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Invisiblesilversoul7
Chill the FuckOut!
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Registered: 10/10/02
Posts: 27,301
Loc: mndfreeze's puppet army
Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: Phred]
    #3080219 - 09/01/04 09:42 PM (19 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

pinksharkmark said:
deafpanda writes:

But blacks in the US are also poorer, on average, than their white countrymen, and crime is closely correlated with poverty.

Why is Sweden's crime rate so low, then? American blacks, on average, are wealthier than the Swedes, on average. Yet black crime rate is substantially higher than the Swedish crime rate.

pinky



I think it's not so much about being poor itself as it is about being poor compared to those around you.


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"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."--Voltaire

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OfflinePhred
Fred's son
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Registered: 10/18/00
Posts: 12,949
Loc: Dominican Republic
Last seen: 9 years, 2 months
Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: silversoul7]
    #3080235 - 09/01/04 09:46 PM (19 years, 6 months ago)

So -- as mushmaster so astutely observed -- we're talking not about poverty, but about envy.

pinky


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Invisiblesilversoul7
Chill the FuckOut!
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Registered: 10/10/02
Posts: 27,301
Loc: mndfreeze's puppet army
Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: Phred]
    #3080267 - 09/01/04 09:54 PM (19 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

pinksharkmark said:
So -- as mushmaster so astutely observed -- we're talking not about poverty, but about envy.



Sort of. I think it probably has to do with the sense of hopelessness you get knowing that the other guy is always going to have it better than you. Many poor people find that stealing, drug dealing, and prostitution are the most expedient ways of keeping up with the Jones's, and in such a materialistic society as we have here, one's self-worth is often determined by one's wealth. I suppose you could call that envy.


--------------------


"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."--Voltaire

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Offlinedeafpanda
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Registered: 05/07/04
Posts: 984
Loc: Inguland
Last seen: 12 years, 5 months
Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: RandalFlagg]
    #3081515 - 09/02/04 06:00 AM (19 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

3. I believe that the extreme Left has a distaste for religion(or
any type of established institution that exerts control and influence).




This may be true, but have you seen the extreme right? If you judge a population by its most extreme members, you won't find much worth exploring.

Quote:

The threat of supernatural punishment, supernatural rewards, and an
absolute unquestionable morality that is enforced by an omnipotent
and immensely superior being are the only things that seem to keep
people in line in the long run




Could be. Lets hope not, more and more people are atheist these days, so if you're right, god help us. I'm not sure you are though.

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Invisiblefastfred
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Registered: 05/17/04
Posts: 6,899
Loc: Dark side of the moon
Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: deafpanda]
    #3081587 - 09/02/04 06:31 AM (19 years, 6 months ago)

Brights actually have a majority in the US now... It's sad that they're not more organized.

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OfflinePhred
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Registered: 10/18/00
Posts: 12,949
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Re: Bush Suggests War on Terror Can't be Won [Re: Phred]
    #3090839 - 09/04/04 10:22 AM (19 years, 6 months ago)

In my previous post (the one this one replies to), I had given a reason why terrorism was such a difficult tactic to counter. Clifford D. May http://www.townhall.com/columnists/cliffordmay/cm20040902.shtml points out other reasons: (the bolded parts are my emphasis)

As President Clinton might say: "It depends on what the meaning of 'win' is."

By now, you've no doubt read all about it: President Bush told NBC's Matt Lauer that he didn't think America could win the War on Terrorism. Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards accused Bush of declaring defeat.

Bush then told Rush Limbaugh that what he meant to say was that the current global conflict is not like World War II. No enemy general is going to hand over his weapons in ceremonial surrender.

But that's not how the last great international struggle ended either. The Cold War?- which some historians now call World War III?- concluded when the Soviet Union collapsed and ordinary citizens smashed the Berlin Wall into paper weights.?

In the War on Terrorism -- or World War IV -- the Free World is battling totalitarian ideologies that have borrowed freely from both Communism and Nazism, but which stake their claim to legitimacy on a radical interpretation of Islam and Islam's doctrine of jihad, or holy war.

Terrorism?- the deliberate slaughter of civilians by combatants disguising themselves as civilians ? is simply the means by which the Jihadis believe they can defeat decadent, infidel democracies.?

And terrorism is a weapon the Jihadis believe they have all to themselves ? infidels, they are confident, will not indiscriminately slaughter them and their families. Our reluctance to use this weapon is, in their view, a symptom of our weakness.?

