Lawrence "Larry" Lessig
is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention.
He is a director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advisory board member of the Sunlight Foundation and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig


Chris Hedges
is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

>> ^Zifnab:

That is 'CBC news' not 'CNBC news', a little different.


CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national public radio and television broadcaster
CNBC = Consumer News and Business Channel, a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S

Got an National Public Radio story here: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/02/132482428/into-the-tunnels-exploring-the-underside-of-nyc

I'm on the fence about how much you want to promote advanced urban exploration like this.
A lot of abandoned places are dangerous partly because they don't appear dangerous.

>> ^Mauru:

What an absolute bunch of horse-crap. If your reasoning sounds like an haiku, it is probably made for the stage. If it is made for the stage you are playing with words. If you are playing with words and you mean to educate, ... ah well, you can probably suspect the value of your reasoning.
We are officially entering the ether of ideological comparison. Go ahead guys. You know how well this has worked out in the past.
I'd feel a lot better if I didn't have the suspicion that this guy got his patriotic hard-on during that video.


Are you talking to me, or talking to him...and furthermore, what are you even saying! I require specificity. Are you saying the Quran doesn't state those things? Are you saying he is taking them out of context? Just saying something doesn't make it so, you must plead the case. The whole point of this thread was to avoid group thing dynamics where you just state things carte blanche to resonate with your fellow minded friends and to engage with the core issue with specific, and perhaps, personal examples. For example:

>> ^Bloocut:

@GeeSussFreeK-Symbols are used, not unlike roughy remarked, by evil fuckers who know how to use them-similar to product placement in cinema. See a symbol enough times then whatever value placed upon it by the bulk of society, becomes the acceptable shit-think.
Symbols contain both intrinsic and adventitious meanings and when used effectively they can convince or otherwise influence the most moral souls to commit unspeakable inhumanities.
To the more enlightened of the planet who take the time to use their computers to explore the history of the place rather than looking at cartoon characters through scopes or hundreds of pairs of tits or listening to National Public Radio, well, it's grammar school time.


At heart, I am an anti-establishment, non-traditionalist, don't-tell-me-what-to-do type of person. So, when I hear rhetoric about the "man", and zombie mind control, I usually bite hard. When I first read this, I was like "right on, fight the power", but then I started to examine the core of the argument, and look into personal examples and found it held less water.

Symbols only matter when you care. A symbol for you doesn't really work for me at times. For example; I still have my tattered, unusable bible, my lego collection that I never use, books galore, star wars figurines, ect. They all have very little rational value. The raw materials couldn't fetch much of anything on any market. But they all have real, deep, and meaningful value to me. Symbolism is a deep part of my life and I didn't even realize it, and in fact would of said I am very iconoclast if I was asked.

It isn't for a lack of enlightenment or reason, I would say I have a slight deal more of that than the average man (not much though), but what I value naturally reflects itself in how I deal with objects of my fixations. I don't care for churches persay, so making one of blowing one up is silly to even care about, but if you grabbed 30 of the worlds fastest graphics processors and melted them down right in front of me, I would be disturbed. Of if you grabbed my legos which I don't use and burned them, the depths of my sadness would be hard to measure. Or to abstract it away to a level of symbolism, if people that made those items went out of business, I care (RIP BFG video cards).

Far be it a stretch of the imagination that people would use symbolism under false pretense to manipulate people, I am sure it is done all the time. But that only strengthens the argument that the mosque could potentially be built under false pretense inasmuch as the people who are offended by it. Everyone here could be guilty of some hidden, secret agenda, who is to say? I just wanted to point out that people getting upset about something that isn't a direct offense but a symbolic one aren't very different from you or me; they just care about a different set of things.

@GeeSussFreeK-Symbols are used, not unlike roughy remarked, by evil fuckers who know how to use them-similar to product placement in cinema. See a symbol enough times then whatever value placed upon it by the bulk of society, becomes the acceptable shit-think.

Symbols contain both intrinsic and adventitious meanings and when used effectively they can convince or otherwise influence the most moral souls to commit unspeakable inhumanities.

To the more enlightened of the planet who take the time to use their computers to explore the history of the place rather than looking at cartoon characters through scopes or hundreds of pairs of tits or listening to National Public Radio, well, it's grammar school time.

Senator Kerry said in an interview with National Public Radio:
If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism? If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?

Lurch, i would refer to bases in germany, uk, lithuania and literally scores of other countries as a form of occupation, it's a kind of quiet empire. The presence of those bases gives the USA considerable political leverage.
"state sponsored killing" referred to collateral damage, not bases. i would definitely call the US Army blowing up Iraqi civilians "state sponsored killing". Hope that explains it.

As for the whole "there will be bloodshed if we withdraw"... damn, as if there isn't bloodshed now, and as if the bloodshed will stop quicker with an occupying christian army on their soil. Comparisons to Vietnam are interesting... last time I checked Vietnam was not a communist stronghold bathing in blood.

What you are saying, by extension, is "there should be US troops in every country where there's bloodshed" and that is totally impossible. What is so different about Iraq? Why not go prevent the bloodshed in Sudan or Burma or China or Russia? No war proponent has ever explained this to me.

About those bases you say aren't permanent:

We're talking about a U.S. embassy compound under construction these last years that's meant to hold 1,000 diplomats, spies, and military types (as well as untold numbers of private security guards, service workers, and heaven knows who else). It will operate in the Iraqi capital's heavily fortified Green Zone as if it were our first lunar colony. According to William Langewiesche, writing in Vanity Fair, it will contain "its own power generators, water wells, drinking-water treatment plant, sewage plant, fire station, irrigation system, Internet uplink, secure intranet, telephone center (Virginia area code), cell-phone network (New York area code), mail service, fuel depot, food and supply warehouses, vehicle-repair garage, and workshops."
...
When it comes to American construction projects in Iraq, the sky's really the limit. Just recently, National Public Radio's Defense Correspondent Guy Raz spent some time at Balad Air Base about 70 kilometers north of Baghdad. As Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post reported, back in 2006, Balad is essentially an "American small town," so big that it has neighborhoods and bus routes -- and its air traffic rivals Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174858/baseless_considerations

Bill Moyers is simply presenting/culling reports from various media sources; White House Press releases, Bush's own speeches, Ad campaigns from Freedom Watch, National Public Radio, US Army Ads, The Observer, NBC news, Associated Press, Stars and Stripes, US Army website and the New York Times (a story written by soldiers from the 82nd Airborne).

I don't even know how you can compare that to Fox News.

Most of the folks in that video have seen combat time. "Ivory tower eggheads divorced from reality" - that's Rumsfeld, the biggest chickenhawk of em all.

Anthony Zinni
The former Marine general said Secretary Rumsfeld should be held accountable for "throwing away ten years' worth of planning, plans that had taken into account what we would face in an occupation of Iraq."

Paul Eaton
The retired major general, who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops until 2004, wrote in The New York Times that "Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold Warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower."

Charles Swannack Jr.
The former commander of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq told the New York Times, "I do not believe Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person to fight that war based on his absolute failures in managing the war against Saddam in Iraq."

Gregory Newbold
The former Marine general, writing in Time magazine, declared, “I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat--Al Qaeda.”

John M. Riggs
In an interview with National Public Radio, retired Gen. Riggs alleged an atmosphere of ''arrogance" among top civilian leaders at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld ''should step aside and let someone step in who can be more realistic," he said.

John Batiste
The retired major general, who led a division in Iraq, told CNN, "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork."