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Iran Reverse Engineers Cobra Attack Helicopter
Hugh Pickens writes "Continuing its tradition of reverse engineering and fabricating its stockpile of 40-year old American weaponry, Iran announced that it is about to unveil its first ever domestically produced Cobra attack choppers. Nearly 50 years after the U.S. introduced the legendary Bell AH-1 Cobra, once the backbone of the U.S. Army's attack helicopter fleet, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country, reports the FARS news release. More photos available here."
...came on... make it open source. !!!
Some people have the weirdest fetishes.
No! Haven't they watched Stargate SG-1?
It's all going to end in tears.
I'm curious what their ability is as far as mass production. I'm also curious why they are producing a 40 year old variant instead of targeting a newer one - I suppose it's a lower barrier to entry and probably a lot easier to get pieces for...
I find it interesting that they didn't release any specific armament specs. This may suggest they don't have any arms plants with sufficient production.
everyone will just copy whatever is developed.
, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country,
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Blast them with patent infringement suits. The mullas are screwed now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I can see them off-shoring production to China and getting 100's a month. Their big problem is going to be training pilots fast enough.
As far as the "age" - it was a good design then and is still a good design. Upgrade the weapons to something more modern and they are going to be very dangerous on a battlefield.
Ah-mad-dinner-jacket is a buffoon!
We could debate the situation between Israel, palestina, and Iran all we want, but we have no idea what the facts are here. Journalism isn't what it used to be, and every single story about those three are biased beyond all reconing. Not in outright lies, but in leaving out "details" and drawing lots of attention to others.
How can we give judgement if we have no idea of the conditions these people live in?
Give me facts, and I will give you arguments.
One thing we can say for sure is that Nuclear bombs (fission or fusion), will always be beyond a last resort. The backlash of using one is so tremendous, that countries rather go to war in the traditional means (tanks, generals, the occasional trumpeteer) than anything involving massive genocide.
It's the reason people are terrified of terrorists getting nuclear arms. Because they simply don't care about the backlash.
On the red plate in this http://www.jamejamonline.ir/Media/images/1389/02/11/X00873991516.jpg picture is that writing in English?
Wait until they get a taste of our theatre-wide laser weapons. We could blind and crash their entire fleet in a few seconds from across the Gulf.
yeah! sock it to 'em! hit them with weapons that dont exist yet!
Also, why stick to theatre-wide laser weapons ( that dont exist), we could also use antimatter weapons (that dont exist yet) on them too.
Hooray for the USA!
Ahmadinejad is a buffoon, and he's not the person running Iran.Ayatollah Khamenei is the one that could actually order a nuclear attack. Unlike Ahmadinejad, Khamenei doesn't make threats against Israel, and has publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral. He will also still be in power long after Ahmadinejad is gone.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Have we made any advances in helicopter technology that is beyond Iran's reach? I understand the purpose of this article is to mock Iran, but what if they start copying nuclear weapons from that era? And how long will it take them to build equivalents to our modern helicopters?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I just figured out that the "more photos" link actually points to a forum thread from 2010.
Are you sure it wasn't Photoshop that got reverse engineered?
Would Iran really kill countless innocent Muslim civilians, including women and children?
Yes. You may not be aware of the brutal suppression of the Green Movement.
Any regime that suppresses free speech is an oppressive government.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Do you know of any studies/argumentations about the likelihood of Iran using atom bombs against Israel?
About as likely as Britain launching a first strike against the USSR during the Cold War?
If you want to bring them to their knees accidentally loose some F-22s over Iran. If they tried to reverse engineer then deploy them it'd bankrupt the country. Even better yet would be a 30 year old Osprey prototype. The point is we're the only country that spends enough on their military to maintain such cutting edge aircraft. They can mimic 40 year old aircraft but the modern ones are too expensive to build and are drastically more expensive to maintain. It's not just that all they have access to is 40 year old aircraft it's that they were far more practical than modern aircraft. Look at the A-10s they are phasing out. They were wildly successful and the basic technology wasn't all that different than was used in the 50s. The joke is the technology has both gotten so good and so delicate as in the breakdown rate that far more planes are lost due to mechanical failure than enemy gunfire.
Would Iran really kill countless innocent Muslim civilians, including women and children?
Of course they would (and they have on a smaller scale). If a Muslim dies as part of an attack on Israel they are martyred and get guaranteed entry into paradise. So there is little downside from a theocratical perspective. Plus the Palestinians are probably Sunni, the Iranians are Shiite. There is no shortage of sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, apparently each has little problem with killing the other. Each side believes the other to be heretics to some degree.
This article over at Foreign Policy is a good read to see how much of a threat Iran really is. And why every one if focused on the wrong threat.Story
In related news, Adobe announced that the Iranian government has purchased several licenses of Photoshop CS6.
You mean despite the fact they have *never* said that, in fact quite the reverse - that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and against the tenets of Isal?
But don't let mere facts get in the way of your knee jerk predjudices.
No, I don't really believe you would.
I think you'd like to see everyone agree with you that Iran would not kill "countless innocent Muslim civilians" and that we should somehow take comfort in the fact that Ahmadinejad "is no Hitler and no Stalin". I'm sure that late neighboring buffoon, Saddam Hussein, was "no Hitler and no Stalin" but he had no compunctions about killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians". In fact, just about every time I look at the news I see muslims killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians", and more often than not, it's thanks to some "buffoon" who's "no Hitler and no Stalin". So pardon me if your assurances about Ahmadinejad do not really convince.
We have seen this news since about 2002. Every six months or so, a parade of neoconservatives who have failed at foreign policy (Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Podhoretz, etc) shows up at the right-wing talk shows with breaking news that Israel is going to launch a strike against Iran "within 60 days". No joke, this is as regular as Autumn follows Summer. If you tune into any of the Salem Radio talkers, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, you will hear these predictions at least once a week. The funny thing is that not one of them has ever mentioned their own long string of failed predictions.
I don't know if Israel is going to launch a strike on Iran, and I don't know if Israel wants to launch a strike on Iran, but I know for sure that Israel doesn't want to launch a strike anywhere near as badly as this string of former foreign policy advisers to Republican administrations. And this act has been going on since at least the 1970s.
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They often seem to portray President Ahmadenijad as one of the world's greatest geniuses. I expect to see a patriotic picture of him flying one of these.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Decades later....doh....
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's something many people don't know about. The one place where Nazism, and it's blend of socialism and ethnic genocide is popular, is the middle east. The entire middle east, that is, including Turkey. It is very popular in Iran.
because all the trained ones go down thud. God/Allah/yo'momma forbid they ever try and fire any of that backyard armament. gas pipe ain't good gun barrels. and I'm not going to say why ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Ahmadinejad is a buffoon, and he's not the person running Iran.Ayatollah Khamenei is the one that could actually order a nuclear attack. Unlike Ahmadinejad, Khamenei doesn't make threats against Israel, and has publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral. He will also still be in power long after Ahmadinejad is gone.
Um, that eases me.
The prospect of another war in the Middle East scares the shit out of me. As the GP said, this fosters hatred, which makes Jews/Christians/Americans be murdered all over the world.
In fact, those assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists (which many people assume to be carried by the Mossad) may be a bad idea.
I am JOrgePeixoto. I created tis accounted to overcome the 50-comment limit (yes, I'm an addict)
I don't recall there being any backlash when the U.S. used nukes on Japan, they became one of Americas closest allies soon after.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
Needless to say a fusion bomb on a large city would be horrific but very few nations have those. A fission bomb would certainly be worse than 9/11 if an Al Qaeda like group managed to set one off in a Western city so its obviously something to be avoided.
But the U.S., Britain and Russia have been killing large numbers of civilians since World War II with little repercussion so I think your statement "will always be beyond a last resort" is a little overly breathless.
@de_machina
Iran sent their own children into minefields, walking slowly through them to clear a path by getting hit by mines, until the mines were exhausted. But no worries ! They gave them small little plastic keys, that the government claimed would take them to heaven "if" they died. They sent all the orphans they had. Why ? Because that's what muslim law says, orphans become slaves of the caliph, which Iran takes to mean they owe their lives to the government.
The keys called attention to the fact that, according to the highest authority of shi'a islam "to kill and be killed for allah is the purest part of islam".
http://www.themodernreligion.com/ugly/unholy.html
Islam is a barbaric, monstrous religion, and it's the real threat.
Yes, but they'll only do so 40 years later ... at which point, what's the problem exactly ?
To fire the weapons, you must think in American
Having a nuke is the ONLY way to make sure your country is
not taken over by the US.
That's why N. Korea, Iran, and any other country which doesn't want to
end up being a puppet of the US wants nukes.
The US acts like it is waging a war on terror, but the sad truth is that much of the
terrorism has been done in response to things the US has done. This is something
that is well known within the Pentagon and in the White House. All that "war on terror"
propaganda is put out for the consumption of the idiots in the US who will provide
their bodies or the bodies of their children for use by the US military.
If you do not believe what I have written, you need to educate yourself.
Ever read about this guy on the bible named Samson?
Based on him, I can assume every Christian country is a super strong whoremonger terrorist.
Yeah, Troll, generalizations are bad for everyone.
A better question: Israel has hundreds of Nukes. Would Iran want a single nuke on Tehran? They would loose 15 million Iranian.
Obviously not.
During Iran-Iraq war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian army and civilian. Iran never retaliated with chemical weapons stating that chemical weapons are inhumane. Iran still has thousands of people suffering from the effects of those weapons (incidentally provided by western countries).
