In a way Scahill is like a less educated\refined version of Noam Chomsky. He does good investigative work, and dedicates enormous energy into exposing and spotlighting the bad things that America does. That has a place, but without a similarly harsh and critical light being cast on America's targets/enemies it becomes propaganda.

Jeremy says he wouldn't work with Charles Manson to oppose trump, fair enough. What about kind of working with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Say, at least agreeing not to attack Stalin while you both deal with Hitler?

The world is incredibly complicated and the singular and lone focus on American mistakes paints a deceptive picture. Pointing out the problems with America's war in Iraq, like torture and Quantanamo and declaring these as so immoral we needn't even look at Saddam's past is propaganda. Saddam waged two campaigns of genocide against his own people. When America saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib, they shut it down and attempted to punish those responsible. When Saddam's brother used chemical weapons to exterminate Kurdish civilians Saddam commended him for it. Guantanamo is bad, but it doesn't mean we should fail to acknowledge the concentration camps that Saddam operated during his genocide of the Kurds. It doesn't mean it's unfair to observe that conditions in Saddam's prisons across the country were far more cruel during his entire reign.

There's a nuanced place here that Scahill and Chomsky and pundits like them just fail to acknowledge and encourages inaction at times were the lesser evil may well be for America to do something, even if aborting Gadafi's genocide doesn't make Libya a paradise after.

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I finally girded myself and read the babe article. So painful on so many levels.

We are so clueless as human beings, I swear.

The one thing that I hadn't read about before was the screenshot of the text she wrote him the next day. She was quoted as saying, in several accounts, that while it might have been fun for him, it wasn't for her. Even in the babe article, it lists her response as beginning that way.

What I don't remember reading anywhere else was this shortened excerpt:

Aziz: Hey it was fun meeting you last night. [Something about cameras]

Grace: Hey Aziz, it was fun meeting you too. [Something in response to cameras]

Oh dear. This is what I have been saying since #metoo has started.

Our socialization has us saying, politely, "it was fun meeting you".

No. No it wasn't. And yet she felt compelled socially -- and was helped in crafting a response by her friends, according to babe! -- to soften the truth, which came next. Clearly and directly.

Women need to learn to be more direct and less polite. And we need to train our girls early about their right to speak their truth.

I don't blame Grace for her frozen inaction. She wasn't taught anything different as a child.

Let's teach our children to speak their truth, yeah?

By "just fine" I meant surviving, which for natural animals as groups today is actually doing far better than most.

Is it a bad thing that there are no more stone age tribes? By my estimation, absolutely. I value diversity for many reasons, but mostly as a safety net against the totally unpredictable. For some unfathomable reason, something about being pure stone age might be advantageous.

I 100% agree about the option part, but offering them that option itself destroys their world viewpoint and eventually their civilization, proven time and time again with other tribes.

I honestly don't think there is a "right" answer, any course of action (or inaction) has it's own inherent dilemmas and moral traps. As a probable last example of unadulterated natural humanity, conservation seems to be paramount....but that's just like, my opinion man. ;-)

Edit: maybe I was over influenced by ' The Gods Must Be Crazy'....I thought clearly things were better without that coke bottle.

Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

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@enoch,

I don't have any opinion on what Hedges says because I didn't take the time to listen to him...

Here was my bigger take away, an article posted by RT that is criticising negative press for Russia immediately gets filtered into my 99% likely hood of being misleading, either by outright lies or more often lies of omission.

Now, that filter got bypassed a bit seeing a recommendation from someone I deemed thoughtful on things. So, I went and did a 5 second google on the subject and found red flags immediately, so then I stopped again.

And Noam Chomsky has fallen off the rails IMHO. He's never going to lie, and he is incredibly intelligent, well reasoned and thoroughly knowledgeable. The catch is he is also biased in the sense of presenting everything he says over the last decade plus through the filter of American exceptionalism. He'll present mountains of accurate and compelling evidence of everything wrong about American foreign policy and the horrible impacts it has all around the world. Trouble is, he'll maybe give 2 sentences on the pre-American period or the alternative of American inaction.

In fact, as I wrote this I was going to blindly espouse that Chomsky's world view would council in favour of Clinton's inaction on Rwanda even with full hindsight. That prompted me to google for Chomsky's actual opinion on it, which led immediately to the fact that Chomsky wrote the forward for a book denying that the victims of Rwandan genocide were Tutsi but instead that they were in fact it's architects...

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This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

I always thought this 'problem' was bullshit - not because I dreamed of being some special snowflake 'outside the box' little shit who just wants to bypass the difficulty in question, but because the answer is so obvious. If you have perfect certainty that you can either save 1 life or 5 lives, then that's the same as choosing to kill 1 person or 5 persons. Perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action. It's only in reality, where there's uncertainty, that you can balk at taking action.

In the same way I find the moral dilemma of killing Hitler as a baby to be ridiculous. If you, as a time traveler from 2016, balk at the idea of going back to 1889 to kill baby Hitler, but you're fine with going back to 1939 to kill adult Hitler and maybe prevent WW2, then you essentially want hundreds of thousands of people to die in concentration camps just to make you feel good about your murderous action. Ridiculous.

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I don't know what folks you mean or how squeaky clean you mean, but I think if you search the internet long enough, you'll find someone childish enough to accuse Hilary of corruption for, say, cutting the queue at Burger King. I agree that you can't expect people to be perfect since birth, do people really ask for that?

I look at the world around us: unbelievable wealth inequality, global warming, oil wars, illegal invasions, the hijacking of Greek democracy, the great bankers bailout swindle, austerity politics, the pay gap.... I won't go on. The world has not been well managed for a long time now. A national leader represents a fuck-ton of people and their decisions can literally lead to the slow or immediate death of all of us, either by inaction or incompetence or mistake....etc. Honesty and integrity have got to be important now, even if the old ways seem familiar and comfortable. I would argue it's childish (naive) to say let's ignore those things.

this is exactly why there will be no learning or awareness gained from this tragedy. you are either "defending a "terrorist"" [not your words, but it is a prevailing part of the public narrative] or you're towing the party line and making sure nothing changes.

i'm not defending the killing of anyone but i am trying to understand why. i'm trying to consider the context and internal logic that drove someone to do this. this made sense to him and we should try to understand why. and honestly, this type of desperate, damaging, and explosive reaction isn't surprising to me considering recent events, the coverage and public reaction to those events, and the categorical inaction that follows.

it is possible to empathize without endorsing the actions.

If only it were actual ACTION.
What they did was force inaction for about 25 hours, and now until July because they just recessed.
Sadly, inactive government is a gift to the Republicans, not some kind of hindrance.
No vote was taken (not that a vote would help, it's clear they can't pass any gun bill in either house). At least they showed they're trying....kind of.
I partially agree with Paul that this was simply a play for attention....but I also see that that's the most Democrats can do at this point, because they get zero cooperation from Republicans on anything. (I would also point out that every 'repeal Obamacare' vote was nothing more than a play for attention, so Ryan's comment is really the pot calling the kettle black.)

I can only hope that the unwillingness and inability of Republicans to legislate at all will lose them congress and the presidency....which will also lose them the Judicial. Perhaps if that all comes to pass, SOME progress can be made....certainly it won't be made until then.