JayB

We're counting on Europe and Canada. They have a fraction of our millitary spending, and look at all of the world-changing innovation and high quality research that they crank out every year. The fundamental problem with the set of assumptions that you bring to this hypothetical is that you are assuming that crisis-spending would occur in the absence of the said crisis. I don't see any evidence that this assumption is correct.

Gosh. I don't blame you for not reading through my long-winded post in its entirety, but the overall point was that not everyone who attacks millitary targets should automatically be classified as "Freedom Fighters," for a number of reasons, some of which I'll restate in a somewhat less long-winded post. For one, you are assuming that there's a clearcut distinction between the guys blowing up the supermarkets and the guys attacking our forces, and I'd wager that theres no clean divide between the two. Secondly, you have to look at the ends that they are hoping to achieve with their violence, some of which include some vaguely nationalist sentiment, but none of them seems to be shooting for anything like personal or political freedoms. If anything, they're trying to dismantle them in favor of a return to a totalitarian state or the adoption of sharia law or some combination of both. Then there's also the fact that there is/was a political process that they could have availed themselves of if they wished to persuade their countrymen to adopt their agenda, which they made a conspicuous point of not doing, probably because they reasoned correctly that they'd have it rejected out of hand, and so they are trying to bridge the gap between their vision and what the public will willingly accept by violent means. On this and many other counts, these guys are anything but freedom fighters, and the fact that so many folks in the west think otherwise is something that I have a hard time understanding.

But one man's freedom fighter can become the same man's terrorist...the Afghan freedom fighters, for example, that later morphed into Al Qaeda using the skills that we taught them. We should be very careful what we teach rough characters to do in this world. They don't always stay on your side. Ya well one could probably argue the same thing about veterans of the Revolutionary War turning the skills that they picked up while fighting the British against the new government that supplanted it, and that Washington, Adams, et. al should have forseen this and forgone the whole affair. Ditto for arming the Russians while they were fighting the Germans, etc. Back when the US was funding the Afghans, anyone who suggested that less than 10 years hence the Soviet Union would implode and the ragtag band of fanatics sporting the beards and turbans would surpass the Soviets as a strategic threat in another 10 years hence would have found everyone within earshot doubled over with teary-eyed laughter. This notion that somehow leaders who are confronted with a grave, immediate, and obvious threat should somehow forsee one of the millions of unintended consequences that could potentially result from their actions and at some random point in the future and let these considerations fundamentally alter the manner in which they address the threat in front of them doesn't seem like a terribly wise or viable way of confronting threats. If I'm a doctor and there's a massive ebola-esque plague errupting somewhere within our borders and I've got a pill that will neutralize it, I imagine that concerns that it might potentially lead to an increased probability of cancer in some people some years down the road. Of course, if everyone dies from the plague, that'd be one way of keeping those cancer stats in check.

Signed up for the Institute for Creation Reasearch's newsletter yet? http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php "Iraq Body Count Press Release 16 October 2006 Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates."

Well if those are the facts, and you had actually read what I wrote then you'd know that I'd have no problem labeling the guy as a terrorist and having his ass deported to wherever.

Hahah. Brayshaw, putting the WACK in Chilliwack.

Hey - it's the "I'm losing both the argument in one thread so I'll restate it somewhere else" tactic. Neat. The absolutist statements that you were spewing out before you ran away to another thread have way more in common with the "It's in the bible therefore I believe it" perspective that you are referring to than anything that I've articulated. Only people that live in some kind of a cloistered dreamworld or refuse to acknowledge the kind of moral complexity that one normally encounters in the real world, beyond the age of twelve, could possibly hang onto the kind of perspective that you bring to pretty much any political realities that get discussed here from time to time. Don't you have Cuban "not terrorists" to coddle? I don't actually know what you are talking about, but it must have something to do with someone in the Cuban emigre community using violence against the Cuban regime in some fashion or another. I've always thought that the glib "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." statement is a transparent crock of shit, and one could just as easily and logically say that "One man's romantic is another man's rapist," "One man's cannibal is another man's gourmand" or any number of other statements that conflate two things that share certain components but are moral opposites of one another. When determining whether a not a person qualifies as a terrorist or a freedom fighter you have to asses several characteristics. Is their intention to deliberately kill as many civilians as possible as a means of futhering their objectives? Does the society that they wish to create by means of violence one that bears any resemblance to anything that resembles a free society, or is what they are fighing to impose its antithesis? Is the reason that they are resorting to violence to fill the gap between their ambitions and what the public will accept without violent compulsion? Do they recognize that the public will reject their vision and the arguments they used to support it if they were forced to use dialogue to persuade them instead of violence? Are there political means available to them that do not require violence in order to bring about political change? Does the society that they are attacking permit vastly more political freedoms than the society that the "freedom fighters" aspire to create? In just about every case, the answer to most, if not all of these questions is not one that comports with the "Freedom Fighter" label that gets applied to most terrorists movements or insurrections. Since Cuba is a politically repressive state where the people neither enjoy political freedoms nor have any means to bring about change through their political system and most of the people who want to see the regime overthrown have ambitions of creating a society with vastly more political and personal freedoms than the population currently enjoys, I'd give anyone who attacked the regime on behalf of these causes more leeway than someone who attacked, say, the Dutch government on pursuit of the same grounds. However, since the "terrorist or freedom fighter" question also involves asking whether or not there's any way to bring about the changes they desire without violence, attacking the Cuban government would fail on that front, and anyone who deliberately attacks civilians to achieve their political ends categorically falls into the former category. So - if the people you were talking about were out to down a planeload of Cuban citizens, then they'd fall into the "terrorist" category. If they were involved in a plot to assasinate Fidel or Raul in some fashion or another that didn't involve targeting civilians, I'd put them into the "Freedom Fighter" category, as the unelected heads of totalitarian/police states are fair game IMO.