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
He's already started it. The entire board of the Foreign Policy Initiative all except for William Kristol himself are part of his foreign policy team.
And the only reason why WK isn't on the team is that it would be too obvious.
There is *nobody* in the Press talking about it. The silence and tacit approval from the Fourth Estate is fucking disgusting.
You know what I see? I see rampant electoral fraud this November geared to get Romney elected and we're all just fucked. The fix is in. The fix was in two years ago. The loony-tunes unelectable candidates were picked by the GOP leadership to ensure that Romney, their patsy, would get the nomination. There is no other logical explanation for the disgusting crew of unlikeable and shit-for-brains candidates like Crazy Bitch, Mr. Hairpiece, Pizza Guy, etc.
Yeah, I know, tighten the tinfoil, bmo, but the more you watch what's going on, the more it seems like tinfoil is required.
And so we head toward Permanent War.
--
BMO
So maybe you could share with us the dire consequences the U.S. suffered for nuking Japan.
You can't can you, loser AC.
@de_machina
Call me a conspirator, but if you look over everything thats been going on in the government, whether 9/11 was done by terrorists or the government, you'll notice that a police state is arriving, secretly its already here, but openly its not.
A conspirator is someone involved in a conspiracy. You, my friend, are either a troll or clinically paranoid.
This blatant stealing is killing the industry! Right?
I find it amusing that you think that the Persians living in Iran have any kind of ethnic kinship with Arabs; they are more likely to feel that the very presence of Jews in the Holy Land is an affront to Islam, resent the Arabs for losing Palestine, and see the Palestinians as the physical embodiment of the Arabs dereliction of their religious duty to wipe the Israel off the face of the Earth. I easily see Iran as capable of sending every Palestinian on the earth to paradise as Martyrs in order to destroy Israel.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You're going to have to tell us what happened to all the christian massacres that easily trumped arabs both numerically and in terms of quality (as in being quite sophisticated about the ways used to kill people). No one was as good at brutally slaughtering people in the name of the God (and his installed representative on earth, the blessed king/tsar/pope/etc) as fellow christians. Hell, the colonialist period and its massacres alone probably killed more people then arabs during entire history of islam. That's not even touching dark ages, which were full of both internal as well as external savagery. Ever wondered why we use arabic numbers? Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.
What about radical Islamist conduct to date has convinced you that the certainty of more muslim than infidel deaths as a result of a given course of action will deter them from that course of action?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
I was alive when US nuked Japan. Parent statement sounds right to me.
I just happened to be reading the U.S. military's strategic bombing report of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also read a recent hospital report on a severe burn victim.
I don't see any difference between being burned to death (or killed when a building collapses) in a nuclear blast or in a conventional firebombing. It's a long painful process in either case. The best you could hope for would be enough morphine to put you out, and they didn't have much morphine after those attacks.
The AC's comment is part of a bad Internet practice of calling everything that you disagree with "inane drivel", as a substitute for thinking about it and making an intelligent comment.
The use of nuclear weapons against Israel presumably has to potentially include Jerusalem as a target. Nuking 'just' one location, such as Tel Aviv, means starting a war of total distruction with the surviving elements of the Israeli military, so it makes no more sense than, say, nukeing just New York and expecting the US to say "Oh, if it's only NY, we won't use nukes back." Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back. That means one of your hypothetical Iranian bombs takes out one of the most major Muslim holy sites (The Dome of the Rock). It also opens the door to retaliation against Islamic sites in general, presumably including even Mecca itself, as a risk. The question becomes, how far would Israel go with a 50% population loss? The real answer is, there's a reasonable likelyhood of a nuclear power using its weapons in response to just fallout from being downwind of a target nation, or similar possible triggers, let alone being faced with genocide and the possible total distruction of their nation. Asking what people would rationally do in such cases is starting from a false assumption that people in such cases remain rational if they started out that way .
So yes, you are drawing a reasonable inference when you question how much Ahmadinejad is like Hitler or Stalin, as one of the major questions is "Is he crazier than either of those two?". Probably not, but he does what the Grand Ayatollahs direct, maybe with some other influences, but just who those might be is terribly unsure from outside Iran. The real question may be how crazy a bunch of mostly 70 yeal old + spiritual leaders are.
However, you should keep in mind that most Iranians are not Arabs, although most are Muslims. Actual Arabs are only about 2% of the Iranian population according to the CIA world factbook. People who even speak fluent Arabic in the region total only about 3%, from the same source. Add to this that the version of Islam endorsed in Iran is Shia, while the majority of Palestinian Islamic practitioners are Sunni, and there are not as many ties between these peoples as most assume. There may well be Iranian hardliners who regard the Sunni as damnable heretics anyway, or, more secularly, strongly resent the occasional Sunni tendency (as seen particularly in Wahhabism, which is a Sunni/Saudi based half religion/half nationalism splinter), to treat all non-arab Muslims as second class Muslims.
Who is John Cabal?
The photos show the "Cobras" sporting Royal Air Force roundels. Are these also used by the Iranian Air Force out of some love for the British occupation or is it just some sort of Photoshop fail?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian leadership used a tactic called the "human wave". They sent huge numbers of unarmed men to attack Iraqi troops. The Iranians kept coming (and dying) until the Iraqis ran out of ammo. After that the Iranians would overrun the Iraqi positions. This is just to illustrate how much the Iranian leaders care about not getting their own people killed. Add to that the fact that the vast majority of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs are Sunnis, whereas the Iranians are Shiites. There is a lot of bad blood between the Sunnis and the Shiites, and each does not really consider the other to be true Muslims. As far as your last point, it appears that anything Israel does, short of committing a collective suicide, fosters anti-semitism.
The biggest single group of victims of Islamic terrorism and militantism is, by a long shot, Muslims. Even Palestinian suicide bombers are/were very indiscriminate and would often kills as many Arabs as Jews in the attacks.
Do you have ESP?
No, I don't really believe you would.
I think you'd like to see everyone agree with you that Iran would not kill "countless innocent Muslim civilians" and that we should somehow take comfort in the fact that Ahmadinejad "is no Hitler and no Stalin". I'm sure that late neighboring buffoon, Saddam Hussein, was "no Hitler and no Stalin" but he had no compunctions about killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians". In fact, just about every time I look at the news I see muslims killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians", and more often than not, it's thanks to some "buffoon" who's "no Hitler and no Stalin". So pardon me if your assurances about Ahmadinejad do not really convince.
I did want the debate, I'm honestly curious. I have no strong opinion here. How could I? Middle Eastern politics is insanely complex.
People provided me with tons of new information, including links, and after reading them I will be much better informed.
Regards
gas pipe ain't good gun barrels. and I'm not going to say why ;)
Just an FYI, your ignorance is showing.
Iran isn't Zimbabwe or even Afghanistan. Iran's essentially a modern country. They have Internet - Twitter was a major part of the protests a while back. They have a space program that's successfully launched satellites. They're actually considered a leading country in stem-cell research and nanotechnology. They helped build the Large Hadron Collider. They export automobiles. They're considered a creative player, a rising star, in cinema. Their GDP sits between Turkey and Australia. On the UN Human Development Index, they are listed as High - the same category as Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, and above China, India, and South Africa.
They produce, legally and under license, H&K MP5 sub-machineguns and G3 rifles and Rheinmetal MG3 machine guns. They have designed and built their own helicopters, UAVs, flight simulators, ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, smart bombs, you name it. Their standard infantry rifle is arguably an improvement over ours - literally, as it's a bullpup-modified variant of a Chinese copy of the M16.
If we ever go to war with Iran, it will not be like Afghanistan. It will not be like Iraq. It would be like invading, say, Norway - we would win, eventually, if only through sheer bloody-mindedness, but it would be a nasty, brutal fight, bloody on both sides. It would be months, even years before we even get to the "barely-armed guerrilla insurgency" phase.
I didn't mod you down, but I can guess you were modded down for needlessly bringing politics into a tech thread. And not only politics, but ME politics that results in flamewars every time. Mods probably did the right thing by putting out the firestarter before it could catch and ruin a discussion about technology and engineering. We'll talk about Iran, Israel, nukes, and ME politics when the topic is about Iran, Israel, nukes, and ME politics -- its not as if we don't get plenty of that around here.
Thank you for replying.
But honestly, how could a story about Iran reverse engineering American military helicopters possibly not generate
politics-related comments?
And no one had to moderate me down twice and hurt my Karma. They could simply have ignored me and moded up
something else, so my post would be smothered.
Fortunately, I have plenty of Karma to burn, and the dishonest moderators are just wasting their mod points
and taking the risk of being caught by metamoderation.
Regards
While I see no indication that Nazism is popular in China, at almost every book sale I pass on college campuses, I see Chinese translations of Mein Kampf for sale. I have never seen one sold, nor even seen anyone pick one up, but I don't hang around the sales for a long time, either. One of these days I am going to have to ask what's up with that.
As for the original topic, if you can't reverse engineer 50 year old technology that you have in your physical possession at least to the point of understanding the basic physics well enough to make a reasonable imitation, what a backwards place you have to be. What are they going to copy next, the B-52? Copying an airframe isn't very challenging, particularly when they already own plenty to disassemble, but without modern electronics and modern doctrine training, they might as well be clay pigeons to anyone but their own people.
Looking at the original article (mod me up, I RTFM'd!), though, I am wondering how many of those Cobras were photoshopped in (and why none of them seem to have more than half the rotor with the sky a strange color in the space where the missing blade should be), and why can't I find Jar-Jar Binks... he has to be in there somewhere!
