Support the troops! Jail the hired mercenaries! Take their salaries and give it to the wounded vets so they can get the care they deserve.

that's a great comparison, man. holy shit, you hit the nail on the head. Iraq is EXACTLY like germany 1943. And the Allies in WWII also had completely incompetent planning and hordes of mercenaries stuck in the middle of a civil war of their own creation. Wow, you're a freaking genius.

And Chocolate Rain is not a meme? Passed out "dudes", nut scratching, raving lunatics are quality posts? No one is twisting your arm to watch viral videos. I won't complain about your videos if you don't complain about mine. This is not your personal video site where you get to dictate what is good or bad. And you are free to leave at any time.


In reply to this comment by budzos:
Mercenary In The Office has got to be the lamest piece of shit marketing campaign ever created. Do you honestly think it deserves to be given a spot on the Sift? Posts like this are going to make me leave the site as it's turning into a free-for-all with everyone posting every single meme they can find, and all the top members suckling each others' crappy posts reliably to the front page... instead of actually, you know, sifting.

Thanks MG, that was a very informative video. While there is definitely a need for law enforcement to have such devices, I as well as many others in this country are concerned about the potential for it's abuse, especially with the possible declaration of martial law given the self-appointed powers of the Executive branch and the buildup of mercenary paramilitary organizations in anticipation of "domestic terrorism" as the Executive branch puts it.

I bet he's regretting that orgasm. Poor bugger. Very mercenary of the ladies. Maybe they decided they both wanted to stay at home with baby, but needed someone to pay the bills. Found a nice loop hole to make it possible.

The U.S. Military: cheapest mercenary force the multinational oil companies could buy.

It couldn't have anything to do with all that garbage food and beverages that are marketed to people in such mercenary fashion. There's no real reason - it's more akin to coincidence - that virtually every square inch of space is now covered in advertising.

http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Century-of-The-Self-Part-1-of-4

manfromx asks: "Qualm unless you are just making stuff up do you have any real reason to think he's a racist?"

I do. I've already written about it on another of the now countless Ron Paul threads so I'm going to copy/paste to here:

My earlier posts:

****

Ron Paul: "If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."

"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e., support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action."

"Politically sensible blacks are outnumbered as decent people... I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city [Washington] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

"We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."



I don't believe his pathetic "blame the employee" excuse. (Where he says these statements aren't his but the words of an employee of the Ron Paul Survival Report.)

(In the following post I explain why I don't believe his explanation.)

Grimm, I don't merely choose not to believe him on a whim. His denial is not believable. Think about it for a minute. The best case scenario is that Ron Paul is telling the truth that he didn't write those words. But THEN it's not even remotely plausible that an employee would write such blatantly racist views as quoted above, which were published in the Ron Paul Survival Report, unless it was clearly understood that such views spoke to the people who were Ron Paul's audience at the time. (Rather damning, I'm afraid.)

And then if this was not the case then such an action by this phantom employee would clearly be the work of a mercenary sort of enemy or rogue infiltrator who was setting out to damage Ron Paul. But Ron Paul doesn't make this claim. Ron Paul says very little. Occam's Razor, man.

The last rather bizarre possibility is that this was just an incident that's equivalent to some lout grabbing the microphone at the radio station. How silly is that? This would collapse the truth that Ron Paul's staunchest support has in fact always come from the extreme right-wing militia, skinhead and neo-Nazi crowd...to the realm of mere coincidence.

No, now that he's a "serious" candidate the time is for backpedalling and denials. Or silence, better yet.

There won't be any Kramer meltdowns, unfortunately. (Certainly not during an ELECTION CAMPAIGN.)

****

from here: http://politics.videosift.com/video/Freedom-is-Popular

Scahill wrote his book before the current controversy.
http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Rise-Worlds-Powerful-Mercenary/dp/1560259795

Grimm, I don't merely choose not to believe him on a whim. His denial is not believable. Think about it for a minute. The best case scenario is that Ron Paul is telling the truth that he didn't write those words. But THEN it's not even remotely plausible that an employee would write such blatantly racist views as quoted above, which were published in the Ron Paul Survival Report, unless it was clearly understood that such views spoke to the people who were Ron Paul's audience at the time. (Rather damning, I'm afraid.)

