Further, we weren't doing that while we were opposing communism. Are you having trouble grasping this concept? Slavery was bad. A major war was fought at least partially to end it? Sure, it was an imperfect solution, and the racism still survives today. But slavery was ended. Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be done to bring back Native Americans.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Oh, and you should note that even on one page you pointed at, "only" (I do not belittle it) a half million people died in Russia at Stalin's orders. The vast majority died because of his political decisions, as side effects, in starvation and such. In vietnam we killed 1 to 3 million people (depending on who you listen to) at our government's orders. And I don't think anyone's done the death tolls by starvation in the various areas which economies we've ruiined. We blow Stalin's (already horrific) death toll out of proportion. Similarly China's -- even had Mao Ze Dong made better decisions, China's situation was crap. Millions were going to die. Do we know how many fewer would have died? No.
And yes, Stalin was much worse than us, insofar as the death tolls he inflicted in war against us are around as bad as we inflicted as war against him, and he did have nigh a half million people killed in cold blood, which we haven't done in well over 100 years.
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posted
perhaps more important that which is the greater relative threat is the fact that we have a certain amount of control over how we react, while we don't have much control over the existence of terrorism.
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Way to keep changing the subject until you can come up with a point that can't be argued with,folks fact#1 corrupt politicians in the United States have done bad things (DUH!) fact#2 Scared politicians have done stupid things(DUH!) fact#3 Leaders of this country have occaisonally tried very hard in the last 70 years to meddle in affairs not neccessarily directly concerning them in hopes of preventing impending disaster from very real threats(DUH! DUH! DUH!) fact#4 The soviet bloc was as real a threat to mankind's survival and/or freedom as there has ever been, and probably ever will be(DUH!) fact#5 Anybody comparing Stalin to any US leader or leaders as far as extent of attroceties should go look up a few well documented figures, and anybody comparing him with regard to level of attroceties should probably attempt to purchase a new brain. One thing to effect the death by the the thousands people of your wrongly percieved "enemies" or of other lands for the supposed "greater good", but more or less accidentally, quite another to effect the death of your own people by the million and to force them into slavery(DUH!) fact#6 What was The plight of the American indians is not remotely compareable to the Soviet Bloc, and it is near exactly comparable to the vast majority of the muslim world, but sorry not Al Qaida(DUH!)
posted
Yup, no doubt about it, we have make a lot of mistakes. But we have done a lot of really really great things too. And the fact that we can sit around and contemplate our collective navel and criticize our leaders without fear of the big bad secret police huffing and puffing and blowing our house down in the middle of the night is a pretty good indication that the USA is still a really great country in which to live.
And lets not make any mistake about this: "The only people to blame for terrorism are the terrorists."
That is from an article by OSC entitled "How Bush Caused 9/11." It is on his Links page under "The Ornery American" or click on the URL below.
posted
Whenever I read these conversations about the history of the US I'm always torn between who I find most irritating. Those who want to make the US out to be a blood thirsty monster where most rational people realize that by virtue of being a/the global superpower (depending on where we are in history) they only ever have lose/lose situations to work with. Or those who are always arguing that yeah sure, we made mistakes, but look at these guys, they're worse! Or the ever popular, yes we've made mistakes but here's all the ways we're wonderful and great! You know, it's Ok to say bad things about your country. Chill.
I guess I'm just irritated with people who look at history by starting with a conclusion and working backwards.
edit: added a bit
[ May 31, 2004, 12:21 PM: Message edited by: Bob the Lawyer ]
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:You know, it's Ok to say bad things about your country. Chill.
Of course it is. No one here has argued that it's not. Nor has anyone said that evil done by another country justifies evil done by us. Edit: And that statement itself contains the implicit assumption that evil has been done by us.
posted
I'm curious, Dags, have you always been so concerned with how people say things? Or has it just started since taking the law degree?
