slothrop

Since Bill Clinton is known for being such a humorless, brooding man, clearly the only thing to do is bow our heads and pray. If you laugh at death, one can only imagine the lack of searing existential pain that you will experience on your deathbed.

If PP wants to prove that there is a pervasive left-wing bias in the media, I welcome him to do so. Until then, I'll have to keep working on my proof that there is no extra-terrestrial life in the universe. I'm almost done, I just have 6 quadrillion more cubic light-years of space to explore.

Bwahahaha! The ol' "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" argument gets me every time! Rummy is a comic genius!

Yeah, screw you guys! The classy thing to do would be to get together with our "redneck friends" to laugh at "granolas" getting beaten by police at some protest. Good times, and Jesus would approve, too. That guy was always going to stonings 'n shit back in the day.

Liberal media bias? Stop, you're killing me!

PP is nothing if not intellectual and dishonest. Sorry, no more personal attacks, just had to get that one out there. That Walter Duranty thing is sure fuct up. Thank goodness we have a free press so that everyone else can try to write and report the truth.

That's what I'm trying to do, ya right-wing fucktard I'm not following your left-wing bias story, since I don't know who Robert Conquest is, what he said, or who "the other side" was. Again: what did the NYT have to do with it? I'm honestly curious.

What was the NY Times' role in covering it up/playing it down? Is this Stalin we're talking about? Congo for sure. Man, there's just too much genocide going on to report on it all at once. There will always be some bias. It's terrible.

Or how about how there's not much mention of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan? People boiled alive for political crimes. We have military bases there and have cozied up to the corrupt leadership.

Which Ukrainian genocide, when? Do tell. I agree that media bias can cost lives, I just think PP is being ridiculous. Sudan is not on the front page every day, even though more people have died there than in southern Russia.

He'll have to cut down on the foie gras and fried chicken after this. And better watch out for overly exciting encounters with the young ladies!

So the appearance of this line in a post about the events in Beslan is merely an elegant sweep of rhetoric, not meant to imply anything specific: Maybe you should be more careful with your incredibly overblown generalizations.

How quasi-enlightened of you, Scott.

PP, how did the use of the words "hostage-takers" and "militants" in the Western media lead to more deaths? And please do not use the technique of second-guessing the Russian negotiators or special forces. You were not there.

Hey Mr. Semantics, what if there were no children? Would that make the situation different? Then they would just be terrorists. Even if the goal was just to lure in more victims, they were controlling and threatening something the Russians valued in order to get what they wanted. That's hostage-taking. Using that term doesn't dilute the fact that they're terrorists, too. Use whatever loaded shorthand you want, the facts are that they took hostages. PP - ?

Anyone know what the terrorists' demands were? Hostage-taking is such a bad idea... it's just terrible for both sides. I can't imagine any Russian who doesn't want to nuke Grozny now.

This reminds me of the good ol' PC euphemism wars! Lame! "Hostage-takers" is factual. They took hostages. Otherwise, why not just blow up the building outright, or shoot everyone immediately? "Terrorists" is true--they caused "terror". "Freedom-fighters" is also factual, since they probably believed they were fighting for freedom (say it with a sneer if it wasn't your freedom they were fighting for). Calling them "gardeners" or "out for a Sunday stroll" would be inaccurate and misleading.

I totally agree. Wait, I can't read Russian.

Uh, I'm one of those fuckhead liberals and I thought it was obvious that diplomacy and sensitivity go out the window when armed gunmen start shooting your children in the back. Diplomacy and sensitivity are only useful in preventing this kind of incident from happening, i.e., figuring out more productive ways to solve conflicts before they escalate to such levels of perverse violence. Of course, the Russians did try diplomacy before the bombs started going off. I read that they offered the assholes safe passage out of the country, but they refused. What their demands actually were is not clear to me. Would you blindly go in, guns blazing, if someone held a pistol to your cute little dog's head? What if the crazy fucker just wanted a Twinkie? It doesn't hurt to ask.

Not PNW, but WTF? Vedauwoo.

All-Purpose Duck. Why is that name weirdly funny to me?

I don't get you, Scott. Kerry laid out a lot of his platform in his speech. I'm hoping GW will do the same, because I'm sick of the nitpicking and clever spinning of quotes taken out of context ("I voted for the war before I voted against it", "We can't win the war on terror", etc.) done by both sides. The Swift Boat thing was the lowest of low points so far.

You almost can't go wrong here. Oh yes you can. Just ask eric8 about the routes he wants to do on Dragontail. That guy's a master of creative pronunciation. I make him listen to NPR as punishment while driving to climbs.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of: the South Face route. My partner pulled a piece and almost decked on that pitch a few years ago. There's a big pointy flake right underneath the start of the climb and it's an awkward belay, so the belayer tends to want to sit back from the base and thus can get yanked off his stance by a fall. I'm glad the climbers involved got speedy, competent help. Good thing the accident was at Castle Rock and not somewhere more remote and less popular.

And now even South Korea got caught enriching uranium! We are losing influence in Asia... bad news.