So by your standard you would agree that the U.S. has an oppressive government because it crushed every Occupy movement in every city in the U.S. last year, with mass arrests, tear gas and blackjacks, protests that were for the most part peaceful and just exercising their right to free speech.
Israel's done pretty much the same thing, in fact substantially worse to suppress free speech by Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel.
Saudi Arabia has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, heavy censorship, travel bans on dissidents in violation of international law.
Lovable Canada recently passed laws to suppress student protests in Quebec over massive tuition increases, including 10 year sentences for protestors for simply wearing masks.
So if you wanna be all holier than though about Iran you might wanna look around and notice that every government suppresses free speech the second they start feeling threatened by it.
@de_machina
Ahmahdinajad has only titular power.
He's much like the elected mayor of London.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They are a fine design, presuming Iran has all the parts working right (there's more to making a perfect copy than making it look similar). However they've got nothing on modern choppers. It isn't even so much the actual bits that have to do with flying, but the electronics for communications and attack.
What makes the AH-64D so fearsome is the whole "longbow system". So one helicopter with longbow radar, could even by a Cobra with it, sneaks forward and peaks its radar dome up over the trees or buildings. This gets an accurate map of all the enemy forces, and cross decks it to all the Apaches lying back in waiting. The scout makes itself scarce, and the other pop up and fire off a volley of hellfires from around 5 miles away. These all go for their designated targets, there aren't any unintentional overlaps, and hit.
The system lets a mass targeting like that take place. One platform finds them, the rest blow them up and you don't have any problems of multiple designations where like 4 choppers shoot the same tank or something.
So if Iran has a longbow system ready to go, ok then maybe they have something. Notice the article says nothing about that and they'd probably be bragging on it if they did.
Never is a mighty long time, and religious tenets frequently get left behind (or reinterpreted, or taqiyya'd) in a desire to achieve a goal.
“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense
gathering Sunday in Tehran.
His remarks came on the day International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran to negotiate for inspections
of Iran’s nuclear program. They were reported by the Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
While he could expect everyone else to do the dirty work and hope for a better outcome then the 6 day war, the only meaningful way the Iranian military could achieve his stated cause is with nukes (or chemical/biological weapons).
I find it amusing that you think that the Persians living in Iran have any kind of ethnic kinship with Arabs
I never said that Iranians are Arabs. I merely theorise that Iran may fear the Arab backslash if they killed a million Arabs.
I agree with most of that, but the Mongols had the biggest and most genocides. And while the crusaders and the Spanish were big on killing Arabs, virtually all the enslaving was done by the Moslems.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The Chinese don't exactly subscribe to Nazism but there was a counter revolution when Mao died and they did swing hard to state Capitalism and something closely resembling Fascism. Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
The two regimes in the Middle East that were closely aligned to Fascism recently were the Ba'ath regimes, Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. It is a real stretch to claim Turkey is anywhere close to being in the same class.
If you want to name another regime in the Middle East with issues with ethnic cleansing and far right leaning its probably Israel. Its ironic how similar they've become to their bitterest nemesis.
@de_machina
So by your standard you would agree that the U.S. has an oppressive government because it crushed every Occupy movement in every city in the U.S. last year, with mass arrests, tear gas and blackjacks, protests that were for the most part peaceful and just exercising their right to free speech.
Free speech doesn't mean you are able to say anything you want in any way you want. It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you. This is an important distinction, figure it out.
Saudi Arabia has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, heavy censorship, travel bans on dissidents in violation of international law.
Yes, Saudi Arabia is an oppressive regime.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In terms of what the US has, well have a look at the AH-64D. That's the current unclassified nifty toy, though it has been around for a bit. Particularly look at the longbow package, the thing that makes a D variant what it is. It is a rather big upgrade. Remember that with things like tanks n' choppers n' so on the fundamental design may be kept for many years with various upgrades made to it. The US still uses B-52s but they are far more advanced today, despite being the same airframe.
You could look at it sort of like a computer: Maybe you keep the same case and powersupply, that doesn't mean you don't upgrade the components.
Then of course there's whatever the US has that it wont' tell people about. The Bin Laden raid inadvertently revealed that there is something. The tail of the helicopter that didn't get destroyed was from no known design out there. So the US has a classified helicopter. Big surprise there. Who knows what precisely it is capable of (hence why it would be classified)?
Also don't confuse propaganda with results. Iran says they have a bunch of helicopters. Ok, how well do they work? Where they proof? We know the AH-64Ds the US have work, not only are there plenty of videos of the playing around in training simulations, but they've been used in actual combat. There's no question they do what they say. Iran says they have a domestically produced Cobra. Ok, does it even fly? If it does, is it any good at combat maneuvers? How are its weapons?
If there's no answer to that it could be because they want to keep it secret, but that would be a little silly given the US already knows what the Cobras do. It also could be because the thing doesn't work near as well as it should.
Think about the cheap Chinese knockoff market for devices: You find these things that look nearly or completely the same, but don't work at all as well as the device they copied. One that readily comes to mind are EOTech holographic weapon sights. Real EOTechs cost $400 and up and are combat sights, as in the military actually DOES use them in combat. Very rugged and reliable, they don't lose their zero, are waterproof, and have great optics (the best anti-glare coating I've ever seen).
The Chinese knockoffs? They cost maybe $50-100 in the US, probalby less there. They look like EOTechs, they try to copy as much of the markings as they can and they are physically similar, though built out of different plastic and plastic in some places the EOTechs are metal. However that's where it ends. The optics are garbage, they aren't waterproof, the "nightvision" button doesn't make them work with NV just changes the colour, they lose zero with the recoil from fired shots, and they break down easily.
That they make a copy doesn't mean they make a good copy.
AFAIK, the brutal supression of oposition are made both by Iran and Israel. After all, 'democracy' is not democracy when you chose who can and who can't vote.
Production of battlefield equipment is often not the bottleneck. Training a suitable number of troops is.
Just as in the 1300's and 1400's the English Longbow was a devastating weapon. However, they just couldn't keep up the skilled men to operate the 6 ft, upto 200lb draw strength required.
These helicopters are largely for moral.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
If these people get access to nuclear bombs, a nuclear war will start in a matter of months, how can you possibly interpret their history in any other way ? Iran is a tossup. It's muslim, has a history of aggression, but not nearly as bad as that of the arabs. But frankly, do we really want tossups here ? Besides, Israel is not going to risk it, if Iran goes nuclear Israel has shown in the past that they'll make the first strike.
Luckyo has already commented on your inaccurate assertion that Arabs and/or Arabic Muslims have far more genocide than others. Let me comment on your wildly and provably incorrect assertion that (paraphrasing) "history tells us that nuclear war will start in a matter of months if these people get nuclear weapons".
Now, if I interpret "these people" as Arabic Muslims, then Iranians are generally Persian Muslims (yeah, yeah, there are non-Persian and non-Muslims minorities in Iran, but "Persian" is way more accurate than "Arabic"). So unless (with all due respect) you're a inbred moronic racist who has commented before knowing the facts at hand, then surely that's not what you mean.
Therefore, you surely meant "Muslims" by your phrase "these people". In which case, then Pakistan (also a country with Islam as its state religion and majority Muslims) has had nuclear weapons as well as the means to launch them for about 14 years. Which -- because you probably can't count beyond your fingers/toes -- is 168 months, a tad more what is considered "a few" months in adult English in the civilised world.
I'd also like you to cite evidence that Iran has a history of aggression (Iraq attacked Iran first and Iran merely kicked out a non-democratic puppet dictator in 1979), but given the rest of your post, I reckon it's a tossup whether you're a 7 year old posting on his dad's computer or just a mental patient trying to pass the time away.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
They are totally different.
The rivers don't boil with firebombing.
The moisture isn't sucked out of people that they are so thirsty that they jump into the boiling rivers.
Firebombs don't irradiate people.
Firebombs don't kill people weeks, months, years, decades later.
Visit Hiroshima and be humbled. They have a memorial that is a huge mound of human ashes.
using a military website whos advisory board includes two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to downplay the fact that
iran so far, just as russia had in the cold war, has outstriped our laughably conservative estimates of its military capability. After all, we've been banging this war drum for far too long to see its support base dwindle in the sight of things like the ability to capture, disable, and reverse engineer americas newest drone.
http://news.yahoo.com/iran-says-building-copy-captured-us-drone-083944692.html
investors like lockheed and boeing need politicians, and the american public to maintain the hardline opinion that iran could and should be easily crushed by the US military. The boogeyman must remain frightening enough to win the hearts and minds of constituents, but not so frightening as to make them reconsider the cause and effect of another real war without drones that sends kids home with missing limbs or a full scale IQ of 85.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The proper way to get yourself in bad with the head of the communist party at a university is to ask if he owns the Audi he drove up in, but the 30 seconds or so of blank stare as he goes through all the possible reasons why you might be asking that question is freaking hilarious.
I think your history teachers have really glossed over the whole slave trade part during colonisation era. It made muslim-done enslaving look like employing unionised people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Cobra
No doubt Palestinians are just looking for the right to vote, and speak freely in the country of Israel.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What on earth was Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi doing addressing a Tehran crowd in English?
Of course he wasn't, which means that there are now at the mercy of those who translated it, even assuming the reported it accurately. And your link points to a US media site (so already hardly neutral or unbiased in these things) but not just that, one that has right-wing leanings and indeed was founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney.
It is worth re-iterating that Iran has not started a war before. Can you say the same about Israel or the US. In fact the latter seems to start one every couple of years. Much as I loathe religious nut jobs, the balance of evidence is that the Israeli and US religious nut jobs have more to account for thus far than the Iranian ones.
