Dr_Flash_Amazing

quote: Originally posted by Greg W: Not fair, Iain. I don't think anyone, especially Bush, WANTS war. Please. Are you serious? The guy's first big play in office (aside from weaseling his way in, of course) was the WAR on terrorism. Then he starts in with his WAR on Iraq plan. The Doctor doesn't think Mr. Bush is too concerned about getting a little blood on his hands.

Crotchety Anachronisms (Trask): Forgetting as usual that he is not fact a goat (despite an unrequited attraction to said species), pisses in own face to savor the warm feeling, sighs contentedly and returns to internet search for goat farms.

quote: Originally posted by Greg W: quote:Originally posted by Dr Flash Amazing: Is America not founded on the idea that if one does not like the way things are being done, one might use the means legally afforded as a citizen to change them? Yes, that is true. However, your posts give the impression that there is a lack of understanding about the uniqueness of such a system and how wonderfully lucky we all are to be living in the USA. There, literally, is no other system like ours in the world. I think it is important to accept and appreciate that before embarking on change. $.02 from Greg W Greg, Dr. Flash Amazing agrees with you to a point. The Doctor also believes, however, that many elements of what could be a great democracy have slipped a bit, and feels that to simply accept that we've got it pretty damn good leads to complacency. You got any more change, though? DFA could use a soda about now.

"if the doc doesn't like it here he can leave! go to asia...oh wait there is a big hole in teh ozone there cause of all their pollution...ok go to s. america...oh awit they are slash and burning ALL their resources...or how about western europe...wait there is what 3 trees per square mile there... this is the U.S.A. buddy if you dont like it your commie butt outta here and go live in Iraq... i dont care how much of a hippie you are...they hate white people so much you wouldn't last a minute...and you question the way WE do things? pppssshhhhaa! " That's truly hilarious. Is America not founded on the idea that if one does not like the way things are being done, one might use the means legally afforded as a citizen to change them? The idea of "if you don't like it here, live elsewhere" is rather narrow-minded, given that the beauty of our political system (when it works) is that people can change what they don't like. Also, Dr. Flash Amazing is not a fucking hippie.

quote: Originally posted by trask: The Dr. needs a dose of boot camp. Trask needs a dose of heartfelt punk rock idealism. Oi! Oi! Oi!

It was a very efficient way of destroying their base of operations with minimum American casualties. Next question: Are you suggesting that elimination of Al Queda's primary training, logistics, supply, and concentrations was not militarily appropriate? There we go with the "minimum American casualties" argument. Are American lives worth any more than Afghanistani lives? If so, why? Destruction of Al Qaeda's infrastructure was militarily appropriate, yes, however destruction of civilians is not, and the destruction of Al Qaeda's stuff led to a great deal of innocent lives lost. "And another: If you are not qualified to make judgements concerning an alternate plan, how is it you are qualified to determine the one used was not appropriate? This is very curious." Do you base all of your actions solely on fact? Do you ever act based on feeling or opinion? Or is everything you do dictated by cold logic? Surely you make some decisions based on your feelings? The Doctor finds war and murder to be morally objectionable, and while he understands that it is frequently unavoidable and will never go away, he feels that any military action that is carried out so as to limit civilian casualties is a good start. The fact that so many more innocent people had to die (and how many more will due to the destruction of what was left of Afghanistan's infrastructure?) as a result of our military action makes that action, in the Doctor's eyes, inappropriate. Are the police in a foreign nation, looking for combatants who have declared war on them? nope. The tendency to compare situations which are not analogous doesn't make much sense to me. The point was that we were ostensibly looking for Osama B. Laden and rooting out a government we disagreed with, which is a fairly specific task, so it is analagous. You don't hunt down a criminal by demolishing the country he was last seen in and taking thousands of civilians down in the process. Our attacks were on very specific targets. The Doctor's argument on this point refers to the number of murdered civilians here. The idea being that if we had maybe gone after these targets that were so close to innocent people with some more precise weaponry, we wouldn't have murdered so many people. Who said new tactics couldn't involve old ones, especially when faced with a classic situation of entrenched troops in open country ripe for B52 runs? If we say new tactics are we still allowed to use guns, or is that old tactics too? Ha ha. But really, what new tactics were used in that war? The Doctor is open to the possibility that new tactics were used, but all the media reported was a lot of bombing and propaganda distribution. is it "obvious"? I don't see how obvious it is, when we have wiped his organizational center. These judgement calls you take for granted as proofs continue to amaze me! Didn't another video tape of Bin Laden turn up not too long ago? Hasn't Bush admitted that we are still looking for him? The question of Bin Laden being alive is not a "judgement call ... take[n] for granted as proof;" it is something that is accepted as fact by the president whose actions you're so keen on defending. Using what standard, exactly? How many attacks have there been since 911? how many have we stopped? How many were planned? Isn't this all stuff that needs to be known before we can trot out the "fact" that we haven't done much? DFA already cited the repeated warnings by our Homeland Security guru and his colored charts. Unless you're willing to accept that our own government would fabricate these alleged threats simply to bolster support for its war on terrorism, which the Doctor doubts, given your stringent requirements for factual verification. So assuming that the government is on the level telling us we face continued threats of terrorist attack, does that not indicate that there is still a functional terrorist apparatus out there? DFA knows it's a lot to ask to interpolate things using known information, but humor him, here. It won't kill you to accept something without empirical proof, you know.

