Chinese government, they get plenty of shit utterly and unforgivably wrong

They seem to be way better than us at conquest and occupation if the banks still work.

Told we'd need 300,000 troops on the ground, best we could do was pay some locals to commit some murder of people we found problematic during the "surge" that reduced violence momentarily until we stopped paying them and they wandered off to a marauder gang for further profit.

The faith in air strikes and drones is a joke. Like hammering nails into a pan when you're supposed to be baking a pizza. Place is fucked for 100 years or until we invent a robot army to do our occupation FOR us.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm sure we could all just leave ISIS to its own devices, and stop killing its members, and see how soon they'll come for tea...if we had death wishes and didn't care if the developed world started to shrink around us.

By this point Musilm extremism is certainly enjoying itself, which is a shame because ISIS and other radical groups are a byproduct of thirty years of US foreign policy.

ISIS and other cells are a response to tyranny. Sometimes I think the religious part is merely an excuse, the rest is just about getting even.

Even with who?

Think for two seconds and maybe the flaw in your argument should become apparent. We're talking about a part of the world that has a long history of violence and abusive regimes - going back well before the US had any (negative) presence in the region. The US is far from the only actor who's spread tyranny through the region.

Or do you think it is okay when Assad, Ghaddafi, Khomeni etc. murder their own people, just because the US is out there doing things? Or that Russia, Iran etc. either don't have a presence in the region, or that their policies are going to spread happiness and peace where we failed?

The crux of the problem (nowadays) is the post-WWII dual consensus in the Western countries against genocide and preferences towards Israel's state objectives - but more really with the hopeless optimist / policeman attitude. I think we get too quick to say "oh, something bad is happening, let's go fix it" without thinking about the consequences. And with Israel, many nations have just blindly followed whatever policy objectives we think will secure Israel (often wrongly).

[BryanM]

I'm sure we could all just leave ISIS to its own devices, and stop killing its members, and see how soon they'll come for tea...if we had death wishes and didn't care if the developed world started to shrink around us.

The Islamic State is not a terrorist organization like Cobra La. They don't all live in a secret mountain base somewhere.

You're talking about a government.

Yes we can and should contain their attempts to conquer other countries, repel all their sorties into Kurdistan and such. Dropping bombs blindly in their territory (which is the only way bombs in a city can be delivered) to murder the local butcher's seven year old son? Probably not going to help accomplish much buddy.

If you want to overthrow a government, you have to have power on the ground and do it. If Russia wants to clean up our mess when we don't, I say good luck to them.

[BryanM]

The Islamic State is not a terrorist organization like Cobra La.

They're really more of a terrorist organization like Saudi Arabia. Good Wahhabi times for all.

[Ed Oscuro]

I know this thread is going places when even BryanM sheds his court jester persona just long enough to lob a strawman.

What, exactly, in that did you think I was fundamentally in disagreement with?

We have to distinguish between the past and present. I don't really care what motivates somebody as long as they have the right behavior as a result. All the talk about the US being imperialistic is at least 30 years out of date (as explaining current US policy - of course some of the Presidential candidates would love to move in that direction again). Likewise, whether millennarians controlled the Bush Administration (they didn't) is also besides the point. That is background information for understanding Western policies in the region, but it doesn't mean that people like Skykid and BryanM get to make lazy and false arguments saying that anybody who doesn't want to just forget the whole mess is a closet fascist.

[Xyga]

ISIS isn't the biggest problem, it's even been useful to some at times, no, it's a war for control of the highly strategic territory of Syria (Iraq too of course but that has never really stopped and its less important now to some) and the bigger powers now getting more and more involved directly is what's scary.

Either one side will back off and leave control to the 'winner' and ISIS will slowly retreat from Syria and fade with time, morphing into separate and localized movements...
...or the two 'alliances' battling in Syria will end up going full war, openly, which means US vs. Russia no longer by proxy: and there we can all start shitting our pants even 10,000km away from the current battle zones.

Urgh we're no longer talking about Trump, only I was thinking should we cry or laugh if he becomes president in the middle/apex of the shitstorm ?

[Ed Oscuro]

That other prevalent attitude in this thread, "nobody is honest so we can't do anything," is also worse than useless. Of course there's interested powers in the region - and outside it as well. The fact that my vote against Bush didn't change the course of US policy straight away was frustrating, but that's life. I've kept doing what I can since then, but ultimately, I think all the comfortable people writing furious missives and apportioning blame in this thread really do enjoy being able to kick back and letting somebody else deal with it.

Honestly, you guys are spending too much time worrying about every other parochial interest and complication except peace in the region. (That makes the "omg imperialism" critique even funnier.)

The US fought a civil war absolutely stuffed full of corruption and war profiteering - but at the end of the day the country was put back together, as much as it ever had been, and slavery was ended. It wasn't the final victory, but people who expect final, immediate victories are deluded, unhappy, stupid people.

[Mischief Maker]

Urgh we're no longer talking about Trump, only I was thinking should we cry or laugh if he becomes president in the middle/apex of the shitstorm ?

Oh, I think he'll be quite civil with Russia. Wouldn't want them interfering with his supply of former Warsaw-Pact models!

[Skykid]

but it doesn't mean that people like Skykid and BryanM get to make lazy and false arguments saying that anybody who doesn't want to just forget the whole mess is a closet fascist.

You can ask all those previously oppressed, decimated, robbed and politically undermined countries the US has gone to work on with a pair of foreign policy pliers and a blowtorch over the last sixty years to forget it if you like?

I didn't think Iraq and Afghanistan was even that long ago, checking my watch.

The way you talk I'm beginning to think you are a closet fascist, at least in terms of discussion. Anything anyone says that has any basis in historical fact that is in opposition to the mainstream seems to incur a text bulldozer from you peppered with partly-concealed slurs.

The way I figure it: you have far too much faith and belief that your country's political machinations are mostly above-board and somehow actually work to serve the people in a roundabout way, and voting has meaning, and the system still works, etc, even if the rest of us can't see it. Personally I think there's a much bigger picture than the scrabbled details you tend to claw as examples of a working system, and it's mostly Sith Lords trying to conquer their own personal universes.

[Mischief Maker]

Personally I think there's a much bigger picture than the scrabbled details you tend to claw as examples of a working system, and it's mostly Sith Lords trying to conquer their own personal universes.

Nah, it's just the blind leading the blind.

Go read Legacy of Ashes and learn how a long line of incompetents in the CIA fed sitting presidents bullshit reports about the Soviets gearing up for WWIII to protect their own funding, and ultimately enabling all the worst of 20th century US foreign policy. After all, when WWIII starts proper, an anticommunist dictator would be a safer ally than a democratically elected socialist.