I honestly have no real agenda for asking this, just wondering if people choose the best path for their mind or if their mind moulds to the path they choose.
In other words, it's a completely off topic derailment.
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I've always been concerned about the use of language in political discourse. I opposed the demonization of Clinton (while still opposing most of his policies); I also opposed the disingenuous rationalization of his conduct as simply an extra-marital affair. I’m also concerned with the casual assumptions about other people’s motives and either the inability or lack of desire to come to understand others’ motivations.
On this board, there’s a set of members who consistently assign the basest motives to people who disagree with them on certain issues. People who hold the opposing views either have these base motives or are the hapless dupes of those who hold them.
Even worse are the absolute mischaracterizations of opponents’ positions or facts which are relevant to the debate, which happens distressingly often here. Sometimes it’s merely ignorance; too often, it’s deliberate. I’m counting as deliberate those times when a person’s incorrect post is challenged with evidence and the original poster doesn’t bother to either admit wrongdoing or produce further evidence.
Such an atmosphere makes it impossible to have meaningful discourse. I can swap insults with the best of them. I try to keep the impulse in check in the interests of preserving this as a forum for viable debate. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to restrain myself. Pointing out such instances is my alternative to insulting back.
Law school has made me more aware of the uses of precise language, but I try not to just nitpick meanings. If I’m arguing over a particular term, it’s because I believe there are substantive issues at stake.
Dagonee Edit: To more fully answer your question, the precision of legal language (at least, the precision it attempts to maintain) was one of the things that attracted me to law. My prior career did a lot of data and object modeling. The idea of naming a concept and defining how it behaves has always fascinated me.
posted
"The means are not justified by the ends but they are justified by desperation and a lack of other visible options."
This is basically babbling, isn't it? I mean, you appear to be saying that ends don't justify the means unless you really, really need those ends.
*rolls eyes*
So, let me repeat my earlier question: how bad does a threat to our security and/or way of life have to be before we are justified in using any and all means to destroy that threat? If there IS no point at which all means are justified, isn't that basically the same as admitting, straight-up, that there is some kind of moral calculus involved here?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Oh, and you're quite right on the intentional famine thing. I've never thought Stalin was a good guy or a better guy than us in any way. However, if anything, that episode underscores how un-communist the USSR was.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
OK, but my point was not that Stalin wasn't better it was that he was worse. A whole lot worse. Oh and nothing against Communism here, I'm a communist myself, it just doesn't really work right on a large scale of government, but Stalin and Mao did not even try.
From TD's post:
quote: "The means are not justified by the ends but they are justified by desperation and a lack of other visible options."
This is basically babbling, isn't it? I mean, you appear to be saying that ends don't justify the means unless you really, really need those ends.
No, it's not babbling. Maybe I should have left out the "visible", I don't know, might have been clearer what I meant that way. The ends have nothing to do with it. The means(individual acts) justify themselves if there's no better option, which sometimes there isn't one that can be reasonably expected to be apparent enough to be successful. I would have thought my example of someone killing for his family would have been sufficient explanation.
quote: Or those who are always arguing that yeah sure, we made mistakes, but look at these guys, they're worse! Or the ever popular, yes we've made mistakes but here's all the ways we're wonderful and great!
I've got an idea, Bob, go back and read an understand what was said on this thread and then post, it does wonders for me. There is a valid point here and that is that it would really suck to be living under the soviet tyrant or more likely to all have been blasted into the stone age along with the rest of the human race. If you think that running a world superpower is a walk in the park, then I'm glad you weren't any large part of the nation's leadership during the cold war, or we might all be dead. The fate of the entire world is not to be taken lightly. So if, and I say if, Atroceties are commited with that end in mind, it does not make them justifiable, but it does make them understandable, even if not forgivable.
quote: You know, it's Ok to say bad things about your country. Chill.
