After all, he did manage to defeat the pacifists of the Gandhi nebula...

Apparently in a godless world, we still have soldiers, assault rifles, and crumbling cities, but now the soldier and kid think the assault rifle is a toy?

I suppose they're going for the idea that universal atheism would lead to some sort of pacifist utopia. Atheism may be certain kind of ideology, but it's about being against cults, not creating one of its own.

That's really one of my chief issues with religion and libertarian/conservative ideology -- they both claim to have simple, universal solutions for all earthly problems, if only everyone becomes a strict adherent to the ideology.

"You can't become a pacifist or a conscientious objector after actively seeking a job in which you might have to kill people."

Why?

Taken out of context, your statement doesn't make sense. It is possible for people to realize they have taken an incorrect action and seek to correct it only after having gone down the initial route. Taken in context, your statement is at best an over-simplification/generalization and at worst a conscious attempt to silence those who know first-hand the personal destruction of war. On the contrary, I would think that knowing precisely what it is like to shoot a fellow human with a different skin color and watch while his family tries to make him comfortable in his last breaths gives a human the ability to conscientiously object, like no other human can. Watching ones close friends die at the hand of an enemy only attacking you because you're affiliated with a swagger-rabbit asshole who just told them all to "Bring It On" would be enough to give a human the right to choose pacifism.

Those who have lived through that are, uniquely, allowed.

>> ^Skeeve:
"They're not terrorists, they're wearing sandals." Just one of many reasons not to listen to this guy. He says he was "ordered to kill innocent people" and I can understand that the urge to follow orders can be strong, but it is a soldier's duty to refuse and report an unlawful order, and that is definitely an unlawful order.
He deserted the army and has helped others go AWOL and calls for more soldiers to resist. As a soldier myself I find this attitude disgusting. America has an all-volunteer army. No one forced him to join. You can't become a pacifist or a conscientious objector after actively seeking a job in which you might have to kill people.
This guy is just another undereducated soldier speaking about things beyond his understanding.
As for his obsession with Iraq and 9/11... no one really believes they have anything to do with each other anymore do they? Iraq was an idiotic move by Bush and his cronies to finish what Bush Sr. started.


Mate. Killing innocents isn't something your personal generalizations/sentiments are able to justify/downgrade/trvialize to a large portion of the worlds population. Sounds like you are a good soldier, I can't fault you for that. Sounds like the above guy is a good human being, I definitely can't fault him for that...

>> ^Skeeve:
He deserted the army and has helped others go AWOL and calls for more soldiers to resist. As a soldier myself I find this attitude disgusting. America has an all-volunteer army. No one forced him to join. You can't become a pacifist or a conscientious objector after actively seeking a job in which you might have to kill people.

Except he's not complaining that he had to fight; he's complaining that he had to murder. If I was a soldier and I was sent off to fight a war instigated against people who posed no threat to my country, I'd be pretty pissed off. The army is supposed to protect our country; it's not to be used as the President's personal vendetta team.

>> ^Januari:
I really had to stop watching when he started to suggest his loss was greater than those who lost family in 9/11... This was after of course, he claimed to not care about 9/11 but was also the reason he wanted to go to war and find the people responsible... wha?...

He said he didn't care about 9/11 when it happened because it didn't effect him. He was occupied with his own personal struggles. He's pointing out his tunnel-vision.

"I joined in '03 because I was broke." How do you interpret that as him wanting to find the people responsible?

"They're not terrorists, they're wearing sandals." Just one of many reasons not to listen to this guy. He says he was "ordered to kill innocent people" and I can understand that the urge to follow orders can be strong, but it is a soldier's duty to refuse and report an unlawful order, and that is definitely an unlawful order.

He deserted the army and has helped others go AWOL and calls for more soldiers to resist. As a soldier myself I find this attitude disgusting. America has an all-volunteer army. No one forced him to join. You can't become a pacifist or a conscientious objector after actively seeking a job in which you might have to kill people.

This guy is just another undereducated soldier speaking about things beyond his understanding.

As for his obsession with Iraq and 9/11... no one really believes they have anything to do with each other anymore do they? Iraq was an idiotic move by Bush and his cronies to finish what Bush Sr. started.

>> ^EndAll:
Take into account the numbers of each group, and the willingness to engage in violent civil disobedience, and it makes sense (to me at least) that there would be much more cops at this event.

