Please do give us a closer look at ISIS is doing. Massacres, torture, rape, collective punishment and on, correct? Maybe killing what, 100 people at a time in the worst instances? That doesn't distinguish them from Saddam. Within Saddam's rule those crimes are what guys like yourself colloquially referred to as Saddam's 'firm' hand. They are his, so to speak, lesser and more routine crimes. I'd left them beneath mention thus far.

If you must insist on parroting your ignorance of Saddams al-Anfal campaign I'll resort to posting excerpts as evidence that the gassing was but a small part of it.

4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed by Saddam, that's entire villages turned to rubble.
182,000 dead civilians by counts gleaned from Saddam's own records of how many Kurds his forces had succeeded in eliminating.
The concentration camps Saddam ran were pretty clearly modeled after Hitler's:
With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together.

The conditions within the camp were terrible and torture, abuse and beatings were routine. The men of fighting age though were sorted for the express purpose to later drive them out into the desert by bus or truck for mass execution. This is how Saddam carried his genocide of the inhabitants of the 4,500 villages he'd destroyed.

Anyone interested in more or questioning the veracity of the above account can find more and endless references and evidence here:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/index.htm#TopOfPage

As for American policy, I don't quite see where I suddenly bear personal responsibility to clean up the world if I choose to form my opinions on world events independently of it's 'fit' to American policy.

I don't care much if it was Bush or Putin that took Saddam out of power aside from hedging on which would leave a better Iraq, either would be tough not to be an improvement from Saddam. Similarly for Sudan or the Congo, I'd be rather glad if world powers finally cared enough to try and spare the people there suffering under brutal military repression and endless war crimes. I'm not quite sure why you wouldn't share such a view?

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (3/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee on that post.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (3/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee on that post.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (1/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (2/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (1/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims on that post.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (2/3) has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Chris-Hedges-Interviews-Noam-Chomsky-2-3

I share some of your cynicism in terms of politicians and their incentives but climate change, whether you acknowledge it as a serious issue or not, is something that can only be addressed on an inter-governmental level.

I've said this before in a different video thread but individually minimising your carbon emissions is quite literally an exercise in self masturbatory indulgence. The vast majority of emissions are the result of industrial by-products in the product cycle. The same applies to regular pollution (and whether you use the recycling bin or not) and water wastage among other issues.

Actively selecting environmentally friendly products is generally either impossible (where alternatives don't exist) or impractical (where you're simply not provided sufficient or accurate information to effectively do so).

The efficient and effective way to reduce emissions is through a climate trading scheme. Emissions reduction occurs where it is cheapest to do and those for whom it is expensive buy the permits from those who can offset cheapest. Broad international adoption is the only way that this gets implemented because the costs are borne by everyone. In progress towards that goal, Republican opposition and the broad corporate campaign in the US against what is a scientific consensus is the primarily roadblock here.

The level of belief in climate change being caused by human activity and of being perceived as a threat in the US is woeful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_opinion_by_country

The EU is on board. Japan is on board. Among the largest economies, the US is the laggard and perhaps China. With the US being a major funder and significant influence on international agencies, they are clearly the roadblock here. With just EU, Japan, and the US, there would be consensus in >50% of global GDP output, which should be decisive.

You should acknowledge that, if you are wrong, while you may think you're hedging your bets by being environmentally responsible as you claim, in sum you're doing more harm than good through spreading FUD.

That is a more reasonable statement, but it still ignores the (small?) minority of American human traffickers that know it's wrong to do but fear reprisal if they speak up. They may be few, but they do exist.

edit: and it still contradicts itself because it starts off with an absolutist statement, then hedges.

I've been here 30 years and in the good ole days, it would snow maybe every year and a half. Lately, it has snowed every year, sometimes twice or three times. What is scary is -- the MOUNTAINS still aren't getting much snow.

It isn't much snow, but I have a very steep driveway that is in the shade of 20 foot tall laurel hedges. If I don't shovel it off, I won't be able to drive out of my garage for a week or so. So the thinnest sheet is shovel worthy at my house.

We're in trouble, this world. I think our species will survive, because we are very adaptable. But it is going to be ugly ugly ugly.

We as a civilization always looked to Nero, fiddling as Rome burned, as the ultimate in self-absorption and mental illness. Now we have a planet full of Neros.

It is bad. And getting worse.

Hedges & Binney on Obama NSA guidelines has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee on that post.

Hedges and Binney on NSA Policy has been added as a related post - related requested by lurgee.

Your video, The Real News: Chris Hedges on The Pathology of the Rich, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Chris Hedges would make an awesome guillotine salesman.

*promote first, quality later

She seems to be scapegoating rappers and black women, and using the wealth signifiers of rap music (washing rims in the kitchen decorated with bottles of champagne) to gesture at self-important “anti-consumerism” (as if an Armani tie on a hedge fund analyst wasn't just as bad). She's exhibiting the same kind of bad taste and myopia (not to mention latent racism) as other [white] singers, Lorde and Macklemore.

While she seems to be trying to make some kind of feminist statement here (“Don’t need to shake my ass for you/‘Cause I’ve got a brain.”), it doesn't seem to be all that feminist of her to be mocking the other dancers in the video for having talents she doesn't have. It also doesn't seem all that feminist of her to remain blissfully colorblind in a world that functions along race