ivan

sounds like reprimanding a guy in a wheel chair, his spinal chord severed, for turning to drink in desperation and depression - "what's the matter, iron-sides, you gonna let something that happened a long time ago keep you from running?"

fuck, how did i miss this gem for so long?!?

is that infinite bliss?

seems odd they would consider closing beacon and NOT bringing back the old day-use fee? (that was so neatly avoided for climbers by parking 30 yards down the road )

speaking of orwell, i think what benefit gitmo may have that they don't want to admit is that it helps further the death and destruction that tyranny needs to enrich and justify itself - remember in 1984? it didn't matter who the enemy was, or what the fight was about, just that war never stopped: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

he may have hated us, but it was a vague, imprecise, unmotivated sort of hatred, the kind of hatred that could do us no harm i don't miss apalachia much at all, or the ghettoes i taught in either - a far more capital place out here by far - i find i've had fewer guns pulled on me in the wilderness here

you and gandhi woulda gotten along great i think you may be elevating yourself to the position of the "only enlightened one" a bit in error - do you really not think there are a lot of americans who live in fear everday? who don't endure hardship? have you been through our urban ghettoes? worked in them for years? driven through sioux indian reservations? hiked through bum-fuck appalachia? we have plenty of problems we can deal with on our domestic front w/o going a-conquering oversees to make discretionary enemies. and joe-mohammaed who's busy oppresing his harem wouldn't be our enemy if we weren't in his place, fucking w/ his shit (and do you expect me to believe that ancient bullshit that, in the big picture, we're over there to make his and his bitches lives better? that its all a big selfless enterprise?)

i'm curious, how would you quantify "amazingly few incidents?" seems like u.s. history is chock-full of them, from the pilgrims poisoning the indians w/ spiked wine, the sand creek massacre (another boondoogle which no one paid for, despite all the congressional oversight you could shake a stick it), sherman's march to the sea, the phillipine insurrection, the titanic # of civilians killed by indiscriminate u.s. aerial bombardment in asia and europe during world war 2, vietnam (which had god knows how many dozen more my lai's that never made the papers as a large number of the combat vets from that war i've met attest to w/ our "free fire zones", not to mention the bombing of the north (remember johnson's "polish school?") and then finally to this war - i've seen plenty of pictures of fried civilians, headless kids and old folks, and directly from the soldiers who took the pictures (my own brother, a cav officer in 2003, among them) so what does "amazingly fewer" mean again? amazingly fewer than in operation barbarossa? okay, glad to see we're setting the bar so high and to be clear, it's not so much that i blame the private piles of the us military - he's supposed to a sadistic attack-dog ready to do incredible, indiscriminate violence when his master drops the leash - it's not in the nature of war to be restrained and intelligent in the use of lethal force - which makes it all the more imperative that the leash be held onto tightly except in the most dire of circumnstances

huh? we pumped plenty of cash and weapons to him as our puppet to counter-balance iran, another beast of our own making hey, it might be wikipedia, but it can't ALL by lies, eh? and just for fun...it's alwasy fun to see rummy hanging out w/ the big H! [video:youtube]

man, that'd be terrible if there were no rangers around to enforce the climbing ban...especially after i lose my job anyhow to massive school-cuts the article was a trifle unclear - sounds kinda like just the campgrounds would be closed? i doubt they'd be keeping the gate on the hiking trail locked, probably just locking the bathrooms and gating the road up to the campground. the fisherman would probably go fucking beserk if they were somehow prevented from putting in at the dock there, no?

the nodder?!?

i have no illusions about there being fewer billious bastards or peevish pricks such as yourselves anywhere else on the globe...except maybe the federated states of micronesia, but i hear there's no climbing to be had there

orwell's quote is a bit of a catch-22, no? for when we do rough violence to people in the middle of the night, we make those people want to do us harm. we terrorize them prophylactically. we congragulate ourselves for stopping enemies we created in the first place.

When their "rights" conflict with my (our) right to live (ie: they want to kill us as in the picture above) then I become more concerned about enshrined laws that apply here and less about extraneous law as it exists elsewhere. furthermore, i find it disturbing that you don't see how these words you just uttered are exactly that same that every tyrant in history has used to justify their tyranny coincidentally, given the drift of this thread, tomorrow's the anniversary of the my lai massacre, a fine example of our gifts to the world and respect for non-american lives (as well as the rule of law, given that no american was given more than a symbolic punishment for cold-blooded, calculated murder of a sort that would have made even a nazi smile) - interestingly, it is also the anniversary of saddam's halabja mass-murder, committed by a puppet of american foreign policy at the time, and a crime that we did not decry until it was convenient to off him (funny that we could make him pay the ultimate price, but not our own stooges, eh?) what was that aobu tus being the bestest country in the world again? and why do we even deserve protecting when we do fucked up shit like this?

i see no strawman beyond the one i'm watching on tv w/ me daughter right now i find it disturbing that you think that 5 billion people in this world should have fewer rights than yourself, especially when the rights in question were established in law millienia ago

Easy enough. Here are a couple of little gems: your first sample makes no mention of a dying american empire - the second one was not exactly a serious statement, given the subject

gay man-hating republicunt?

he's on bill maher all the time, and funny as phuck - if only we could all be so amiable, despite our differing politics.

to my mind, his biggest qualification is that you're willing to listen. at some level, you must enjoy this, b/c you seem to stick around all the time despite apparently having many other demands on your life? and since when do you have to be an expert to have an opinion? having an opinion, having it attacked, researching it, defending it - this is all part of the educational process that actually MAKES one an expert, yes?

Who did they execute? The Sudan handed up OBL on a platter and Clinton turned them down. End of story, really. tim mcveigh? okay, so it 4 months into bush's watch, but he'd been arrested, tried and sentenced under clinton's a.g., yes? he did also try to kill osama.

whaaa? 9/11 was the result of decades of american-escapades in the middle east - it was you conservative boys that first put saddam and osama on the payroll, no? it was you who occupied saudi arabia? you who overthrew a democratic iranian gov in favor of a thug? do you really think there was no connection between those things and 9/11?

Are you kidding? Clinton already tried what you propose--and this was the result: yes, it does seem strange you'd denigrate the clinton admin for dealing w/ terrorists when they did in fact put several terrorists behind bars/execute them, had al-queda high on the radar, and largely ignored a chickenhawk saddam

maybe next time litter thousands of alka-seltzer tablets over the top of the cache?

ANYTHING!

tvash as mcmurphy: "the next girl i get into is gonna light up like a slot machine and pay off in silver dollars!"