mattp

In another thread, I posed the question: Any thoughts? (I ask again, because the other discussion descended into the typical cc.com toilet bowl and there really wasn't much discussion related to what I was asking about.)

JayB - there is no doubt that the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima were inhumane and by most standards immoral. But I doubt there are all that many who would argue that our use of such tactics rendered us the complete moral equivalent of Nazi Germany. And I would guess that if our general's had been tried for war crimes they would have had a substantial defense in the idea that their actions were justified in the circumstances. Most historians have reached that judgment, haven't they? But what are historians going to say about Rumsfeld? Was he justified in allowing prisoners to be tortured? What do you say to my initial questions: should he be accountable?

Lets get back to where KK, Puget and Fairweather explain why Rumsfeld or others in the Bush administration - including Bush himself - should not be held accountable for what they've done.

I'm not sure what all that article posted by DeCristo adds up to, but I'll point out that when Justice Sanders was sworn in to the Washington Supreme Court, and immediately went out and gave a speech about how abortion is a crime and we really gotta stop it, the ACLU leaped to his defense when the Judicial Conduct Commission came down on him for it. Sure, they are not a political. And yes, they promote theirselves as an organization. And yes, they need money to operate and will seek attorney's fees just like any other party in any legal dispute. So what?

Actually, KK and his buddies are just pissed off because they got their guys elected, had full control of the White House, Senate, and Congress, brought their dream-war into action, and now it turned out badly. All the flag-waving haters of the liberal terrorist sympathizer-appeasers in this nation gotta lash out at somebody, because it sure can't be THEIR fault this whole thing turned out badly. And accountability? They sure as hell don't want that!

As I said, there are plenty of sleazy lawyers. But the big sleaze is the banal and self serving arguments of those who rail against "sleazy lawyers," in seeking to promote a complete removal of any accountability in such areas as medical malpractice, criminal corporate misconduct, or the blatant disregard for any reasonable standard of human decency and civil rights. And the fact that people fall for their arguments is not only pathetic, but dangerous.

I'm not surprised to read KK's little rant here, but I gotta say: it smacks of uninformed knee jerk right wing lunacy to me. I certainly don't always support the ACLU position on a variety of issues, but they have been an important force in protecting American civil rights for nearly a hundred years - and in many arenas they have been the ONLY party looking out for the little guy. There are plenty of sleazy lawyers out there, but the ACLU as an organization is certainly NOT exhibit A.

What do you guys think about the ACLU suing Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees mistreated in Iraq, or the stories of a German tribumal charging him with war crimes? On a more likely than not basis, do you think there is much doubt that Rumsfeld knew about what was going on, failed to take strong measures to stop it, likey impliedly if not explicitly authorized it, or bears responsibility simply as the person at the top of the chain of command? Did you think it was important to investigate people in the Clinton administration over travelgate, Vince Foster's suicide, Whitewater, or Monica Lewinski? Should elected and unelected officials at high levels of government be accountable for what they do? How?

It was heavily rimed and late March or early April when I climbed it - so probably the easiest possible conditions. It was not a hard route, but we did not climb the more imposing gendarmes directly. Note: with rime over a heavy snow cover and only a wee bit of water ice here and there, there was nothing you could call solid pro anywhere from bottom to top except maybe the sling we placed around a gendarme to rappel in the middle portion. We pitched it out, and it came to about 16 or 17 pitches. Bill, topping out.

319.9

A six pack of beer, a kaleidescope, and a head of lettuce were our provisions for a bivvy on top of Mt. Washington once. A real bivvy - we didn't plan on a night out and broght no sleeping bags.

I'm with you, Dru, to the extent that I have greater respect for the bragging rights of those who climb new routes and I actually consider a listing in a "classic" or "select" guide as a negative. I generally award a couple of extra plus points to a route that is "not recommended" and even more to one that is completely "unknown" if it turns out to actually be a good route and I think there are lots of these out there. However, it is true that the authors of the Select or Classic guidebooks, just as those who have assigned the stars in a cragging guide, have mostly made good choices. In my opinion, these tick lists are as good a measure or motivator as any other. Somebody who wants to climb "all the routes listed in Nelson/Potterfield's Volume I," or "the hundred highest" is just as respectible as one who wants to climb "a new route in every major sub-range" or "as much as possible within a day's drive," or whatever.

For total suck, you have to try skiing in Michigan. For example, try Mt. Brighton. A brief websearch yields no photos except this one: My guess is they don't want to be embarassed with any real photo's of the place. The "hill" was originally a gravel pit, then used for a dump, then they built it up with a bit more dirt and installed 4 chair lifts. It towers maybe 200 feet above the surrounding corn fields, and on a good year they may have 15" base made of artificial snow with grass still showing through in places (at least there are no rocks or stumps to hit since it is an artifical hill). SE Michigan doesn't get much snow, and the biggest hill in the area isn't more than 300 feet high, so Mt. Brighton does OK with what they have but it aint much.

I climbed 38 of the routes from Volume 1, and descended a few more, mostly before the book came out. Of those in Volume 2, I've climbed 12 of the mountain routes, with one or two more descended. They listed most of the "classics" in volume 1, and scratched a little deeper or reported newer routes and filled it out with crag climbs for volume 2. What'll they come up with for volume 3? There are a lot of excellent new crag climbs, but how about mountain routes? What are some true classics that have been omitted (or potential classics)? For an easy one, Whitechuck via the standard route is a good non-climb, and for something a little more challenging, the Bertulis route on Nooksak Tower is pretty cool. What else?

I agree: diplomacy is in order. When I raised this point two or three years ago I was told I was completely wrong and it was no problem and why should climbers worry at all about access, but it strikes me as obvious that climbers will lose if there are significant negative interactions between climbers and skiers or ski area personnel. And consider that, from a ski area management or safety point of view, our mere presence in the area and the disctraction that we create could under the wrong circumstances be thought to be a problem. Keep a low profile. Play nice with the other kids.

Hey guys: our president and the secretary of defense have been telling us that we are winning -- pretty much non-stop -- since we invaded. And they did all they could to discredit anybody who said differently. The big news now IS the fact that we are starting to hear something different. We are neither winning nor losing? What a crock of BS. If you listened to the testimony this morning (and I did), "we are not winning" is a lot closer to what he actually said given the context. Yes, he tried to be all wiggly about it, and he was obviously trying to limit any political use of his words, and he did offer the "neither winning nor losing" clarification, and after lunch he came back and clarified that when he said we were not winning he did not mean to suggest that we had actually failed to win any single on-the-ground battle. Its all a bunch of BS histrionics to avoid admitting the truth: we are in fact losing. And we have no intention of fully pulling out. No matter what happens we'll keep that nice fort we're building in southern Iraq. And Peter: don't get us started on that "impending" vs. "imminent" b.s. again. Yes, Chalabi and his pals said otherwise, and Saddam was waving whatever he had as loudly as he could, but the vast majority of the intelligence we had, and the on-the-ground inspectors, told us that not only was Saddam weak militarily, but that there was no connection between Iraq and terrorism and little prospect for the Iraqis to pose much of a threat and certainly no urgency to any invasion. It wasn't a bold venture - it was a war crime.

Good call, Baltoro. Another candidate for this discussion is the bolt ladder start to City Park. There is a serious trick to it so that if you know the "beta," it is at least a letter grade easier and maybe two: from atop the block where it starts to get hard, step down and right about four or five feet, then proceed upward again.

Kevbone, you make one fatal assumption: the law should make sense. If it did, attorney's would have less to do.

Here's a piece that appeared in the 1950 Mountaineer, unsigned, when Harvey Manning was editor. At this time, the bulletin was full of reports from Beckey and Schoening and others of their climbs using aid and the occasional lasso to climb features like The Flagpole, and Hammer Head, etc. I'm not sure this is "wicked" in the sense that it is not directly critical of anybody but it is certainly mocking humor a la Mark Twain:

A lot more than I want insurance companies having anything to do with it!