I think the police presence is a consequence of something more basic: The G20 was a protest, 9/12 was a photo-op.

The folk who showed up to the G20, even the died in the wool pacifists, went with intent to challenge the power of the state, to obstruct a meeting of high officials, the kind of thing the first amendment was written to protect.

The folk who showed up for 9/12, even the died in the wool gun toting "revolutionaries", went with the intent to pose for a photo op with FOX NEWS/GOP, not to exercise their first amendment right, not to challenge the state in any concrete way, which is why the government doesn't really care.

As for the damage, it would have been more localized if they had allowed them to get to the convention center, and it would have cost less then the million or so they spent to bring an extra 4000 officers into the city.

The FuckShitUp crowd usually focuses on destroying barricades, and other structured designed to deny the protesters their rights, and I support that kind of vandalism. The other kind would be easier to punish if the police didn't spend so much time making sure the protesters were spread out from here to sunday, just video the hell out of the convention center and strategically arrest vandals.

>> ^gwiz665:
Even if he were not a pacifist, HE holds no blame, since he was not involved. You don't carry the sins of your father.
I think the accusation already lies in the "from Munich! God!", I also think it is stupid to frame it like "he's not willing to take blame" - I'm not willing to take blame for anything that my ancestors did either, and I shouldn't have to either.

Well, there are several points in that paragraph that were completely lost here. Let's see if I can explain.

- To Israelis, Munich is almost always connected to the 1972 Olympic games and the terrorist attack, on which the film "Munich" is based.
- While the person himself holds no personal blame for either the Munich massacre or the Holocaust, the nation of Germany does (for the latter, anyway). It's hard for some Israelis to separate the two.
- The entire paragraph is satirical, and Lapid is not trying to say Jorgen holds personal blame for the Holocaust, but rather that the person blaming him for it is being absurd.

I guess the last point was lost in the translation as well. It's a shame, since it's a recurring one in here.

"and Jorgen from Munich - from Munich! God! - says he's a pacifist - which is code for not being willing to take blame for the Holocaust, he wasn't born then yet, and we shouldn't think it justifies everything"

Even if he were not a pacifist, HE holds no blame, since he was not involved. You don't carry the sins of your father.

I think the accusation already lies in the "from Munich! God!", I also think it is stupid to frame it like "he's not willing to take blame" - I'm not willing to take blame for anything that my ancestors did either, and I shouldn't have to either.

siaiaia (or whatever your name is), you are in dire need of an education in both religion and epistemology. Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge. One can have historical knowledge, knowledge of art theory, the knowledge of the human condition which has informed so many poets and novelists, musicology... The list goes on and on. Which is to say that there is no reason why one should expect that a religious truth (if such a beast exists) should be classified as scientific.

Furthermore, your understanding of religions as primarily sets of doctrines--systems beliefs--is profoundly inadequate. Let's ignore the Eastern religions, for all of which that's not clearly not true, and look at an example from Western history. In the first century BCE, Roman orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a book entitled De Natura Deorum, or On the Nature of the Gods. In it, he portrays a fictional but plausible conversation between himself, a Stoic philosopher, and an Epicurean philosopher. Throughout the dialogue, it becomes starkly clear that, though all three follow the Roman religion, they can barely find a single belief about the gods that they hold in common. This detachment of doctrine and religion--of dogma and religious practice--was the norm throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

Only with the rise of Christianity does anything like your criticism of religion become even coherent, let alone plausible.




With regards to the palestinian bomber - why did the IRA not do suicide bombing?? Eh? Because the palestinian bomber believes he is doing something in the name of God, and doing a righteous thing before he dies.

Or maybe because it's one of the few acts that a Palestinian can take with any effectiveness against Israeli oppression.

Suicide bombing was not invented by Muslims, but by Hindu Tamils. And not for religious reasons--both murder and suicide are strongly enjoined every Hindu tradition I'm familiar with. The problem was that one group--the native Sinhalese (primarily Buddhist--a pacifistic religion)--was oppressing the Tamil minority. They invented the suicide bomb as a technique by which a minority could strike at a militarily powerful oppressor.

There are strong parallels between the Palestinians and the Tamils. In both cases, the rulers speak a different language than the oppressed minority, having a different culture right down to religion. In both cases, the majority overwhelmingly outguns the minority. In both cases, oppression of the minority is acceptable to the populace of the majority group.

