>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

Was the objective of Vietnam and Korea to stop Communism? If so, then the success rate is 50%.



Actually the War in Vietnam was pretty much a complete success. The idea was to make sure that Communism didn't spread...it was to show that if you consider this way of life we will visit the terrors of the earth upon you. After the Tet Offensive the business community decided that this wasn't profitable anymore and turned against the war. Many pundits wrote that the US should just claim victory since we did achieve our main objectives. So yes...2-4 million Vietnamese dead (we don't count our victims hence the 2 million discrepancy) and effects from Chemical warfare that are still being felt today through thousands of birth defects. Yeah it's not taught in schools and it's not generally accepted but we did actually win in Vietnam...but I would point out how could any human being say that it solved anything?

Not so much a making of as a "Oh, doing this is going to be really hard.. BUT WE DID IT!" /patback

I liked the small glimpses of the actual making of though, wish there was more.

What's the scandal here?

He said he's a proponent of a single payer health care system.... I'm sure he still is a proponent of a single payer health care system... it's a matter of getting enough people in congress to agree on something and we got that relatively crappy compromise... but we did move the bar forward. That's the first time we've gotten progress on the issue after decades of trying.

What's the scandal here?

You know what? Fuck you and your point of view. Relax, I'm going to make a point. By saying something so rude, and stupid. I understand your point more than most.

Right. In the US you can say what you damn well please so long as they are not "fighting words". Directly calling someone out.

Now, here is where it is different: Fuck you and your point of view. That is an expression of my distaste for your position on the matter at hand. Had I said, Fuck You! Then you can construe that as fighting words. That is not, under the law correct free speech. You must put context with the situation.

However, context for saying Fuck You may be given by the situation at hand. If I were being wrongly accused of some wrong doing, and so frustrated that I yelled out "Fuck Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" then given the situation it can be construed as expression of your stressful state, and in Philadelphia is protected free speech.

So what he showed in the video, was by United States standards, freedom of speech and expression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck#Freedom_of_expression

Just because it offends someone does not make it illegal free speech, and in fact it would be censorship to say so. Iran's leader came here and spoke his mind, but we did not silence him, and he isn't even a US citizen!

>> ^Mysling:
To me, there is a very significant difference between a person making use of his or her freedom of speech, and intentionally inflaming and entire people and hiding behind it. Geert Wilders isn't on trial because of what he said, but because he showed incredibly poor judgement in how he chose to say it.
While what he said may be "true", there are definately ways to say it that are both rational, well thought out and based on valid arguments. But when he instead chooses to make a movie based mainly on disgusting images and emotional porn, you have to wonder whether he truely wanted to tell the "truth", or simply wanted to poke at the bees nest to create publicity. If so, he has made a mockery of the freedom of speech he is touting to his defense.

Its quite possible to organize, don't be such a pessimist. We have been in seriously shitty situations before, but we did it, even if only for a moment.

It starts in your communities. It starts in REAL relationships not defined by capital. It starts it making people aware of their own power, that they don't have to take this shit anymore. I'm organizing in ATL. What are YOU doing? People should be in the streets, this is true. But this isn't Latin america. Its the United Statutes of selling caskets. Its the conglomeration of cities where people are their cubicles. Alienation has reached its alltime high from Capitalism.

But we must fight, my comrades. We must be organized. Why? If not for liberty, solidarity, equality, love. Do it because even if you lose, it is the only honorable thing left in this world

I don't believe a soldier shot a baby intentionally, or even an unarmed civilian, for that matter.

That being said, Israelis need to recognize some harsh truths about Cast Lead. That operation started with the intention of stopping the rocket fire, toppling Hamas and possibly rescuing Gilad Shalit. While the second and third are obvious failures, the rockets are quiet for now, but that's only a lull while Hamas builds up it's arsenal again.

But we're still in denial. We look at the statistics of the dead and automatically say "the Palestinians are lying about how many died". We look at the percentage of civilians and say "they're lying, there were many more combatants there". I have yet to hear an excuse for the number of slain children during Cast Lead, but I'm sure some Israeli has one waiting.

After Cast Lead, the UN did the only thing it can do. It launched an investigation. It even appointed a South-African Jew to lead it. And still I heard people I live around, people I work with, people I grew up with, call him an anti-Semite. Saying the report was biased before the report was even started.

And of course Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation. Politically, cooperating has only a down-side. If we allow soldiers, commanders and politicians to be interviewed, if we allow documents to be subpoenaed, if we give any form of assistance to the investigative committee, we're essentially signing off on the result. If we deny any responsibility, claim sovereignty, and refuse to accept the committee's authority, we get to keep the Status Quo.

And what a Status Quo it is. Were listed as 141/144 in the Global Peace Index. Below us are Somalia, which has no government, and then only Afghanistan and Iraq, which I don't really need to explain.


No. I don't believe we deliberately killed innocent men, women and children.

But we did set out knowing full well that the goal was unattainable, that the fighting itself would take place in extremely-dense populated areas, that we would be facing an enemy that has no qualms with firing rockets from schools, with placing enough ambushes in second-floor windows that soldiers on the ground wouldn't feel safe without sending a rocket or grenade into every building first. I don't believe there was a single commander, at any level of command, who didn't expect high civilian casualties.

We are responsible. And we're not going to change unless forced to.