First, I am not justifying Iraqi atrocities by any way. However, I am amazed how people who send unarmed men into battle and who send boys to clear mine fields have the chutzpah to pontificate on what is humane and what isn't. I also think that the only reason Iran did not use chemical weapons in that war is because it didn't have them.
Actually, it does.
However, in practice there are limitations on free speech which most reasonable (and some unreasonable) people would agree are necessary to a functioning civil society, limitations that prevail even in countries that claim to be committed to freedom of expression.
It's the limitations most people feel are unacceptable that cause the problem. Right here, right now, right in what many of us consider to be "the free world", such unacceptable limitations exist, and many of us are pretty pissed about it.
I don't have any more to add right now.
blog
Some moderator keeps moderating down as "Troll" everything I post
Slashdot could fix this. I'm guilty of being pissed off with modpoints (years ago) and it is too easy for a moderator to target an individual. Simply gauging moderator behaviors and applying some limits(max 1 mod per individual) would take care of this problem.
I think we can rightfully call this the "reddit effect".
"It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you."
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
The occupy movement was criticizing the U.S. government and just trying to be heard. As soon as they started being heard, and they started to cause discomfort to Wall Street and the government, they were systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess, New York, Oakland, UC Davis, Denver, Boston, LA etc.
The Federal government was actively aiding and coordinating the cities as they used riot police to break up the entire movement. How often have you heard anything about it since the last encampments were broken up by riot police.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal, but in terms of intent, goals and effect what the U.S. government did to the Occupy movement was exactly the same kind of oppression Iran's government did to the Green movement. The Green movement was actually trying to topple the regime in Iran. Occupy was just saying the current regime in the U.S. sucks (i.e. Wall Street seizing control of our government and using that control to loot America).
@de_machina
You need freedom of speech to get the message out that a government is bad, and get your ideas out for how to improve it. As long as you can do so, your country has freedom of speech, because then you will be able to (attempt) to convince your neighbors that the other speech limitations should change.
That is the necessary bar for 'freedom of speech' from a political perspective. If you are above it, you have freedom of speech. If you are below it, you do not.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If they ever try anything like Pearl Harbor again they should be summarily eliminated from existence.
Say the warcrimes in China and Korea that the Japanese committed, but Pearl Harbor...
The image you just painted IS hilarious.
@de_machina
>Here's hoping Ron Paul hijacks the candidacy or runs third party and splits the GOP right down the middle
And the GOP will have learned the easy lesson from watching Nader fuck the DNC. All it will take is to find Dr. Paul's price. It's probably not money, but I guarantee that they will definitely wheel and deal to keep him out.
Yes, I am that cynical. Possibly not cynical enough.
--
BMO
So you are saying the Fars News Agency, an Iranian web site, is actually a US media site and was founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney? Because the very first link in the Yahoo web page I originally included points to it. Perhaps I should have used that link originally, but I thought the Yahoo web site did a better job of fleshing out the story.
But you are welcome to begin believing that even native Farsi speakers are unable to translate correctly, because the following is obviously a mistranslated peace overture: "The Zionist regime is a real cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut, God Willing," Ayatollah Khamenei underscored.
The problem is in how they want peace. The world will supposedly be at peace when it is entirely run by Muslims, all others killed or subjugated.
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
They do have the right to speak. They don't have the right to say it in any way they want, or to become squatters.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal,
No, it was significantly more brutal.
The point of free speech (from a government perspective) is that You need freedom of speech to get the message out that a government is bad, and get your ideas out for how to improve it. If people aren't interested in your message, you can't force them to listen to you by blocking bridges and yelling in their faces. The Iranians weren't trying to topple the regime, they were trying to get their votes counted.
And let's face it, the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? Everyone knows that. Is it any wonder people get bored of listening to them?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Israel would not nuke Iran unless Israel's existence was threatened. Even if Iran used a chemical WMD Israel would likely respond with (a lot of) conventional munitions. Really the Israelis have nukes so that they won't have to use them (crazy, eh? but it is the same with most of the other nuke armed powers).
IIRC, there was a great deal of debate on whether to drop the bomb. It was decided to because of the way the Japanese fought throughout the Pacific, ceding island by island fighting to the last man. So instead of risking 100s of thousand of US troops, they asked Japan to surrender. They refused and it was decided to drop 1 bomb. The US then requested Japan to surrender again. Japan still refused. They dropped #2 and promised more unless there was a surrender. A bit of a bluff since there were only 3 in existence at the time. Japan surrendered. The net effect - probably less Japanese dead, and a whole lot less US dead, and Japan surrendered instead of being wholly defeated and possibly wiped from history. Conventional war was not pretty with the Japanese fight to the last man ethics, it makes for great movies but horrible wars, as all sorts of atrocities start being carried out by the ever more desperate losing side. And Japan was losing, and would lose. There was little doubt as at that time civilians were just considered collateral damage - unfortunate that they were caught between two warring parties even though both sides would claim they tried to avoid hitting civilians but, weapons just weren't that accurate.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
No, they are thousands of kilometers apart (two countries are between them).
"How far would you go?" Question to Israeli general.
"2000 kilometers."
I really wish he had said that on Meet The Press or something.
Huffpo, popular as it is with liberals, isn't going to reach the same amount of people as MTP does, which would probably get repeated on the network news and even Fox if only for Fox personalities to get all offended.
--
BMO
So you are seriously trying to grade how people die with nukes versus a fire storm and you think somehow dying in either one doesn't completely suck? If anything the nuke tends to be somewhat more merciful, at least for all the people near ground zero since the death is instantaneous, slow roasting or searing suffocation in a fire storm has to be one of the more brutal ways to kill someone.
Their are monuments in Tokyo and Dresden too. The Tokyo monument is a statue of a group of children.
The Dresden monument reads,
""How many died? Who knows the number? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless ones who burned here in the hellfire made by human hands.""
Once you start killing large numbers of civilians the details of how you go about it don't actually matter.
@de_machina
Sorry, Muslim genocides - starting from the time of Mohammed and going on to this day, far dwarfed anything done by the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Conquestadoras, the Nazis and the Communists - all of them put together. In India alone, some 100 million non-Muslims died at the hands of Muslim conquerors over 700 years (1000AD to 1761AD). The GP AC is correct - overall, some 270 million people people died in the Muslim jihads - and that was before 9/11.
Luckyo is also full of shit regarding 'Arabic numbers'. They were called Hindu numerals, and originated in India. In fact, almost everything the Muslims claim to have invented was already invented elsewhere, like China, India, (pre-Islamic) Persia and Egypt, and so on. The Arab 'contribution' to this was taking some of it and spreading it around. This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth, and what's more, it flies in the face of the logic of apologists who claim these as being Muslim/Islamic achievements, while claiming that Islam is not a monolyth when it comes to exhibits of their savagery. Never mind that that savagery is common to Arabs, Turks, Farsis and Afghans, and driven by exhortations to jihad in both the Qur'an and Sun'nah.
CIA world factbook
Also known as Facebook? ;)
So you are basically in the camp that there are good and righteous nukes and the ones the U.S. dropped are them?
I'm not sure you are actually disagreeing with my original point, which in case you missed it is that I think its quite plausible that someone could use nukes today and not be nuked in to the stone age in turn or end in eternal damnation.
Israel was danger close to using nukes in 1973. They were actively threatening it to get more aid from the U.S. and if the convenentional war hadn't suddenly turned in their favor they would almost certainly have rolled them on to the tarmac . Are you saying someone would have incinerated Israel if they had nuked Egypt or Syria, or would Israel using nukes be another one of your righteous and justified cases?
@de_machina
Demachina's claim about there being no repercussions on the US for using nukes is historically borne out. Far from US being subjected to attacks - conventional or nuclear, Japan surrendered, and the war ended. Maybe you can fill in whether people within the US condemned the US for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the first time it was condemned was when the Soviets started using it during the Cold War as propaganda against the US. Never mind that 2 days after Hiroshima, the Soviets declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria and Korea.
You are right - for the victims, there's not a difference between being bombed by a nuke vs being at the receiving end of, say, a JDAM. Difference is more strategic - a nuclear attack is guaranteed to completely destroy everything within a certain radius, whereas conventional weapons only work on their precise targets.
Excuse me while I think about this. If this actually happens, we will have become communist-era Bulgaria.
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BMO
It's ironic how a huge portion of ISRAEL's population is Muslim, as well as how the 'Pali' population in Gaza and West Bank have been growing. If Israel was a state that practiced ethnic cleansing, the overwhelming majority of people in not only Israel, but also Judea, Samaria and Gaza would have been JEWS, not Muslim.
NAZI was a German acronym for 'National SOCIALIST German WORKER's Party'. It beats me why they are refered to as Right Wing, when their economic philosophy is not much different from Marxism. Only difference between Nazism and Communism is that the former assumes that they (the people who constitute their members) are a master race, while the latter has goals of a worldwide fraternity of the proletariat. But both are only too happy to employ genocidal means in order to achieve these utopian goals.
Actually the speed with which you kill people doesn't matter at all. Slow death in Hitler's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags are, if anything much worse, because they caused massive and prolonged suffering. At least nukes are quick except for the people who get high doses of radiation and burns and aren't killed instantly.
As for the collective guilt of Americans, I am relatively sure its non existent. All the interviews I've seen with the crews who dropped the bombs they were of the opinion the Japanese deserved it, and it was better than the carnage, and mass casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of the main Japanese islands. They'd also been pretty well propagandized in to hating the Japanese at that point. Obviously some American's were torn up over it, Oppenheimer included, but people were torn up by concentration camps, the Bataan death march, Dresden and Tokyo too.