"Questions being raised does not indicate their validity. Some folks think raising questions means they are valid simply because they thought of them. I think looking at the context of same, and answers to these questions that get ignored because they are not what the questioners want to hear, makes more sense. A zillion unanswered pointless questions just means unanswered pointless questions." The questions of Bush's ties to and dealings with the energy industry aren't pointless. Do you honestly believe he and his cronies denied Congress access to all those files because it was an issue of national security? It's tempting to accuse you of being naive again, but you seemed genuinely hurt by that before, at least hurt enough to adopt a holier-than-though attitude, so the Doctor will let the question stand. Suffice it to say that politicians have set a precedent of being involved in less than savory activities (Watergate, Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, God knows how many cases of bribery and kickbacks) and the Doctor doesn't see why he should continually allow himself to be duped by believing that this time they're honest and not self-serving corporate whores. As far as DFA is concerned, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

DFA: "How about US citizens who get plunger-fucked by the NYPD, or pumped full of enough bullets to put down a full-grown bus, or dragged out of their cars and beaten (assuming you'll claim Rodney King had it coming, this happened to a 70ish-year-old woman as well, although she only got roughed up by one cop)." MG: Are these acts legal? In Iraq, they are. You seem to be making a common mistake, equating the acts of individuals who commit crimes and are then fully and rightly sanctioned for them, with places where these acts are not crimes and are carried out with impunity. Are you really going to claim that a nation in which these things are illegal is the same as one in which they are not? No, these acts aren't legal, but if you look at these incidents, you don't see the police being too heavily punished for their actions, either. In a nation where the powers that are meant to maintain the law are given a slap on the wrist at most for working above the law, it doesn't make much difference if these behaviours are illegal.

DFA: "Your arguments about Saddam could easily be made about America, as we've sponsored plenty of brutal regimes and bloody coups for our own ends." Goat: You are right. But we're talking about Saddam, not the US, and now he's demonstrably responsible for killing Americans, when you claimed he was no threat to begin with, a charge you respond to now with "oh yea, what about US?". Instead of addressing the point made, where you claimed he is not a threat and I proved he is, you sidestep. So are you saying he is not a threat even though he has proved to be, or what? Hey, you were just arguing that nothing gnarly happens to people at the hands of America. Now who's changing their story? The Doctor was not attempting to sidestep your point, but he was merely illustrating that if we're truly going after Saddam because he's a potential threat to people, then we're hypocrites (see previous statement regarding fucking hypocrites). Also, you don't really prove he's a threat to the US. You're conjecturing that he is, but you don't have any concrete proof, and apparently, neither does GWB. How do you explain the fact that many Republican congressmen aren't even sold on the need to bomb Iraq if the evidence is so clear? Looking at the situation, it seems naive to assume that Bush's Iraqi blood lust is anything but politically motivated. He makes a lot of noise about hunting down Bin Laden, but can't find him. Things are apparently settling down in Afghanistan, but meanwhile questions get raised (again) about the administration's ties to big business, which looks bad politically. Bush is a politician with a reputation to uphold, so why not go after Iraq in the name of justice, and keep Americans feeling safe. After all, we'll never find out about the civilian death toll, anyway. Of course, it may be moot anyway, since it seems that Mr. Hussein is letting NATO come in and have a peek.