As an amateur astronomer, I have spent hundreds of hours "looking up" and have seen nothing which competes with that!! I did see one fine meteor which broke into pieces which could be seen to be tumbling (though "instantaneously" fast also). It just wasnt quite as glorious as that. Another time, I was standing in my kitchen with my wife once and the back windows all lit up like daytime. We learned it was a meteor crashed North of us but we did not see the trail, only the momentary daytime.

>> ^atara:
By-the-by, Citizens Against Breast-Feeding doesn't exist.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/breastfeeding.asp


Really?? Well thanks for looking that up! I guess I didn't dig deep enough!

There is however a lot of people who feel this way. A few years back I remember people trying to have it banned in local public places as being obscean and not apropriat for kids to see. I was working in retail and we has couches in our store, women were always stopping to breast feed in our store. I didn't care much but we did have compliants - our reation was to just say "oh well"

the replays reminded me of the Radioactive Man episode of the Simpson's...

Director: We've got to do the "jiminy jillikers" scene again, Milhouse.

Milhouse: But we already did it. It took seven hours, but we did it. It's done!

Director: Yes...but we've got to do it from different angles! Again and
again, and again and again and again!

*timeshift

are you saying you think most people in america know where/what stalingrad is? you wanna go out into the street and video a few people and send me the youtube link?

and i wasn't taught WWII, that's just a fact, it wasn't on the syllabus, we spent about 20 minutes on it, but we did months on Hitler's rise to power. i don't remember saying the war was a race to berlin. you twisted that, fox news style.

i think you're getting a bit worked up about it.

Actually, calvados, electrocution = death by electricity. Anything less is being shocked.

But My base had the same problem - only no one was seriously hurt. Of course, My base also was not serviced by anyone. I was there in the relative beginning of the latter half of 2004. My base was hardly anything more than hooches and tents.

Out shower trailers, though, were fed by tanks of water (no pumps) that were elevated above the showers. Those tanks were filled by taking water out of a stream that ran through the base and filtering the water.
But we did have one trailer that shocked you when you touched it from the outside. I never could figure out why - but the electrical systems in that whole base were shoddy at best. I was constantly repairing them in my down time - often to the reward from VERY grateful Marines.

To clarify: My base had zero support personnel. It was Infantry, us (artillery) and the cooks. Sure, there were the water dogs (the guys that pumped and filtered water), ammo techs and medical support - but there were no Marines there for facility repair and construction.
During the day time, we had electricians (Iraqi Locals) that would come in and repair broken systems, but they only stayed during the day - and they could only fix so much shit at once - there were only two of them.

Word got around somehow that I was did electrical work before I joined. I would have people come to my hooch at night asking me to fix their lights or air conditioner. I would do it every time, mostly because there was no one else that would do it, and partly because they would "pay" me with shit they had like candy bars, Playboys, or whatever else.

It's pretty sweet what you can get when you hook up the chow hall guys with A/C, though. I was eating stuff I never knew the base had, like frozen pizzas.

/agree with Ant.

My husband and I both play WoW, HL, Counterstrike, and Team Fortress, but we do that instead of plopping our butts on the couch and watching American Idol every night. Neither of them are particularly healthy things to do, but we've picked our poison and enjoy it. We both still hold down full time jobs, the cats still get fed, the lawn gets mowed, and we have social lives.

(Besides, I kinda like squicking folks and work who say, "So, did you see who got booted from the island last night?" by responding, "No, but we did kill a dragon, and I got an awesome wand..." )

I largely agree with the jarhead. Should we have gone into Iraq in the first place? No, probably not. But we did, and we made a huge mess. Now we need to take responsibility for it. I think it's horrible that innocent soldiers need to bear that responsibility instead of the lying pricks who put them there. Here we have citizens who have pledged service to protect and serve our country and the president puts them in a death trap in order to fulfill his personal vendetta, using a few thousand of our innocent murdered countrymen as an excuse no less.

I don't think removing Saddam from power was a bad thing, but I don't think this was the time to do it. Executing him was stepping way over the line. Yes, I know he was tried, convicted and sentenced by Iraqis, but that was a blatant sock-puppet show.

There's no good way out of Iraq at this point. I just hope we do the best clean-up job we can as quickly as we can and get our soldiers home.

I love my country. I wouldnt live anywhere else but.. I'd like to comment on the following:

You are not the nation with the best education - Thats Japan. Also the highest stress amongst children.
You are not the nation with most peace - That's still Switzerland - Sig Heil! Erm.. There Neutral.
You are not the most ecologically-aware nation - Um.. what nation truly is? Statistically or not.. all nations are guilty of this in some fashion or another.
You are not the nation with the best social politics - Duh, Bush? But we did get to vote for him.
You are not the nation with the best medicine - But were not the nation with the worst either.
You are not the nation with the lowest crime rates - Yea.. that "Right to bear arms" is a bunch of crap.</sarcasm> But... the larger the population the higher the crime rate. Couple with the fact that Americans have to put more time on the clock at work, and the fact that the divorce rate is so high - kids have no role models, or even anyone at home to raise them. Its a downward spiral in which we can't seem to be rid of.
You are not the nation with less enemies - Well.. of course not our foreign policy management sucks. Plus - it seems were like the Roman Empire trying to 'help' other nations with their terrorist issues.
You are not the most democratic nation - Um what nation truly is? You put down ANY country and you can find fault with it.
You are not the wisest nation - Nope only 200 years old - wisdom comes with time and learning from our mistakes. Problem is right now were too busy making them to be able to learn from them yet. BUT - in 200 years we have done more to change the world then any other place on the planet. Which has been good - and bad.