You seem pretty confused about the position I'm advocating. I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.
@de_machina
...it will fire female ninjas at the enemy.
I know someone who knows someone who did training for the Iraq.
Basically if anything broke or happened, it was "hands of the controls and start praying" - no corrective measures, no evasion, no ejection.
They had to pound that out of them, and did so with only limited success. Seems to be a cultural thing.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically. War was inevitable from that point and FDR and the U.S. military knew it. Japan had no choice but to seize the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to restore their oil supply, and to do that they had to neutralize the U.S. Pacific fleet.
The specifics of when and where the Japanese would attack might have been a bit of a surprise but the U.S. knew full well it was coming. Its up to the conspiracy theorists to make the claim the U.S. intentionally let the Japanese maul Pearl Harbor because FDR needed a day of "infamy" to goad the American people in to entering World War II, something the very isolationist American people had been loathe to do up to that point. It did a great job of whipping Americans in to a war frenzy, and producing a gusher of volunteers for the military, something that simply wouldn't have happened if FDR had just declared war on Germany and Japan without a provocation.
@de_machina
A dupe, for one.
Meaning that I posted similar words in more than one story? I wasn't aware that was forbidden.
It's not. We just don't like it, hence your getting modded down.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Someone's taken a liking to your commenting. Smells like you got a copycat stalker.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Go fuck yourself, troll. Way to hijack a thread, you must be proud!
"Offtopic" is "While we're talking about monitor resolution for brand X, I noticed that the audio quality has problems as well", not "Iran has a new helicopter, hur durr Iran nukes?" Iran also has a lot of gay hookers, but you don't see me bringing that up.
Whichever moderater gave this dickhead a +1 insightful, go eat a bag of dicks, you lazy fuckwit. The only stories that get more offtopic troll threadjacking than stories about Israel/Iran are the ones about Google/Apple.
I found it "interesting" that the article says that Iran's acquiring nukes will lower the nuclear annihilation vulnerability rankings of every other state except Israel (and Iran itself).
Nope its not a stereotype, its well established that the Audi A6 is the semi official car of choice of the Chinese Communist party official.
The mistresses and princelings apparently favor Ferrari's.
If you aren't familiar with the term princeling they are the children and grandchildren of the giants of the Communist party, the comrades of Mao back in the day, the marchers of the Long March, champions of the worker, who have now suddenly all become staggeringly rich, are driving around in Italian sports cars, and have lost touch with the prolateriat.
@de_machina
I agree with most of that, but the Mongols had the biggest and most genocides. And while the crusaders and the Spanish were big on killing Arabs, virtually all the enslaving was done by the Moslems.
Sweden, or rather a part of the Hansa League based in Stockholm and Visby, had a ginormous trade of slaves from non-Christian parts of (what is today) Finland and the Baltics states, during roughly the same time as the Crusades in the Middle East. Small nations was depopulated to fill the need for slaves in pre-feodal and early feodal Europe. All the Christian crusades in the Baltics and Finland was poorly wielded slave hunts; I have hard to belive that the same was not true for at least some of the Crusades in the Middle East, albeit, the Crusading around the Baltic Sea was made by professional soldiers motivated by profits, not by a mix of amateurs with a plethora of motivations like in the Crusades in the Middle East. It was taboo for European Christians to hold other Christians as slaves, hence the huge demand for heathen slaves. Of course, once the slaves discovered that they would be released if they where to be baptised, they promptly converted to Christianity. Then people discoverd loop holes in the Churchs ban on Christians as slaves and the feudal systems was invented (Sweden is the only part of Europe, except for some really small, isolated areas, that haven't had a feudal system), that made almost all people in Europe de-facto slaves.
Ironically, slavery was made illegal in Sweden during heathen times, centuries before the profitable slave trade was initiated. So Sweden, despite being the largest exporter of slaves to continental Europe for a couple of centuries, never had any slave workers, neither heathen nor Christian, within the country borders, while the slave trade made Stockholm grow rich and influential, it would eventually become the capital of Sweden as well as Sweden propers largest and most populated city; that never would have happened without the slave trade.
Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
Let's see what some other sources say:
'Tyranny of Clichés' Excerpt: The Truth About the Crusades
The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism
The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.
a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.
The atheist Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think your history teachers have really glossed over the whole slave trade part during colonisation era. It made muslim-done enslaving look like employing unionised people.
Tears of Jihad
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"They don't have the right to say it in any way they want"
Well yes actually they do. I don't totally disagree that they may not have had the right to "squat" but they were trying very hard to camp in public spaces, and limit traffic disruptions, and I think that is different than intentionally "squatting" on private property.
You might not like it but if you are going to demonstrate and express your displeasure with your government it almost inevitably results in large numbers of people needing to be in the streets or parks near the seats of power which would be New York and Washington. If they have to get "permits" to do that from the very government they are criticizing, then the government just cuts off the permits and the message the government doesn't want anyone to hear disappears. Or you get things like the "free speech zones" of the Bush era, chain link cages that are conveniently placed so no one will see or hear any protestor foolish enough to get shoved in to one.
"the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? "
You probably should have listened more instead of being "bored", because the message is quite a bit more sophisticated than that. The message is Wall Street in particular, and also big defense, pharna and fossil fuel companies among others have, for all practical purposes, seized control of the U.S. government, to the detriment of the American people.
They did it by buying Congressmen with chump change in campain contributions, with lobbiest bribes, with big PAC donations for campaign ads and more importantly with revolving doors through which Congressmen, their staffs, generals and bureaucrats get lucrative jobs when they leave public service for favors, and in the other direction where people from Goldman Sachs join government to take over places like the Department of the Treasury and the White House. From there they steer trillions of dollars to bail out their former employers and hand out trillions in gifts to corporate interests off the backs of working Americans who still pay their taxes while most big corporations no longer do thanks to the loopholes they've bought.
You ever wonder why the SEC never prosecutes anyone important on Wall Street, because everyone who works at the SEC wants to work at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and get a huge pay increase so they will NEVER do anything but slap their future employers on the wrist. The SEC spent 4 years investigating Lehman Brothers whose malefesance resulted in economic catastrophe, and last week announced no charges would be filed. The investigators will, no doubt, soon get lucrative new jobs on Wall Street.
Some more examples, a 90 billion a year windfall for pharma from Medicare D which was barred from negotiate drug prices. Billy Tauzin rammed through Medicare D and then took a job as a drug company lobbyist. There are massive tax breaks for an oil industry which is making staggering profits. There are hundreds of billions in pork laden contracts to defense and homeland security contractors.
Its called crony capitalism, its a trade mark of banana republics, thats what America has now, and the American people are being royally screwed by it. They have every right, in fact its their duty, to be in the streets of New York and Washington D.C. every week until its stopped and we get our Constitution back.
@de_machina
Hitler was not Otto von Bismarck either. He was just some Austrian buffoon in Reichstag. Yet final result was the same. Wars were waged against other countries.
lol well you're starting to get an understanding of how government is. Keep learning and you might get to the point where you can actually change something.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Quite often the Muslims caught Animistic people from Africa as slaves and sold them to European merchants who then sold them to work in the Americas or whatever colony.
Most casualties in WWII were Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese which employed all sorts of means to "control" the Chinese population including chemical warfare. They also attacked an US base with a military strike prior to the US declaration of war on Japan. It is not like the Japanese were some sort of warm and fuzzy character from tinseltown.
I'd like to point out that Iran's proxy in Lebanon did bomb Israeli Arab children and promptly declared them martyrs for the cause, extrapolate that as you will.
I've also wondered if a religious leader might stretch the concept of martyrdom to a place, i.e. Jerusalem.
Personally, being an Israeli, I'd be willing to bet my life on Iran not wanting to actually nuke anyone and just being interested in acquiring nuclear capability to be taken seriously, by the US and their neighbors.
And I don't think Netanyahu is irrational enough to think he can get away with an Operation Opera type strike without pulling Iran into an all out war and maybe some of their friends and is just bluffing to have the Americans do the work for him.
Let me just quote the original post to which GP responded:
If they ever try anything like Pearl Harbor again they should be summarily eliminated from existence. Full stop.
In other words, he was talking about complete genocide as a justifiable reprisal. Everything that you say may be true, but there's a difference between nuking two cities, and wiping the country out.
The reason Audi's are popular is they are the closest thing to a luxury car which is not actually considered a luxury car. If they drove BMWs or Mercedes, it would really look ostentatious.
> Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
It's comical for the Democrats to claim they are Democrats (remember the grey uniforms, pro slavery, pro state rights "Solid South"?) when they have a black federalist guy as President.
Indeed. Pakistan is far more of a threat than Iran - they already have nukes, and they have an Islamic insurgency that permeates their army and intelligence service to an extent where they half run the state... and those are the same people who fund Taliban, which is already engaged in direct warfare vs NATO troops.
But, hey, so long as their premier keeps saying that we're friends, that's no big deal, right?
That link is very heavy on irony. Colin Powell, the man who made the case to invade the Iraq with lies and spin has repented! He should be in Hague among others being prosecuted for war crimes.
Look! My anti-Muslim views are completely supported by all there anti-Muslim blogs! I MUST be right!
[...] the slave trade made Stockholm grow rich and influential, it would eventually become the capital of Sweden as well as Sweden propers largest and most populated city; that never would have happened without the slave trade.
Citation, please? Never mind censorship and conspiracies to suppress The Truth; if this wasn't a complete fabrication I think I would have heard about it at least *once*.
