@kevingrr
you are engaging in a false polemic defense.
and it is unnecessary.

i did not call you out specifically so there is no need to defend your actions nor those who you know personally.

and just because i point out one truth does not negate the other.
example:

"the soldier who oversaw the gas chambers during world war 2 was a fantastic father and husband"

1.the soldier was a fantastic father and husband=true
2.he oversaw and fascillitated the deaths of thousands of jews=true

as for my "america is circling the drain" assertion,let me rephrase to make it a more succinct statement:
"the american empire is circling the drain"
see:rome (and pretty much every empire known to human history)

Once a middle eastern nation decides that they no longer want to sell oil in dollars - something which seriously shores up the US economy - they start the propaganda machine.

http://videosift.com/video/The-Road-to-World-War-3 is very enlightening, though if you don't like to hear the narrator's emotional view on the subject you might want to stop it half way through.

Just as a historical note, the World War 2 German Stuka dive-bomber used 20mm rounds to take out Soviet tanks.

That's a shitload of kinetic energy.

I somehow doubt most American's know much about Iran other than that its name is similar to Iraq.

I was talking with the salesman in Nordstrom's yesterday and I was talking about world war 2. He asked if that was the one with Hitler or if that was WWI.

*sigh*

I can see that you're not gonna listen, but I hope other people will read this.

http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com/2008/09/humanitarian-imperialism-by-noam.html

In it Chomsky makes the case for Humanitarian intervention, citing two specific instances where an invasion was justified as humanitarian.

"The most significant ones by far during the post–Second World War era are in the 1970s: India’s invasion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), ending a huge massacre; and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, driving out the Khmer Rouge just as their atrocities were peaking."

Neither of those instances was England and neither is the Falklands. It's a much more complex situation than just Evil Military Junta, and White Special Knights of England bravely saving the day. People who believe these fantasies give power to those who end up destroying a lot of fucking lives.

Every evil bastard cites defense, or humanitarian intervention. It's not true, don't fucking believe them just because you're too lazy to do the research.

This is basically it. We were a country that after World War 2 had HALF of the worlds wealth, unprecedented in all of history. Then we went through the biggest golden age ever, tons of money being generated everywhere. Since the 1970s that didn't translate to the workers, wages stagnated. Now wages are actually regressing, when the rich enriched themselves the workers are getting less and less and the middle class is being destroyed.

I don't dislike anyone for them looking for an answer when there are none about. Going to Libertarianism makes a lot of sense if you want to believe in a just world that makes logical sense. But it's not all that complicated, those at the top have money and power and they use the government to keep it that way. We have to stop them to get what we're owed.

Staged or not, the subtitles speak the sobering truth of the planet at-large. The difference between a kid with a head full of sports statistics and one abreast of regional religious extremes and government abuse is the difference between growing-up watching cartoons and playing XBOX and being raised amidst the sounds of mortars and helping your mother raise your siblings while dad is out chewing Khat and talking Muslim smack with his buddies.

What we need is an immediate alternative to fossil fuels in the form of unlimited free power and a worldwide routing of all assholes who hold the power now-In the next world war, the blood in the streets should only be blue.

World War C

Yes, but World War Z was a movie made for morons. God. Good fast zombie flick? 28 Days Later.

@lantern53

i think the only thing manning did that could be considered "wrong" is the pure data dump he performed.

unlike snowden,who sifted and vetted the information and then forwarded the information to a journalist (glenn greenwald at the gaurdian),manning just dumped massive amounts of information to wikileaks.

but manning is also paying a high price and he is willing to pay that price.
so while i may disagree with his methodology i admire his courage to face the full force of the united states federal government.

its interesting that you find people who criticize the federal governments practices as being confused.
let us look at the definition of terrorism shall we?

from the FBI:“the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).

now the key word here is "unlawful".
which can be translated as being "when THEY perform acts of violence against a population it is "terrorism" but when WE perform acts of violence against a population it is "counter-terrorism" because WE made it lawful".

the arguments is about distinctions and it is flimsy when you question the validity coming from a government which performs drone strikes on a daily basis on brown people.

