Dr_Flash_Amazing

Ah, DFA was hoping he'd have figured out how to get sponsored for himself by now. After all, one never gets far in the spancering business without thinking for oneself, and getting a spancer... err, sponsorship shouldn't just fall in ones lap.

Damn, Necro, you're really down with the spancering! You should get, er, sponsored for all that spancering. (Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Sounds of clearing throat.)

"You should be ashamed of yourself. You know better than to fuck around on this bbs. Only the serious need apply." [ 09-18-2002, 01:44 PM: Message edited by: Dr Flash Amazing ]

Yourself included, there, NecrOsamaBinLadenomicon? Nothing interesting to say, indeed. "What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image? What do you think of my offensive new avatar image?"

quote: Originally posted by trask: Here's a silly song to go with a new black thong Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat... Bow bow bow... Ummm... the other day I had a ricochet biscuit. A ricochet biscuit is the kind of a biscuit that's supposed to bounce back off the wall into your mouth. If it don't bounce back... you go hungry! Bow bow bow... Umm, umm, umm... the other day I had a cool water sandwich and a Sunday-go-to-meetin' bun... Bow bow bow... Hee hee hee hee... What da ya want for nothing? ... a rubber biscuit? Bow bow bow... Whatchootalkin'about, Willis?

Hey, MtnGoat - The Doctor was mulling over various bits of things discussed in this thread yesterday, and had a question about your objectivistness. As the Doctor recalls, you were doing a fine and apparently well-read job of refuting the Doctor's arguments and supporting the need for war, and the need to wage war Iraq, or at least supporting the possibility. The Doctor also recalls a few instances in which you referred to not wishing to impose your will or your parameters for a good life on others via democracy and laws. So it occurred to DFA to wonder why you would support war, which seems to the Doctor to be the ultimate manifestation of imposing your will on someone else; by not simply negatively affecting their lifestyle , but by taking their life altogether. The Doctor does not understand how you can justify killing as a means to get ones way but not the inconvenience of something like a law you may find to be limiting.

Ah, DFA knows that. He was making like to joke. You know, like instead of the half-ropes being used side by side, that they were being tied end to end to make one full-length rope. Apparently this was a little too subtle for certain cave-dwelling folk to grasp ...

Better yet, learn to snowboard, and avoid the perilous dork-trap that is two sticks.

It has come to the attention of Dr. Flash Amazing that rope manufacturers are now producing single, full-length ropes, eliminating the previous need to buy two halves and tie them together! Saves on all that tedious knot-tying, and of course having to pass the knot whilst belaying. Ingenious!

DFA:"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." MG: "You have never addressed the alternative plan you had, this is the second time I'm asking you to do so." The Doctor is not a politician or an expert on foreign policy, so it's doubtful that he could come up with a fully functional alternative. However, engaging a ragtag army of AK-toting Afghans intermixed with civilians by dropping huge bombs on them doesn't seem like the most efficient way of rooting out who we're looking for. When the police are looking for suspects, do they blow up the houses of those they suspect, and then look for the evidence? Perhaps smaller groups of soldiers launching more precise attacks on specific targets would have been a good start. Freezing the terrorists' assets seemed like a great idea, too, although it doesn't seem to have been too successful. For all the rhetoric about how this is a new kind of war requiring new tactics, why did we charge in with the B-52's (Love shack, baby, love shack!) and start cluster-bombing? It's obvious that the tactics we used haven't done much as far as turning up or eliminating Bin Laden. Additionally, we seem to be threatened by potential terrorist action quite a lot lately (see Tom Ridge's brilliant color-coded alert system), so it would seem that aside from not finding Bin Laden, we haven't done much to mitigate the threat against us, either. Is this the mark of an effective military campaign?

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.