Nah. Their Iran-Iraq war performance was pretty horrible in the beginning because in Iran theology trumped military experience and know-how. Only later on when they got regular military in their forces were they able to start turning the tide around (yet they still had to resort to human-wave tactics to win). The main problem with invading Iran is that it is a mountainous earthquake prone shithole similar to Afghanistan but only larger. The country has a much larger population than Iraq and is close to developing nuclear weapons. Norway in comparison has better weapons but next to no population in comparison.
Why is the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists - assuming that they were working on a nuclear missile program - a bad idea from the POV of the Israelis, assuming that the idea was theirs?
Even under that POV, it is a bad idea if you want Iran to open their nuclear production sites. If you first ask for access for the IAEA, get documents and visits to sites, then the names on the papers get leaked from the UN to Isreal to Mossad and people get murdered -- how should Iran proceed under this threat? Should they just continue providing access indefinitely? Until they prove their innocence (something that is understood to be impossible in any western legal system)?
Assassinations destroy trust. Only in a very short-sighted view can they be seen as a good thing. (Same applies for torture)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Nuclear bombs also mostly aren't slow deaths of suffocation. With firebombing, people had time to go into the bomb shelters. Then the fires sucked all of the oxygen out of the air, causing the people to slowly suffocate, knowing they are about to die but being unable to do anything about it (Well they could have run out into the streets for a faster end I guess.)
If you think that is bad, check out the time between the Chinese J-8 first flight and entry into service on Wikipedia. Something about a "Cultural Revolution" or whatever...
Well they seem to manufacture composites just fine. The problem is everything else but the airframe...
Then there was this Soviet entry on the Pacific theatre* that had a lot to do with both Japanese surrender and the haste to drop the bombs.
*Matchurian Strategic Offensive Operation, which destroyed the Japanese Kwantung Army of over 1.2 million in a week (capturing +600k POWs).
Actually, no. Party officials in China are broken up into four ranks when it comes to cars stipends: 1) they get so much they can afford a Mercedes or BMW (means they are one of the top 5% or so officials in a province, more in a big city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Chongqing, and these guys have absolutely no problems being ostentatious, thus their princeling children started learning their lessons early) 2) they get enough so they can afford an Audi A6L (if they want to use their own cash to move up to an A8L they can, but there generally isn't enough money to afford a nice Mercedes or BMW if you include maintenance/repairs beyond the ordinary) 3) they get enough to afford an A4L 4) they get nothing. The luxury car companies all fight it out for these stipends, with Audi probably doing the best at matching features to appropriate price bands.
Notice that all versions have an L after them. A party official would generally prefer die than own a non-L version, since the L versions are considered cars they COULD have a driver with, if a situation ever called for it. Few people short of class 1 ever get a driver on a regular basis, though. In general, the cost of moving up from an A4L to a Mercedes or BMW is much too great, and they would rather save their money for a "nice" flat. Same goes for the A6L- take the car, save money for as many houses as they can afford (that attitude is beginning to change with property prices dropping from their historic highs). The guy I was dealing with has a flat provided by the university, so he used his money to buy a nice car, instead, since he doesn't qualify for a stipend. The money the school pays him isn't enough to actually afford the car, he raised the extra money via entrepreneurial spirit and getting commissions for signing kids up for IELTS and TOEFL cram schools.
This is far enough away from the Iran subject that I will drop it now. Besides, I have another dinner to be at shortly.
Your link is large on speculation and short on fact. And your use of the pseudonym "dirty bomb" is just inflammatory. You do realize that alpha radiation - which, as stated in the article, is the primary type observed from DU rounds - is basically harmless, right? I remember working in the physics lab and running tests using sources of alpha radiation. We handled them. With our hands. And this was 4 years ago. You need to eat alpha radiation for it to be harmful. No one has ever produced any solid evidence for long term effects of DU munitions use. I especially like that the article cited soldiers claiming it must have been the DU rounds that caused Gulf War Syndrome.
Which numbnuts modded this drivel up?
using depleted uranium munitions is actually a great cost saver for US taxpayers. It's a cheap way to dispose of nuclear waste while irradiating a foreign civilian population
Um. No. DU has all the nice and very slightly radioactive U235 removed. It isn't nuclear waste.
U-238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years. If you ate it, the problems from heavy metal poisioning would be much worse than the radioactivity.
It's not like they're firing shells filled with Cs-137 which is what the parent is blatantly trying to imply.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth
The Romans of antiquity were similar borrowers. And yet they had a golden age as well. Creating a common culture and political system and a huge trade network has vast value in itself. Among other things, it permits borrowing of technologies and ideas between otherwise disparate groups and creates a mixing pot of such things.
So the very borrowing of stuff which you decry is a huge part of the Muslim contribution to human development in that time.
What really has changed isn't that Muslim society has gotten worse, but that the rest of the world has found something better.
Why would they have to kill him, since his price has obviously already been met.
I feel pretty bad for all the young people who really thought Ron Paul was something special, something different. He turned out to have his hand out like every other politician. Mitt Romney bought him off with the political equivalent of a little flattery and a promise to look out for his developmentally-disabled son, Aqua Buddha.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Erm, talk about half the story?
"Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically."
Have you never heard of the rape of nanking? Japan was war mongering well before even the war in Europe had gotten underway, it was an imperialist nation no different to the Western nations you criticise for provoking them, it's whole purpose for war against China starting primarily in 1937 was because it wanted to take it over.
That's why Japan was under embargo - because it had rolled into China, before Hitler had even rolled into Poland.
Christ, I'm probably one of the least pro-American people you'll meet but Pearl Harbour WAS rational for doing something to Japan, because it was a further extension of Japan's military aggression in the Pacific.
They weren't some innocent country who we just embargoed because we thought it'd be a bit of a laugh, we did so because they were a major destabilising force in the region, we attempted political pressure through embargos and it didn't work. From that point on the only option was full out war against Japan - they started the war in the Pacific long before the west really got involved. The West gave them 4 years to give up their imperialist ambitions and during that time they committed countless massacres, mass-rapes, and general destruction of Chinese cities and infrastructure, when they finally hit Pearl Harbour it was no fucking wonder the West decided enough was enough. No rationale? seriously? You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
> Besides, I have another dinner to be at shortly.
If this is a Chinese dinner, then gan bei. See you in 48 hours, when the hangover is gone.
"I would like to see this debated."
I don't think it will happen, but it may. Your turn.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Oh here we go.
"They're both the same, so vote Republican" nonsense.
Even if Obama is a patsy, he's a patsy for a different group of people entirely. He's not a patsy for the PNAC II aka FPI and assorted neocons.
--
BMO
I was never making any suggestion that Japan didn't deserve to be embargoed. The point was that when the U.S. embargoed Japan it was an act of war as far as Japan was concerned so the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. As a result its disingenuous American to pretend like it was out of the blue or any kind of justification for nuking Japan later.
The rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march on the other hand were pretty good reasons for retaliation.
@de_machina
Excepting for the obvious fact that so far the Tea Party hasn't actually slowed spending or reduced corruption at all. They mostly seem to have just made Congress even more bitterly partisan, disfunctional and deadlocked than it already was and that was a real feat considering it was completely dysfunctional before they got there.
But I am actually as much a fan of the original Tea Party message, and their attempts to cut spending. as I am the OWS's. I think the two movements should acutally unite since they were attacking the same problem from opposite directions, unfortunately the two movements completely hate each other.
The big problem wi the tea party is their movement was co opted by a bunch of horrible, whacked out, politicians like Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint, and by a bunch of people who are obsessed with right wing social issues like abortion and gay marriage instead of the economic issues that matter.
At this point I am willing to wager they are or will be totally co opted in to the standard Republican causes of cutting taxes, especially on the wealthy, gutting social programs and busting unions, while they let the military squader unlimited amounts of money, shield tax subsidies and pork for big corporations, and generally let the deficit spiral out of control. I am actually all for cutting taxes, gutting social programs and busting unions but I want all the pet Republican pork beneficiaries to be gutted too and I doubt the Tea party will actually do it.
@de_machina
Intriguing how the slaves shipped to Europe are completely ignored. Also intriguing how the fact that much of Africa was in fact forcibly converted to Christianity at that point and the fact that you're trying to pretend that current population split on religion and one that existed before the major islamic push in the last two centuries are actually the same.
Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes
Ha-ha. We say the same thing about ours in the U.S.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So you are in the camp that its OK to massacre civilians as long as they "deserve" it and you are righteous about it. You do seem to have completely missed the point I've been trying to make.
Suppose Iran does get nukes and uses one on Israel. I'm assuming you would be in the camp it would be A-OK if the U.S. or Israel in turn nukes all of Irans major cities. Do you think it should be factored in that perhaps a large majority of the people in those cities hate their regime, would have thrown them out if they could and were completely opposed to their use of nukes.
Being all righteous when you go down the road where you justify killinb civilians is pretty messed up. Its why the Bible, the Koran, history of our species in general, is one long string of eye for an eye massacring of civilians, with each party doing the massacring claiming they deserved it and were righteous when they did it. This was borne out elsewhere here when there zre scores of posts claiming the other guys religion has massacred more people than the other guys religion has.
@de_machina
lol, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be smug. I'm a programmer, and programmers are more arrogant than even bankers, just about different things. I'll try to be nicer.
1) You have an idealized view of OWS. Some were trying to 'limit traffic disruptions,' but a large group of them successfully managed to block the Brooklyn bridge. It's as if you're only looking at the good and ignoring the bad.
2) Government is corrupt. That's a boring message. Do you know how to fix it? That might be an interesting message, if you have good ideas. Hint: campaign finance reform won't fix it.
3) You didn't explicitly say this, but it's something that concerns me anyway; the government is NOT some big power that we need to complain to, or protest, in order to change things. The government is our servant, and we tell it what to do. Protesting at best is a publicity technique to get people to see your view, but it won't change anything by itself. If you want to change things, it's important to understand how power works.
If you want to make the world a better place, I wish you the best of luck. If you have good ideas, I might even try to help you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Khamenei just recently said Israel was a "Cancer" that would be "cut out". He's worse than Ahmadinejad if you've been paying attention. He's the one that actually *believes* all the suicidal religious insanity. Ahmadinejad is just a politician.
And when Romans took slaves, the often taught them a trade and, after a time, freed them to become Roman Citizens. Mary Beard (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gknyq) takes an interesting look at daily life in Rome. Worth watching. I'm watching a 12 hour documentary on New York City and the day-to-day stories of Roman slaves don't seem that much different than those of the immigrants in NYC in the 1800s. Life was shitty and hard, but there was a path up. Some of those large memorials you see in Rome are from freed slaves that went on to become quite successful citizens, who then had their own slaves. There was a lot of death by disease in Rome. Their solution was to steal people and make them Romans.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I'm pretty down with what you've stated here. Thanks for putting it so directly and succinctly.
I do still think that you underestimate how much collective regret Americans have about Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it's not like I have concrete data either.
blog
And how many hundred of millions of lives were erased due to horrors and inequities of the Hindu caste system? We'll never know because estimating historical death tolls is a fools game, unless of course you've got an agenda which overrides any pretense to accuracy. You obviously do.
The idea of both an Islamic golden age being incompatible with Islamic conquests is ridiculous and trivially falsifiable - glory, achievement and war have often coexisted for many civilizations.
In regards to Muslim achievements, you seek to reduce them to keeping alive the legacy of others. A simple Wikipedia search would disabuse you of that notion. I would point you to many aspects of trigonometry, algebra, optics, sociology and medicine.
The savagery that you assign to Muslims *is* and was common to many historical groups.The Arabs,Turks and Afghans you cite were violent nomads both before and after Islam.
If you going to be an Islamaphobe you're going to have to do better than these sophomoric arguments. They might fly on Yahoo News or Youtube but this is Slashdot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij#Origins
http://www.iranmilitaryforum.net/the-sacred-defence/using-children-to-run-across-a-minefield-to-clear-the-way-for-the-ground-troops/
http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/iran_iraq_war.htm
If what I have read is not true, it would be fascinating to hear what you have seen, since you were there.
In any case, at 15 you were a boy. Maybe a boy with a gun, but still a boy. There is a reason why 15-year-olds are not considered adults in most of the countries in the world. They lack maturity to make informed decisions, and can be easily manipulated. Would you send your own child to fight at 15 if there was any way to avoid it? When an enemy approaches your city you do everything you can to evacuate women and children to safety. You don't send them on a suicide mission to clear mine fields.
As far as the chemical weapons, Iraq got theirs from the West. Just because you have Chemistry professors and a chemical industry, doesn't mean you have the capability to produce enough chemical weapons quickly enough. I am guessing being an oil-producing country Iraq had a chemical industry too. Yet it got its chemical weapons from the outside.
Conversely, if your country is invaded and you can make chemical weapons, then why in the world would you choose to not use them and send thousands of your own people to die instead? What is more humane: killing the invaders or sacrificing your own people?
This brings me back to my original point: Iranian leaders will have no qualms sacrificing thousands or even millions of Muslims, especially Sunnis.
You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
Believe it or not, I remember reading a book from before WWII (something by Will Durant) where the author seemed very excited about the rise of the Japanese empire.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think you have a good post, but it doesn't seem that it was at all morally obvious at the time.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Good you mentioned that, I hadn't caught on to that. I'm going to be watching Romney's foreign policy very closely now.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I understand, the problem with DU is not radiation but heavy metal poisoning. The way the shells disintegrate leaves lots of Uranium in the environment in an easily ingested from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
We just need to have a mole high in Iranian government smuggle plans for the Ford Pinto into their industrial complex. Within 5 years, Iran will be a smoldering cinder! Of course the plan must never get out or the U.N. will be all over us for human rights violations... Doh!
> Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back.
This probably isn't worth commenting on, but there's a rather odd assumption that nuking Jerusalem would somehow prevent a retaliatory attack against Iran.
Let me assure you, if Iran uses nuclear weapons in any fashion, on any scale, against Israel, Iran's cities and military facilities simply will not exist within 5 minutes. There's nothing more to the situation than that.
Citation needed? Where the fuck did you got that numbers?
So all those 80's fighter movies were prophetic. All of those "migs" that were really F5's are actually Iranian.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I'm not really sure you can call embargos against hostile action an act of war. This seems to imply, from your point of view, that if North Korea or Iran were to nuke a US city because the US imposes sanctions and embargoes on them, then any counter-strike against that country would not be justified?
Political pressure and actions really cannot be deemed to be an act of war. War is a very much more serious step on from that, war is when you start rolling tanks, planes, or ships over the other guy's border, and that's exactly what Japan did.
There are plenty of books out there showing excitement for Hitler's rise to power too, even a number of British politicians were pro-Hitler for quite some time for example.
But that was by no means an overwhelming view. I'm not sure you can really judge from just the odd opinion that it wasn't morally obvious. Certainly the fact that Britain and it's Commonwealth allies, as well as Russia, and the US were able to justify supporting the Chinese financially and militarily against Japan implies there must've been some fairly strong global public support for precisely that.
Still, it's all so far away now anyway isn't it? China, Russia, the UK and the US fighting as allies against Japan? Given todays global political tension between those nations people could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a work of fiction.
The west should totally start reverse-engineering chinese products and learn how to make steel, computer chips etc
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Still, it's all so far away now anyway isn't it? China, Russia, the UK and the US fighting as allies against Japan? Given todays global political tension between those nations people could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a work of fiction.
Well said. Understanding public opinion and views even half a century ago is surprisingly hard.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"but a large group of them successfully managed to block the Brooklyn bridge"
Uh, I dont live in NY so I wasnt there but the only OWS incident I remember on Brooklyn bridge the NYPD intentionally lead a protest on to the bridge so they could make a mass arrest, 700 as I recall. They herded them on the bridge so they could charge them and so no one could get away since they had both ends of the bridge blocked. Surest way to break the back of marginally committed protestors is to arrest them, give them a night in jail, court appearances, fines and a criminal record for life.
"Government is corrupt⦠Do you know how to fix it?"
Aleksei Navalny has taken an interesting approach in Russia where corruption is suffocating the country and speaking against it is a good way to get killed.
Iceland appears to be the one recent success story where people actually threw out their corrupt government and gave the finger to the bankers that crashed their economy. They suffered for a few years but they are rapidly recovering compared to places like Ireland which did what the bankers told them to do, paid off the corrupt bankers that crashed their country, and are unlikely to recover any time soon as a result. Iceland is a small place though, and the powers that be weren't entrenched to nearly the level they are in the U.S.
Americans are still largely complacent and as long as they have a job, a place to live, food to eat, a car, iPad, smartphone and/or TV I doubt they really care enough to change anything and sure aren't going to risk their well being, as tattered as it is, to stand up against a completely broken government. The one thing OWS did achieve last year was it did get the subject in to daily conversation. Now there is nothing again except a stupid horse race between two equally bad Presidential candidates.
Only way anything is likely to change in the U.S. is for another crash to occur and it for it to be so severe that it puts people out of work en masse and in to breadlines. With the nearly inevitable crash of Europe on the horizon it may not be that far off.
"The government is our servant"
Now who is being naive. Our government serves the people with the money and the power. Our founding fathers tried hard to give us a system that wouldn't go that way but they failed. Our two party system is totally broken and its only putting forward a choice between candidates who are all bad. Once you cast your meaningless vote every two years you are totally out of the loop. People vote for the person with the most money and the best attack ads, whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Any voter that bothers to become informed and vote for change is going to be disappeared by party line voters.
Me personally I would have loved to see Ron Paul win the President. He probably would have been a train wreck, but he would have caused a fire storm of change. The main stream media and his own party managed to destrot him with racism charges to make him largely disappear.
Getting rid of the Fed would be step 1 for fixing our totally corrupted economy and Paul is the only one like to attempt it.
@de_machina
Eh? They were at war with Iraq for years, and the US reduced that country to "barely-armed guerrilla insurgency" in days. It will be exactly like attacking Iraq, only the US probably won't bother invading Iran because there would be no point.
You knock out the rader, military bases, airforce, power, bridges etc in the first few hours and they're fucked - absolutely no way Iran is going to be able to do the same to the US forces in the neighbouring countries, ships, drones controlled from the US etc.
lol ok, I tried. Go get an education in real power, you'll thank yourself later. If you're lazy, try this one or this. Johnson knew how to get things done.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I was alive when US nuked Japan.
I'm getting off your lawn now, sir!
But can they fight?
Those look like they'll be great targets for us to practice on the next time we get frisky. Hopefully they make a lot of them so we don't run out too quickly.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
And snap, back to the smug condescension.
The way Johnson played power is exactly everything that is wrong with our government. It isn't any kind of a solution to anything. As soon as anyone starts playing that game you will end up just as corrupted as he did.
He is the person that used his power to lead the country in to its disasterous misadventure in Vietnam which started America's decline and lead us in to the inflationary spiral of the 1970's that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans.
@de_machina
And snap, back to the smug condescension.