"And he's like us? Really? Which presidents have their sons shot? Which presidents watch tapes of gasoline being poured in people's mouths and lit on fire? Which US citizens have their intestines spread on police station walls in DC or their eye poked out for talking bad about the administration? Are we doing this too? NO. We are not. IF you see us as being like Iraq, we have some serious, serious disagreements about our country." How about US citizens who get plunger-fucked by the NYPD, or pumped full of enough bullets to put down a full-grown bus, or dragged out of their cars and beaten (assuming you'll claim Rodney King had it coming, this happened to a 70ish-year-old woman as well, although she only got roughed up by one cop). Then there's the School of the Americas, which puts tactics like torture in the hands of questionably moral military forces. And of course let's not forget the formerly very-chummy-with-America Taliban (ol' Bill Clinton had them as honored guests not too long ago, yes?), a group which for some reason we now condemn for their shitty human rights record, among other things. Speaking of whom, keep your eyes on Afghanistan in the future and watch for a large oil pipeline spanning the country, then ask yourself whether we decimated the country and installed a government we approved of for the good of their country, or the good of our oil companies. Maybe our hands aren't always on the trigger, but they're not too far away. While DFA understands that day-to-day life under GWB is not as shitty as life in Iraq, the US is hardly a gleaming example of innocence, either. And regarding the "fucking hypocrites" remark, that was aimed at the current administration, who are a bunch of fucking hypocrites. Also, we're never going to agree on any of these issues, are we?

quote: Originally posted by Greg W: Duh, it rides through the sky on the back of a giant turtle ...Canadian schools. Greg W Psh. Predictable right-wing conservative Hindu propaganda.

quote: Originally posted by otherguy: I wonder why they call it the Orient Express Maybe it's because of all the Asians falling down it at a fast pace to their deaths. Hopefully your skis wont be as fast and deadly. It's called Orient Express because on the FA, the leader dropped both his tools and his spare, and had to finish the route with his titanium chopsticks. 100% true.

You mean it's not flat?! Time to replace that "disk" with one of them "globes" they're always talking about.

Emoticon Theatre: Hey! Turn that shit down! Turn it down! Grrr! ..... That's more like it. The end. [ 09-17-2002, 09:41 AM: Message edited by: Dr Flash Amazing ]

Shit, the Doctor is up to his capacious cranium in work today, so minimal time to debate, if any. To the doubting wanks the Doc was arguing with before, your argument that there is no conclusive evidence that we're toasting our little planet is weak. If you're going to argue that DFA doesn't have enough evidence that we ARE cooking ourselves, where's your evidence that we're NOT? And, again, look at the website the Doctor linked to before. It's a fucking basic science information site, not the Utne Reader, so your "liberal propaganda" arguments are bullshit. Your arguments about Saddam could easily be made about America, as we've sponsored plenty of brutal regimes and bloody coups for our own ends. Do you think Bush would allow UN weapons inspectors into the US? Yeah, right. Fucking hypocrites. Trask, you are a leg-humping warthog. Back to work, yo.

"Nice answer - another sheep being spoonfed by the liberal media." What liberal media? If you're talking about major media, you've gotta be kidding. Most of the major media outlets are part of huge multi-tentacled corporations which are owned by the uber-rich, a group not usually known for their liberal tendencies. If you're talking about actual "liberal" media sources like IndyMedia.org or Mother Jones, people aren't exactly spoon fed that information, because they're not getting bombarded by it. You have to go out and find "liberal" media, and feed yourself. [ 09-16-2002, 12:37 PM: Message edited by: Dr Flash Amazing ]

quote: Originally posted by jon: quote:Originally posted by Dr Flash Amazing: PowerGel has caffeine in it (some flavors, anyway), and is thus better than GU. Stick your GU up your poo, foo'. GU has caffeine too stupidhead.

quote: Originally posted by Fence Sitter: oh yeah and who do you think would have handled the osama situation better than bush? gore bwa hahaha freaking ha....uhmm..."ladies and gents of america...we are gonna bend over and take it in teh ass and let our thousands of fallen cohorts die for nothing because my media sources say that war is bad and must be soemthing that only republicans do...therefore we will just live in bomb shelters awaiting the next plane to hit our neighborhoods and the survivors better get used to wearing burkas and turbans..." i think i'll take the alternative thank you very much Dr. Media tool Oh, yes, your great white hero has done a ton about Osama Bin Laden, that's for sure. Hey, wait a second ... where is Osama Bin Laden, anyway? Ah, that's right! We haven't actually found him yet! We managed to cluster-bomb and daisy-cutter a World Trade Center's worth of civilians, yet we still seem to be facing a major terrorist threat. Way to go, USA! Wooooooo! It's OK, though, because we're distracted by the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein, which even Republican elected officials aren't buying. Touché, fucker.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/what.html http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html OK, you smartass meathead. The above two links came from the second item DFA clicked on in a google search on "global warming study". It would seem that while there is some contention regarding whether CO2 and other gases are causing the earth to warm up, there is no contention regarding the fact that things like CFC's are wrecking the ozone layer, allowing more UV to get through the atmosphere. OK, so global warming due to CO2 may be a crock. Fine. How about the well-documented link between UV exposure and skin cancer? Is that no big deal to you? How about the fact that the climate has grown rapidly warmer since the 1920's? You know, around the time we started getting after the fossil fuels? It is clear that the above links are not from some paranoid leftist media source, and the information is about the study of climate, not politics. So, the Doctor will bet that there are a shitload more websites out there with more specific information indicating that man is having a detrimental effect on the earth's climate. DFA would love to provide you with more links, but he's busy, so you'll have to wait. Until then, stick your snotty holier-than-though right-winger attitude up your pasty white ass.