It's not really Ok to say lies about your country, though, and half truths in a case like this can be just as bad, especially when you take them and mistakenly equate them to current circumstances. At the very least, you destroy the validity of your point by doing so. Threats and problems have to be recognized and they have to be dealt with, and anybody who fails to respect that is ridiculous. How to deal with the problems, though, there's a subject for inteligent debate. But seriously folks who in their right mind really thinks that Al Qaida is a threat of the same magnitude as the USSR? Likewise who believes Al Qaida is not a serious threat to the lives of the people of the world? Well then I'm saying it's a problem that has to be dealt with, so how?
Posts: 1103 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
As you may have already read, kerinin, "The Patterns of Global Terrorism report" was a "big mistake" according to Secretary of State ColinPowell. Whether deliberately or not, "The report also showed the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died" which indicates that: The criteria for defining an incident as a terrorist act had been changed so that eg sabotage against a USmultinational corporation's oil pipelines in Columbia is no longer considered terrorism; And/or the DubyaAdministration has radicalized terrorists even further toward the attitude that murder is the prefered method of political protest because crimes against property are no longer considered sufficient.
Either way, the old figures..."did not include most of the attacks in Iraq" and placed no emphasis on the fact that "the report counted 82 anti-U.S. attacks around the world in 2003, up from 77 in 2002" which is a 6.5% increase. And "Thirty-five American citizens died in terrorist attacks last year." added to "the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died" implies that at least 47 foreign nationals (excluding Iraqis) working for the US also died.
quote:A senior US intelligence official....with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment...thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign....with the intention...of keeping the same[DubyaAdministration]one in place. "[terrorists] can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now....One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."
quote: Ask the Hungarians in '56 or the Czechs in '63. Ask the people of Berlin in '48.
I spent the first semester of last year in Budapest Hungary. People are still afraid to talk badly about communism. They always said, "We were the happiest block of communism." I tried to talk to my teachers about it, but only one would speak about it. And believe me, she spoke very badly about communism. But the others, they wouldnt speak negatively about it, as if they had a better life under communism. Which is def not true considering the city is just now repairing bullet holes from WW2 and the 1956 revolution.
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posted
You know, if Bush had just sat back and allowed Saddam to launch some sort of attack on US interests the liberals here would be just as quick to ask why he didn't take action in the first place agaist Saddam. Notice that when his father didn't take Saddam out in 1991 it was liberals who blamed him for the massacre of Iraqis by Saddam that followed.
Posts: 232 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Oh, and you're quite right on the intentional famine thing. I've never thought Stalin was a good guy or a better guy than us in any way. However, if anything, that episode underscores how un-communist the USSR was.
Trýing to say that Stalin did not represent what communism was all about is like saying Hitler didn't try to put the principles of Darwin into political practice.
Posts: 232 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Yes, I have read Marx and I have studied Marxist Leninism and Mao's writings (gotta admit every time I have been to Beijing or Moscow they have the old boys under renovation and I have not been able to view their bodies) as well as the Fabians, etc. There is a great danger when you start messing with Utopianism on a grand scale because then you wind up with fanatics that are willing to trample individuality to attain what they perceive as worthy ideals.
quote:allowed Saddam to launch some sort of attack on US interests
um, i don't think even bush ever alleged that we needed to attack iraq out of fear that saddam was going to launch an attack against us.
quote:Notice that when his father didn't take Saddam out in 1991 it was liberals who blamed him for the massacre of Iraqis by Saddam that followed.
so are you saying that "liberals" were wrong in condemning the fact that saddam was left in power? isn't this whole mess we're in now the result of having left him in power for the past decade or so while starving his population to death?
oh wait, i guess we did get a lot of cheap oil through the oil-for-food program, and we did manage to keep the country under wraps by isolating and starving them to death, and they certainly weren't much of a military threat (we of course got to operate military bases in the region), so yeah, i guess you're right: leaving saddam in power was a great idea. leaving a brutal dictator in power is a small price to pay for cheap oil and subdued adversaries...