WTF are you talking about, Jay? Mr. Rushdie’s little rant that you quoted above was really quite simple: (1) a peace agreement in Palestine will not appease the terrorists because that is not what they want so those who suggest that promoting such a peace in the name of reducing terrorism are wrong to think it might promote such a result (though he admits the terrorists use the Palestine occupation an effective recruiting tool), and (2) “the left” is some kind of identifiable block that naively and narrowly believes that Islamic Fundamentalists are overwhelmingly concerned with occupation and their promotion of terrorism is undertaken in a quest for freedom from Western hegemony and nothing else. (You can quibble with my choice of words here, but I think that is a fairly succinct restatement of his argument). Clearly, you posted this excerpt as a jab, knowing that many here would disagree with both points. Then you accused those who disagree with either statement as “missing the point” and being bizarrely conceited, while arguing that he was not commenting in any way on terrorism but on “the lens through which we view it?” It it bizarre or conceited to think a peace accord between Israel and Palestine might as a byproduct reduce that issue as an effective tool for the recruitment of suicide bombers, or to suggest that he's not the end-all expert and “the left” does not consist of a body of people who all believe terrorists are freedom fighters? Yes, there have been a couple of responses suggesting Mr. Rushdie has "lost it," but c'mon -- isn't any narrowly focussed statement that suggests the terrorists just want to kill us and we should not consider how our own actions in the world may impact their thinking, or a suggestion that "the left" holds just a single simple view on the motivation behind terrorism, just as naive, bizarre, and conceited as any argument you are reading here? Your rhetorical stance here is bizarre for sure.

I don't always go for Prole's arguments, Fairweather, but in this case I'd say he is spot on. Rushdie makes a compelling argument for the fact that Islamofacists are an evil force in this world, but this little smippet of prose hints at ignoring the reality that the adherents to this ideology are able to exploit events and policies on the ground to their advantage. Does Rushdie call for jihad against the jihadists? Does he think it is possible to wage war against an ideolgy? Do YOU think that we could stamp out Islamic fundamentalism with military action or economic sanctions or some other program? Would it be a good idea to try? And what does some past argument about "agrarian reform" have to do with it, or the fact that you think the guy suffers from some "creeping ideology?" Tell us: do you think we could do something we have not already tried with military or covert activity that might actually stamp out a movement that is founded in history fifteen hundred years old? Has the war in Iraq made us safer? Has our conduct of the war in Afghanistan been executed in the most appropriate manner? Our frequent lack of intervention elsewhere in the region? Does our generally blind support of Israel help or hurt our efforts to combat terrorism? Are you one of those who thinks the answer lies in Armageddon? Where is it that any member of the mainstream left which you so despise has ever argued that Islamic fundamentalism is a good force in the world, or that we should somehow coddle to such an ideology?

I've been watching the news and we really haven't seen it yet but I don't doubt we'll see some analysis suggesting there has been voter suppression or even vote fraud supporting some of the successful Democratic candidates this year, Fairweather, but over the last several years the majority of it has run the other direction. I guess you've forgotten about Florida and Ohio, eh? And as to smaller races, just run a ten minute Google search and start reading the reports and I think you'll see more reported concerns about problems favoring Republicans than Democrats. And as to the statement from the Diebold CEO that he was going to deliver Ohio to Bush? Search the name Odell if you've forgotten about this story that was pretty big news just a couple of years ago. Still, however, my suggestion is this: the Democrats have said they are going to drain the swamp of dirty politics, and that they want to reach accross the aisle. I think this would be a good issue for them right now and it would be difficult for folks to argue this wasn't a worthy cause or that it is not one that should be addressed by both parties. There was an opinion piece in today's NYT that suggested we might look at an election system more like Canada's. That might be a good place to start the discussion.

Like I said, Fairweather, for the purposes of this discussion we can ignore the fact that the owner or President or whoever he was of Diebold said he was setting out to deliver Ohio to Bush two years ago, and we can ignore the fact that the problems seem overwhelmingly to have arisen in Democratic voting districts, These folks at Diebold said they could not produce reliable machines that printed receipts and they said their machines could not be hacked. Both were ridiculous statements. End of story. I'm with you on those color-in-the-bubble ballots. They are foolproof, recountable, and tabulated immediately by optical scanners. What could be better? Perhaps we agree here that election reform would be a good project for the new "bipartisan" political machine? Election financing reform seems to be beyond their grasp as every time they enact a new law the powers that be find a way around it, but reform/refinement of the mechanics of elections ought to be attainable.

Don't worry, Ivan. The Tilly Jane ski trail is not a difficult climb and they will get that road fixed fairly quick, I expect.