quote: Originally posted by Fence Sitter: media tools...can you quote the "scientific" bahaha "proof" that you heard Dan Rather spew on his bull shit liberal media propagandist soap box? no...we just said... "scientist (note scientist not most or even lots) said that global warming has had a negative effect on the climate" now back to greenland in case you didn't know...right now it isn't the most fertile region...but it was proved (and i mean P-R-O-V-E-D) that people farmed there in the past when the climate was warmer... now...where the fucks your proof? If you're going to talk shit, then you can fuck off, shitbrick. And DFA doesn't watch TV, so whatever the alleged liberal propagandist Dan Rather may have said on the idiot box is not known to the Doctor. DFA will find you some information, asshole, and if there's none to be found, then he'll gladly admit that he was mistaken.

quote: Originally posted by MtnGoat: Me: "We'll get used to for one important reason, it happens all the time, we have nothing to do with it, nor can we stop it." whoever it was... "well that's an utterly ridiculous position", Preposterous! Rediculous! got any more amazing proofs up your sleeve? Enlighten us O great one. But without the invective, if you can. How about the fact that there is scads of scientific data indicating that our rampant pollution and consumption of fossil fuels (which leads to pollution) is causing the ozone layer to look like Swiss cheese? Honestly, do you really believe that the megatons of chemicals that humans spew into the atmosphere has nothing to do with climate change? Page top, you Republican motherfuckers! [ 09-16-2002, 05:29 PM: Message edited by: Dr Flash Amazing ]

Sometimes the correct course is not a maverick one. Note how I have not said leadership demands following, I have also not said that leadership demands maverick action. A correct course of action is independent of either because who follows, or doesn't, or how many, simply has no relation to what is supportable objectively. You're not making a point, here, at least not one that's relative to the Doctor's argument. The fact that Bushie is in bed with the energy industry and is as such heavily influenced by what they want is not supportable objectively. Unless you are going to include Clintons *larger* role in Enron's dealings, this isn't a very balanced view of Enron as they relate to presidencies. DFA didn't say a thing about Clinton, bucko, but if he was campaigning on Enron's dirty dollar, then he obviously had some problems too. The point of what DFA said being that if Bush was accepting such blatant favors from the big E, it's pretty likely his decision making is heavily influenced by their wants, and not his own innate leadership. Also, perhaps you'll enlighten DFA as to what Clinton's role in Enron's dealings was, as this is the first the Doctor has heard about it. Why not? If you don't beleive in Kyoto, why *wouldn't* you put bigwigs in a task force? You'd only avoid doing so if you did swallow Kyoto hook line and sinker. Actually, you might appoint someone besides the corporate pimps who hold your leash to an energy policy task force if you had any interest in the wise use of resources, or at least a balanced approach to energy policy. Given Bush's oily background and his buddy-buddy relationship with the energy ind., it's not difficult to reach the conclusion that his rejection of the Kyoto treaty had a lot more to do with money than any apparent flaws in the treaty itself.

"What the rest of the world thinks is of no consequence when it comes to leading. Leadership is not following what everyone else applauds and agrees on but in charting a course that is correct regardless of who agrees at the time." For a president so far in the energy industry's pocket, GWB hardly stands out as an example of maverick, opinion-be-damned leadership. Doing campaign touring in an Enron corporate jet and appointing energy industry bigwigs to energy policy task force positions doesn't do much to suggest that W's reasons for ditching the Kyoto treaty lie entirely in science and logic, either.

quote: Originally posted by jon: I suppose that is the before and after sport climbing pictures huh. Ha ha. More like: Before sport climbing: "horsecock horsecock horsecock" After sport climbing: [ 09-16-2002, 01:43 PM: Message edited by: Dr Flash Amazing ]

quote: Originally posted by trask: quote:Originally posted by Necronomicon: What do you think of my offensive avatar image? I like Bush, what's your point? Trask, you are by nature offensive, and it stands to reason that you'd like that no-good cretin.