And then if this was not the case then such an action by this phantom employee would clearly be the work of a mercenary sort of enemy or rogue infiltrator who was setting out to damage Ron Paul. But Ron Paul doesn't make this claim. Ron Paul says very little. Occam's Razor, man.

The last rather bizarre possibility is that this was just an incident that's equivalent to some lout grabbing the microphone at the radio station. How silly is that? This would collapse the truth that Ron Paul's staunchest support has in fact always come from the extreme right-wing militia, skinhead and neo-Nazi crowd...to the realm of mere coincidence.

No, now that he's a "serious" candidate the time is for backpedalling and denials. Or silence, better yet.

There won't be any Kramer meltdowns, unfortunately.

I've met two gay men who were essentially mercenaries. Big tough killers, and you wouldn't know it by looking.

I like this video.

I guess I just want to point out that there is a stigma about gay men being limp lilies, but that is rarely the case, based on my experience.

Sometimes the most queenly of gay friends were the most vicious.

Sad that fashionable men have to dress badly to assuage some dumbkoff’s insecurity.

That's a big problem.

We are paying a mercenary force 10x what we are paying our own troops.

They answer to no one. They are above the law.

And if you try to investigate them, your life is threatened - as Congressman Issa implied.

If you want to go to Iraq to investigate Blackwater, Blackwater is the force assigned to your security, i.e. if you want to investigate crime, the criminals are in charge of your welfare.

"Either intelligence was incorrect and bad decisions were made as a result of it, or the president knowing concocted a plan to frame a foreign country for personal gain and has been managing to manipulate his way out of being caught by Democrats that have absolutley nothing but pure hated for him. I think given past evidence of our president's public speaking ability and general intelligence level, I'm going with option A."

I suggest option C:
The president's TEAM (let's not forget cheyney, rumsfeld, etc) told the world that Iraq was an imminent threat (nukes in 45 minutes) and somehow connected with 9/11 (because preemptive war is illegal), in order to further their own financial interests and increase their political power, because they are just plain greedy, as unprincipled as the Democrats who are afraid to oppose him, being as they are just the other side of a dirty coin.

The "extreme" reaction of people like rougy is barely equivalent to the extremity of rolling into a sovereign nation, protecting the oil ministry, building huge permanent bases, torturing innocents to gain false information to go and kill other innocents, employing thousands of mercenaries outside the law, awarding huge sums of money to US companies for reconstruction projects that never happen, arming terrorists with unmarked weapons that get "lost" and dropping depleted uranium on school playgrounds with no electricity or running water.

The fact that you have seen some positive things in Iraq doesn't begin to outweigh the outrageousness of this war. The fact that "fixing" saddam might have been an honourable thing to do doesn't make up for the fact that it was done dishonourably and there was no realistic plan for replacing him, and now the world has lost patience with America and your dollar is fucked.

I don't hate soldiers, I marched in the street to try and stop you being sent there.

If the politicians are going to continue to use mercenaries then they need to enforce the same Universal Code of Military Justice as required by the military. These federally funded contractors should be bound by a stricter rules of engagement than the rest of the fighting forces.

They are even paid 10x that of the soldiers.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

There's no doubt that the Sift is getting more complex. The number of users on the site is growing, but more concerning from an admin standpoint, the number of active content pages we are maintaining is really growing.

We could just let content die- but I think one of the really important parts of the way VideoSift works is that a link to a VS content page is actually more reliable than a link to a youtube page. Because we treat our hosts like a utility company, supplying us with raw media- we can be platform agnostic.

So, if that's the approach that we want to take, (and I humbly suggest that it should be) then we need community tools like the Dead Pool to make it function.

Would the Dead Pool work if it was just a tabbed page on the site without any reward or recognition? That's not a rhetorical question- I'm not sure of the answer - perhaps it would. But I suspect the majority of the fixing work would fall on the shoulders of a few dedicated Sifters, and the list would quickly become completely unmanageable as they burned out and gave up.

I know that you don't want this thread to be about Sift Money (some less mercenary term) but the idea behind it is to provide some "community fuel" for the tools that we need to keep VideoSift a fun, useful place - and return Star Points to their original single purpose use.

annnnnddd *sticky