Just for the record, I don't like you either, but on the off chance that you were singling me out for censure on account of the fact that I should hold myself to higher standards in the forums where I'm a moderator, and not because of previous beefs or a general disdain for me for some other reason, I'll admit that you have a point. Given the nature of the topic, I should have ignored this statement: " You mean by moral relativism, that when Chinese soldiers kill an unamed Tibetan refugee, it's wrong because the Chinese are "bad guys" but when US soldiers kill an unarmed Iraqi, it's OK because the US soldiers are "good guys"? That kind of moral relativism?" And moved on. I didn't watch the footage. If I had, perhaps I would have conducted myself differently, and I'll admit that I should have. Regards,

Hey - it's the "I'm losing both the argument in one thread so I'll restate it somewhere else" tactic. Neat. The absolutist statements that you were spewing out before you ran away to another thread have way more in common with the "It's in the bible therefore I believe it" perspective that you are referring to than anything that I've articulated. Only people that live in some kind of a cloistered dreamworld or refuse to acknowledge the kind of moral complexity that one normally encounters in the real world, beyond the age of twelve, could possibly hang onto the kind of perspective that you bring to pretty much any political realities that get discussed here from time to time.

Yeah dude. If Americans were on the receiving end of a friendly fire incident like that we'd all be marching in the streets and denouncing them and the Army they're part of as terrorists. Good counterpoint, there, soul-brother. I can't hang with a rhetorical heavyweight of your caliber, so I'll have to sign-off on this one.

How about if you take gratuitous potshots from north of the border, I return the favor, and you lose your cool for a bit and come up with a crazy-ass hypothetical that made me laugh my ass off here in the office? Eh?

This is quite the impressive display of someone uncritically reciting strident positions most often jettisoned shortly after adolescence. Keep it up. Per this reasoning the cop that shoots the guy attempting to murder other people is the moral equal of the murderer, the surgeon who bungles a prodedure and has his patient die on the table is the moral equal of the guys who behead their captives, the pharmacist and the crack dealer are indistinguishable from one another, etc.

No.no.no. Clearly there's no difference whatsoever between an Iraqi that's killed by one of the insurgent groups or death squads that our troops have been fighting since day one killing another Iraqi, and the US Army making it a point to use their weaponry to the utmost to kill every civilian that they can get their hands on. Exactly the same thing. And if that was our objective, surely the best way to go about it would have been deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars in an attempt to build up the country instead of just using B-52's to level all of the population centers. So if Dru is fumbling with his radio while driving, and collides with a van full of prisoners, and one of them escapes as a result of the crash and runs off and kills someone, I fully expect Dru to act in a manner that's consistent with his reasoning and insist that he be tried and convicted for the murder.

Some of my ancestors rode the underground railroad to get away from American genocide. Maybe you would have preferred Uncle Sam to gun them down at the border? Maybe if they could look into what lay ahead and catch a glimpse of their future progeny channeling ChuckD, they would have prefered that as well. Way to appropriate a past you never experienced and hardships that you never suffered to support a dubious point and the use of a hillariously innapropriate source, though.

Maybe he's realized his error, and is searching the internet for "Ace of Base" lyrics so that he'll have something more consistent with his identity to cite in defense of his very closely reasoned "physical = moral" argument.

And if a member of the Canadian Army inadvertently kills an Afghani civilian in the midst of a firefight with an enemy that makes commingling with civilians a central part of their stategy that's.....

See above. Jesus Christ. Now we've got white guys in one of the whitest nations in the world Channeling ChuckD to make their points. Maybe you should have that fear_and_greed guy come over and beat box behind you while you record the video for consumption on you-tube.

Ah yes. Canada. The geopolitical eunuch that never tires of applauding its own chastity. The fact that you guys can't distinguish between physical and moral equivalence is one of the more telling signs that your country essentially gave up any pretence of playing a serious role in world affairs. Better get rid of that Harper guy while you can lest things change.

Yerba mate' is the new latte'.

If it makes you feel better JayB, if it makes you feel better. All sides of the American electorate - from right of Attila the hun (Ayn Rand followers) to those left of Lenin (chomskyists) seem to prefer spectacle to substantive debate now. I could go on and tritely characterize your Hayek quoting cigar smoking conservatism, but it's just another actor in the tragedy, a rather sad and boring opera. You can argue whatever causations you want; it matters not to me - but it illustrates well why we don't give a fuck. Excellent retort. Thanks for the missive from the realm of world-weary, cigarette-on-an-extender smoking/waving dramato-nihilism mixed with a dash of self-dramatizing ennui.

Try learning how to dance. Want respect? Show some. We've gotten the bellicose conservative and the witty condscending conservative to post - now I need a self described independant chiming in with their disgust for tic-tac-toe. Ah, this thread, so perfect, so perfect. We've turned death into sideshow laughter and amusement. What's really a shame is that there's no hot latina socialists nearby that you can impress by pointing out these shortcomings. "Look at them. [shakes head with a slow, wistful thoughtfulness]. Just look at them. They've become so morally anesthetized and easily distracted by the wanton consumerism that their society is errected upon that...[sighs briefly for effect and looks skyward for a moment] they skip from genocide to glib inanities without missing a beat. They're so unlike...[pauses and turns to her]..you"

Except that in so doing they'd nuke the value of these same T-Bills, which make up a non-trivial part of the states assets, and then they'd have to turn around and invest at least as much money buying dollar-denominated assets of some sort to keep their currency stable relative to the dollar, lest they crush the competitiveness of their exports and the leading market for them all at once. The T-Bills are like a financial suicide belt around their waists, and I doubt they'll be inclined to detonate it aboard the American bus any time soon.

Oh nonsense JayB - I'm far to bohemian to hit on disaffected americans. I prefer being rejected by the local latinas who've seen 50 of me. As for the sugarcoated bit - look at our politics. We want people to tell us "the positive" and have a "positive agenda" and value that ahead of the negative. Look at the last election - W's brand of incompetence was preferrably to the absence of an agenda Now back to your standard effete liberal critique, oh coddler of cuban terrorists After I posted this, I realized that I forgot to include drinking the organic yerba-mate out of some authentic indigenous drinking vessel AND using the correct straw/filter thingy. Many apologies for tossing you in with the posers who drink the yerba mate' without the straw thingy while doing the theatrical ritual-denunciation of his yanqui counterparts.

I agree with alot of what you said, but I'd say that acknowledging certain realities and limitations indicates at least a bit of moral and intellectual seriousness. Slapping a "Free Tibet" sticker on the back of your Subaru and calling it good is a completely worthless excercise in moral vanity that's about as likely to be effective as pretending that a "Stop Aids" bumper sticker is likely to make the virus dissapear from Sub-Saharan Africa. The bottom line is that China is never going to "Free Tibet." There are various means that concerned people all over the world can use to convince the Chinese that it's in their interest to treat the Tibetans better, but anyone who wants to change the reality over there should at the very least be serious enough to start by recognizing the facts on the ground, and by differentiating between what's it's possible to accomplish and what it isn't, and what is likely to be effective and what's not. I work with a lot of Chinese folks, and my discussions with them concerning topics like Taiwan makes me think that any who wishes to persuade them to change their behavior will need to be mindful of Chinese sensibilities if they're going to have any chance of being effective.

So typically American. Tell us the hard truth - but make sure it's sugarcoated and doesn't hurt to much Something tells me we've glimpsed a part of Carl's pick up routine when abroad. Choose the appropriate setting, then throw your hands up and exclaim " So typically American. Tell us the hard truth - but make sure it's sugarcoated and doesn't hurt to much!!!!"... Then dig out the latest Chomsky tome, crank-up the Manu Chao on the ipod and slyly but furtively dart eyes about the room to see if the euro/latin/backpacker chicks within earshot happen to notice the dissafected/yankee-dissident/sophisticate/citizen-of-the-world-that-has-yet-to-emigrate-despite-his-grievances who's so different from his more noxious gun-toting-banjo-playing-sisterhumping-fundamentalist countrymen, understands the sheer infallibility of the grand globo-euro-lefto consensus, etc - and stands out from all of the other dissaffected/sophisticate/yankee-dissident types cruising around tyring to churn up a little action with the well-rehearsed Chomsky/Zinn/Said riff while they're traveling between semesters.