Terrorism is not a new weapon. But on 9/11, terrorists armed with hijacked passenger jets wreaked havoc on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists armed with nuclear, chemical or biological Weapons of Mass Destruction would escalate such crimes to apocalyptic levels.?

Some analysts believe that such an attack in all but inevitable. The only hope of preventing it is to aggressively ? and preemptively -- hunt down terrorists cell by cell, individual by individual, and target dictators who support terrorists and might supply them with WMDs.

That, by the way, is the link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. After that atrocity, Saddam had to be viewed through a sharper lens, his menace measured by a different yardstick. So, too, North Korea's Kim Jung Il and the mullahs of Iran. This seems a simple proposition yet many otherwise intelligent people fail to grasp it.

Winning World War IV also requires de-legitimizing terrorism. Terrorism today is a thriving enterprise because for at least three decades terrorists have been rewarded. Republicans and Democrats alike have been responsible for this error. Europeans even more so.

Almost exactly 32 years ago, Palestinian terrorists entered the Olympic Village in Munich and massacred 11 innocent Israeli athletes. That act of mass murder was not considered sufficiently serious to merit canceling the Olympics -- or even postponing it for a day.

The group responsible for the killings, the Palestine Liberation Organization, received more encouragement than condemnation. Two years later, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited to address the UN. The PLO was received in the General Assembly and ?the question of Palestine? was introduced on the agenda.

A few years later, Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize. Abu Daoud ? the unrepentant terrorist who planned the 1972 massacres -- received the Palestinian Prize for Culture.??

And everyone else in the world with grievances and complaints learned the rules: Terrorism is acceptable. Terrorism works. Terrorism succeeds -- like nothing else. So why not employ it?

Why not indeed? Over the years that followed, to the extent terrorists were pursued, it was less by soldiers, commandos and spies than by lawyers armed with subpoenas. Terrorists and their masters were seldom punished. There is a name for such policies: Appeasement.

Clearly, we need new and better policies. Surely, the United States needs to develop intelligence and clandestine services capable of ferreting out terrorists wherever they hide, train and plot.

There must be expansion of our now-tiny Special Forces, the component of the military machine best equipped to fight 21st century warfare.

A War of Ideas must be fought as well. It must stop being socially acceptable to excuse terrorism (e.g.: ?One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter;? ?They must be so desperate!?). Yes, in the past, terrorism has been condoned many times in many places. But morality evolves. Not so long ago, genocide, slavery and piracy also were common practices. Should that mean that we tolerate those evils forever, too?

Terrorism must come to be seen as not just a crime but also a blunder. It must be demonstrated repeatedly that terrorism sets back the cause in whose name it is committed ? no matter how righteous some people may believe that cause to be.

Eventually, the extremist, supremacist, totalitarian ideologies championed by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs and others must be regarded as a dead end, figuratively and literally.?

Bin Laden famously said, ?When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they naturally choose the strong horse.? He understands the dynamics of public persuasion better than many State Department officials. It falls to America to lead the effort to demonstrate that freedom and democracy are the strongest horses on the track.?

In the 20th century, America and its friends defeated both Communism and Nazism. There are still Communists and Nazis in the world but their movements are weak and unappealing to all but a lunatic fringe.

Memo to the candidates: This is what ?win? means. Tell us you understand. Tell us you'll do what it takes.

------------------------------------------------------------

May makes some points that correspond all too well with so many comments which appear on this board. I call it the "obligatory Lefty throat-clearing" -- i.e. "Yes, of course, we all must condemn terrorism, but.... yadda yadda yadda," where the "yadda yadda yadda" is yet another repetition of some variant of as "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," or "you surely must understand that these people are angry," or "Israel has killed civilians, too, ya know," or "the US wiped out the Indians" or 'The Spanish Inquisition burned people at the stake" or whatever.

The reasons there will always be terrorists:

- there is virtually no downside to it from the point of view of the terrorists (or at least there was no such downside before Bush's response)
- the moral relativists honestly see no difference between executing schoolchildren and killing civilians with a stray bomb aimed at a different target
- the terrorists know that the West refuses to adopt their tactics
- terrorism is rewarded (see the deification of Arafat, or the capitulation of Spain and the Philippines for more recent examples).

This is why even if we ignore Bush's answering in the context of "four years", his estimation of the problem was accurate -- the war against the terrorists cannot be won -- without a radical shift in the attitude a large part of the world has towards terrorism.

pinky


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