It is unsurprising, then, that the Palestinians should have adopted the suicide bomb--no matter what their religion. There was a complex set of circumstances replicated in both circumstances which produced the kind of attitude which gives rise to a suicide bomber.



This does not, of course, apply to the 9/11 hijackers, the Taliban, or a number of other groups. Nonetheless, I think my point is clear: fixating on a single aspect of a society, like religion, to explain complex social phenomena is a huge mistake.

Yes, greed fear, and ignorance are the main tools of the business that is politics. I am just over 2 years of college, with a bachelor of arts. I voted independent. My main reason is that I distrust both parties. I believe that each election is a show, reality TV only its reality.

I think free market is excellent so long as the participants are ethical, and currently all of the US systems are lacking in ethics.

The current problem with the Systems of the world are the Incentives to take action, whether that action be evil, good, or neutral.

I urge all of the US citizens, who see this comment, if you take nothing away from here then take this: how many of you know what the Office of Government Ethics or Federal Office of Special Counsel are?

Please see: FAA Whistle blowers fired and defamed. The client serving culture costs the Consumer.

Take for example, the cure of HIV : http://www.baldwincountynow.com/articles/2009/05/28/local_news/doc4a1d63cb68531598814432.txt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5

Little publicity? Incentives! The big names didn't find the "cure" so they stifle the little names. We see the same thing when it comes to politics, wars, freedom, and traffic laws. HIV is treatable. Yet the public still thinks that it is not?

As to your question JiggaJphnson, allow me to quote Göring from the Nuremberg trials.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Videos like this aren't good for the pacifist in me.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^bcglorf:
The Middle East has nearly 60% of the planet's oil reserves. If none of them have privatized their oil, wouldn't that make the privatized oil companies the underdogs?
Oh, nevermind, that just detracts from the simple answers people seem to want.
Iraq has oil. America is a corporation run by oil companies. America invaded Iraq to steal it's oil. Thank goodness it's that simple and no more thinking or complexity needs to be considered. baa, baa, baa.
No, we did it to save the 6.5 million Kurds out of the kindness of our hearts. And we only had to kill a million Iraqi's and turn another three million into refugees to do it.
And now we're only telling Iraq to either sign very long term leases with private oil companies who expect over ten times the going rate for extracting that oil, or we won't give them the $120 billion dollars we promised them to help rebuild their country after we bombed it back to the stone ages.
Oil companies the underdogs? Keep clutching at straws you racist war monger.



Whats ironic is that you and others who make comments like this seem not to have cared a whit about what was happening to Iraqis and Kurds whilst under Saddam. Aside from the issue of "stealing" oil or whatever the case may be I challenge anyone to say that Iraqis and Kurds lived great lives under Saddam. Americans went in there stirred the Hornets nest and now are trying to make lemonade out of lemons. If it works (still a long road) then it will be one of the greatest things ever but if it doesnt (with the help of people who are blinded by their indignance) then it will be a disaster. Point is....no saddam is good stuff. But perhaps people like you are removed and immersed enough in your pacifist dreamland to not have cared about the wives, sisters and daughters who were regularly stolen and raped while their siginficant others were fed feet first into wood-chipers by Saddams sons. I suppose the gasing of thousands of Kurds was awesome too so long as we weren't "stealing" oil. As long as its not close to home right? Maybe Neville Chamberlain was right in how he handled Hitler and to follow that example we should have just let Saddam take Kuwait as well.

Well I guess Americans could have just sanctioned Saddam into compliance. Seems to work great so long as the UN gets involved right? Maybe he would have slowed down with the mass graves, the torturing of families and other potential non-compliants and the utilization of what was the 3rd largest army in the world. I agree with your thought-process....as long as the slaughtering of thousands is kept in house and perpetrated by the local tyrant then we should never...under any circumstances....interfere. The loss of lives is never acceptable especially when made in the name of other less fortunate people. And asking for any sort of compesation in return, in whatever form, is always a big no-no as well.

>> ^EDD:
What a pussy.


The cat? [grin]

>> ^Lolthien:
I don't think the dog is afraid of the cat so much as all the random people who come up legs swinging kicking at the cat. Trust me, that dog is not afraid of that cat. The dog is afraid of the over-reacting people.

Maybe it's more of a conditioning thing. The rott grew up with cats as a pup that'd pick on him and beat the crap out of him. Being a dumb dog he doesn't realize he's about 8 times their size.