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:you wind up with fanatics that are willing to trample individuality to attain what they perceive as worthy ideals
well here's the essence of our disagreement; i say that stalin used the rhetoric of communism as a means to excercise absolute power; that is ultimate goal was personal aggrandizement and control. you seem to be arguing that he honestly believed that he was pursuing "worthy ideals", and was simply misguided in his efforts.
i think it's pretty clear that marxist communism is a pipe dream, but that doesn't mean that the totalitarian regimes using it as rhetoric have anything to do with the ideas themselves.
quote:oh wait, i guess we did get a lot of cheap oil through the oil-for-food program, and we did manage to keep the country under wraps by isolating and starving them to death, and they certainly weren't much of a military threat (we of course got to operate military bases in the region), so yeah, i guess you're right: leaving saddam in power was a great idea. leaving a brutal dictator in power is a small price to pay for cheap oil and subdued adversaries...
Kerinin
So who was it who diverted money from his people and put it into palaces, weapons and his own bank account? And I guess it was a good Democratic policy since Madaline Albright and Bill Clinton supported it.
And would you have supported a full scale invasion of Iraq in 1991? And if so, why would you not support President Bush doing it in 2003, like John Kerry did?
quote:So who was it who diverted money from his people and put it into palaces, weapons and his own bank account
yes, saddam was a bad man, nobody disagrees with you here, in fact i think the whole point of my post was that Bush senior should NOT have left him in power. i'm not a democrat, and i fail to see what clinton's continuation of Bush sr.'s policy has to do with the discussion.
quote:And would you have supported a full scale invasion of Iraq in 1991? And if so, why would you not support President Bush doing it in 2003, like John Kerry did?
i don't know if i would have supported the first war, i was too young to really know what was going on. i do not think it was a good idea to have left saddam in power. that, however, is not in itself justification for having gone to war the second time. the question is not "should saddam be in power", the question is "is it in our best interest to remove saddam from power", and i believe the answer is "no".
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I agree with suntranafs. I got an E-mail once thats kinda relevent to this.
Question: You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children.. Suddenly, a dangerous looking man with a huge knife comes around the corner and is running at you while screaming obscenities. In your hand is a Glock .40 and you are an expert shot. You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family. What do you do? ________________________________________________________________ Liberal Answer:
Well, that's not enough information to answer the question! Does the man look poor or oppressed? Have I ever done anything to him that is inspiring him to attack? Could we run away? What does my wife think? What about the kids? Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand? What does the law say about this situation? Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me? Does he definitely want to kill me or would he just be content to wound me? If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he was stabbing me? This is all so confusing! I need to debate this with some friends for a few days to try to come to a conclusion. ____________________________________________________________ Conservative Answer:
posted
The problem, Caitlin, is that you so rarely see the flip side of that argument:
quote: A man rounds the corner, shouts something, and rushes at your wife. What do you do?
Conservative Answer: BANG! Liberal Answer: I pause for a second to assess the situation, and then help him push her out of the way of the falling debris.
While haste has its place, it's not called for in all cases.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Actually, one of the essences of conservatism is a distrust for actions which create irreversible change before those actions can be fully studied. So no bang-bang.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Yeah, Dag, and communism is all about economic utopia.
Seriously, I know you're right -- but practicing and self-identified conservatives are no longer associated with the description you used.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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The revision now counts "208 terrorist attacks as having occurred in 2003, with 625 dead." -- "18 more total events, five more significant events and 13 more nonsignificant events than originally reported" -- than the April original which " counted 307 deaths in a total of 190 terror attacks."
Instead of "the lowest total since 1969" as was stated in the original report, the revision shows that "...the number of significant attacks represented a 36 percent increase over 2001, up from 124 that year."
Among terrorist attacks not counted in the original, "a car bomb that exploded in a housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and a series of attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, all of which took place in November." Terrorist attacks and terrorism casualties in Iraq remain uncounted in the revision.
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