when a person straps a bomb to their chest and walks into a cafe and detonates themselves in a crowd they are a terrorist.
when the US government sends drone strikes and bombing runs to a village in yemen they are terrorists.

there is no distinction.
just because the government proclaims otherwise or your desire for the US to be standing on moral ground are irrelevant.

they are,by definition,both terrorists.

and when you consider the guidelines put forth by the nuremberg trials after WW2,in which it was the UNITED STATES government which implemented the majority of those guidelines both bush and obama and consequent participatory members of those administrations should be (and ARE in the international court of law) war criminals.

but the united states government conveniently ignores just about everything outside their own interest.even if that interest after the second world war was to diminish the practices our very own government engages in on a global scale every day.

it is the height of hypocrisy and reveals a moral bankruptcy that is staggering.
when they do it =terrorism
when we do it=counter-terrorism

i call bullshit.

It is but it's a damn sight better than anything else the world has come up with. It's the most powerful country in the world, it's hard to get democracy going when the powerful don't want it. Little countries like New Zealand can be bastions of democracy because they're small and not useful. If NZ was on top of a ton of oil it would've killed anyone in the fucking way to control it. Also it's been an upward trend of civilization since the formation of the country, even after World War 2 where it emerged with half the worlds wealth.

So yeah the American public can and should be held responsible, but it's not a simple thing to get people together to fight for what they deserve. I don't think anyone fared much better. I never heard England recalling troops from India because the populace was protesting soo much it was getting out of control.

The funny thing is that fascists actually DID win World War II. We just didn't know at the time...

That's not what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after in 1824 after his tour. The northern states (no slavery) were hives of industry and rich. The southern states (with slavery) were generally poorer.

He attributed the wealth of the northern states partly to their better shipping ports, and the frantic industry of the people there. In comparison the southerners had little taste for work, preferring to leave that to slaves.

The book is fairly long, but it's a good read.

Also, might I point out that the end of world war 2 was 82 years and several boom and bust cycles after the end of slavery in the U.S. and that you could make a fairly compelling argument that post war prosperity came from elsewhere.

I'm sorry but you are simply wrong. America is rich largely because of it's slavery past which was cotton, which was textiles. It's why we grew so quickly and put ourselves in a place to overtake everyone after World War 2 when we literally had half the worlds wealth. There's plenty of economic history of this that you can research if you care to try.

The fear thing is pretty unique in America but not unique when you compare it to say a authoritarian society. Americans are a terrified people and it's easy to use it. You can look back at the first Gulf War when people were buying guys and camo and readying themselves in case Saddam came to attack the US. Which is insanity. In the Iraq War we were more terrified of Iraq than Kuwait and it's citizens were, and they had been attacked by them and were their closest neighbor. You can also see the fear today about taking peoples guns away, if we don't have guns we're all doomed, the government is coming or al qaeda is coming and we're all gonna die. Most of the rest of the world looks at us and laughs when we react all scared to nothing.

This cartoon pisses me off for one reason. It reminds me about the South Park guys bitching and moaning about how it was put in after Matts interview, so it looked to idiots like they had made it. Apparently that was enough for them to bitch and moan about it, I lost a lot of respect for Matt and Trea because of that.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it conflates the crimes of select people in the Japanese military (not everyone was a bloodthirsty or order-following robot) with innocent civilians (although see my comment from 5 years ago about how some have rationalized attacks on Japanese civilian population centers). If you believe that the Japanese people are culpable for the crimes of their military and should pay the ultimate price (i.e. death) for those crimes then you've essentially also rationalized the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., as those that planned them explicitly stated they were retaliation for U.S. political and military interventions in a variety of Muslim countries (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks for more info). Holding the citizens responsible for the actions of their government/military leads to very murky waters indeed.

To be fair to America at the time though, everyone was targeting civilians during World War 2--the Germans were bombing indiscriminately in London, the Brits and U.S. retaliated with the same kind of attacks on the German homeland, the Japanese military was doing medical experiments on random Chinese farmers they rounded up... it was a f'd up war all around and I think by the time the firebombings and atomic bombs were dropped in Japan people were willing to do just about anything to end the war. Victory became more important than humanity.