Yah, I can't help it, that's my natural reaction around ignoramuses. Especially the ones like you who refuse to learn. :)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
This is very biased. Something that people forget is that the North of Africa and Asia Minor were originally Christian, before they were invaded by Muslims.
After some time, Christians finally stroke back, recovering a small part of the territory that was originally theirs. In the end, the whole affair was a big victory
for Muslims.
And some people manage to construe the whole story as a Christian aggression against Muslims, which is absurd.
Yep, made total sense to decimate your secret but soon to be out of the closet enemy's forces without officially declaring war first. I do seem to recall Congress declaring war not soon after the attack.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
While you make a good point, you also fail on the other. Japan was on the receiving end of 2 atomic bombs targeted at military/industrial complex cities. They had no idea that the USA had only two bombs to use, and that there was no 3rd ready for a coup de grace on Tokyo or perhaps Osaka or Yokohama.
Yet your point about Russia is well made. Reading the historical accounts of surviving leaders of Japan, what I gleaned is that they WOULD have been willing to bombed to total annihilation or starved to death by the Americans rather than be captured in fighting with the Russians. The majority of military leaders weren't so much afraid of being killed by the Russians as having Tokyo captured by them, and with two bombs having destroyed so much manufacturing infrastructure they knew this to be an inevitability if they didn't surrender sooner to the Allied forces.
Like the other AC above mentioned, tu quoque statements don't refute what I said above about Muslims. The Muslim 'achievements' you refer to are all work done by others, and I refuse to let Muslims pretend that they are the ones who brought this to the world - be it the number system (including zero), or trigonometry, algebra, optics, sociology and medicine. Also, the statement about the Arabs, Turks and Afghans being violent nomads before Islam is crap. Turks and Afghans were a part of the Persian empire, which was very civilized, while the eastern Afghans of Gandhara were Buddhists and Hindus. Yeah, the Arabs were nomads, but even they were far more civilized than they became after Mohammed (great example being Mohammed's first wife Khadijah, who was an independent merchant, whereas under Islam, women pretty much lost all their rights), which is a part of why he had few problems taking over. Had he lived today, he'd have been in jail, hunted down as a cult leader.
The Hindu caste system never claimed any lives. What it did was in an era where vocational training was absent, it prescribed that a son follow the trade and practices of his father, and over time, the number of castes - initially 4 - multiplied. Yeah the problem of untouchability was evil, as were restrictions on inter-caste marriages - neither of which is practiced today, and nor are Hindu fundamentalists demanding it back. Another point - the caste laws, bad as it was, was restricted only to Hindus - there were no attempts to put the rest of the world under Manu's smritis.
This is different with shariah, which intends to bring all people - Muslim and non Muslim alike, under Islamic law, where Muslims would be privileged people, and all others would either have to be dhimmis, or second class citizens, and if they refuse both, be killed.
I don't have an agenda. Islam (i.e. the Qur'an and Sun'nah) does, and it has an indeterminate number of Muslims who are committed to carrying it out, no matter what the costs. If its agenda didn't include covering non-Muslims, or trying to convert them so that they can become a supremacist majority, I certainly wouldn't bother.
The rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march on the other hand were pretty good reasons for retaliation.
Nanking was a a good reason for China to retaliate beyond reasonable measure. Bataan was post Pearl Harbor and merely an additional checkbox in a long list of issues for the US. It's kind of hard to top 2000+ dead and and utter devastation of a fleet while not officially at war. Your reasoning is about as illogical as it can get. So, Biff goes around his high school, busts a few chops, extorts money and lunches, and has his way with a girl here or there. He gets sent to the principal's office and punished. So now Biff considers this an act of war, and can go kill the principal's family? You're slightly off from mainstream thought, logic, reality, hell, even reality TV.
Next you'll be telling us that N Korea or Iran are perfectly justified in nuking the rest of the world.( Hint: both are under sanctions)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It is called delivering a proportional response. Sort of the military equivalent of for every action there is a reaction. There is a reason why the military still train hand to hand combat, knife fights, etc in an age where there are hand-held machineguns and strategic nuclear weapons.
ok, I apologize, I really am trying to be nicer.
It would help if you'd follow Feynman's rule of scientific reasoning. He says you need to find ways to attack your own ideas as much as possible. It would be much easier to have a conversation with you, if you did that.And your ideas and points would be much stronger.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's arguable whether the Soviets declaring war on Japan and invading Manchuria and Korea was a cause of Japan's surrender, as opposed to the 2 nukes, as the GP suggests. The Japanese ruling establishment was more panicky about 2 of their military/industrial complex cities getting obliterated, as opposed to one of their overseas colonies getting invaded.
Actually, the Japanese would have been willing to surrender before the second bomb - maybe even before the first - had guarantees been provided about the safety of their emperor, who at the time was considered divine. So had that been understood by the US government, they'd have gotten the surrender, w/o the Nagasaki bomb being needed. Or alternatively, had the Japanese known in advance that after the war, the US would establish a new state around the emperor, but with a different regime, they'd have given the US the surrender they wanted.
Can you support that 270 million claim (or even 100 millions of it) by referring to decent references? I'll accept even wikipedia from you.
plenty of highly reputable sources, such as Here
overall, some 270 million people people died in the Muslim jihads - and that was before9/11.
and that source isn't even including 9/11, add that in and you'd be looking at 270.003 Million
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Actually I was referring to The Daily Caller.
You are right though, the English language site of Fars is the source - although being a native speaker of farsi doesn't guarantee good translation into English.
As for the quote, it really isn't that different from the US and Israeli threats against Iran. And both of those countries have a history of carrying though with their threats.
I see rampant electoral fraud this November geared to get Romney elected and we're all just fucked.
Bush lost in both 2000 and 2004, but nobody cared then, why would you think anyone would care now? I moved the hell out of the US because of that crap. It's only going to get worse. Have fun with 8 years of Romney. I'll come back after the revolution.
Learn to love Alaska
systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess
Ironic typo of the month. ;-)
...except no one pretends that the Romans weren't some of the biggest plagarists of all time. When you are presented with something Roman that is a copy, you are told that it is a copy. No one tries to pretend that the Romans were something they weren't.
There is no nonsensical notion of political correctness that causes people to try and sugar coat them.
If the Islamic nations had a golden age, it was likely DESPITE of Islam in a manner very much like our own experience in the West.
If the Iranians have anything going for them at all, anything that leaves open the possibility they will become a civilized modern nation, it's the fact that they actually have a well establshed national identity separate from their religion.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You forget that the Muslims conquered most of the Roman empire and also tried to conquer Europe as well. The Crusades were a little more than just convenient adventuring. There was a genuine struggle between civilizations going on at that time.
This stuff tends to get glossed over. Perhaps history professors just can't get over being forced to go to sunday school as children.
The Islamic empires were a very real menace to the West for most of the history of Islam. They have been in decline for awhile but clearly some of them want to relive the old glory.
Dracula wasn't just a bastard because he was an evil sadist. He was on the front lines of this conflict.
There is a lot of historical context here that people choose to be unaware of.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Nukes are big and sexy.
They are a single small thing that's easy to fixate on if you grew up white and too right. They are a great vehicle for white liberal guilt but less satisfying if you didn't grow up terribly priveleged.
Unfortunately, it's a very superficial approach to concentrate on 2 bombs rather than the many others that got dropped onto civilians either intentionally or as a means to some other end. Trying to be more enlightened by feeling guilty about Hiroshima just means you are demeaning the people that died in Tokyo, or Okinawa, or Dresden.
When I see some old Japanese guy that's been working his forge for 36 hours straight, I don't see someone that needs to be cut any slack. I see someone that you treat with respect when you meet them in battle. You have to, or else.
You throw everything and anything you have at them because that is war.
Any attempt to claim that we should have done otherwise is simply doing great disrespect to a mighty nation.
These people on these "liberal guilt trip" really disrespect the Japense on a very fundemental level. It's simply masked racism.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Small nitpick, Japan actually offered two surrenders before the bomb was dropped, they just weren't unconditional surrenders like the US wanted.
I can't remember the exact details, but they included stuff like the upper reaches of the government remaining in place.
That's like offering to "lose" at poker while keeping all your winnings. Not much of a surrender considering what had been happening the previous 8 or so years.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm pretty sure that was the Japanese view on war - win and it's all yours, the people that used to live in country 'x' were just chattel. It's how they fought, and in defending Japan, who knows how far they'd have gone?
as for the GGP, if they tried it again, it'd be pretty freaking foolish, don't you think? Perhaps signs of a rabid society?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You get insightful for a revisionist historical post, and I get a troll for stating two facts and a one line opinion? The mods are unkind.
As has already been pointed out, Japan was engaged in crimes against humanity under the guise of war prior to PH, hence the sanctions. It's irrelevant what Japan considered the embargo - they could have ended the embargo by stopping their inhumane treatment of the Chinese. So because they were poking the world in the eye to get a response so they could claim "war" is just a bit self-serving, don't you think?
As for what the US knew when, please provide some citations. The only conspiracy theorist here is you.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I second this. Hell, I lived in Hiroshima, and as a result did a lot of soul searching on the subject. End result was, it sucked but was the right call ( I'd argue over Nagasaki, however).
Actually, they wanted an assurance on the safety of the emperor - something that they got after the war. Had this been clear to the US, those surrender offers were perfectly acceptable.
First of all, there is no such thing as "good and righteous" murder of civilians.
And with nukes, you are ALWAYS murdering civilians. Along with everything else down the wind.
I think its quite plausible that someone could use nukes today and not be nuked in to the stone age in turn or end in eternal damnation.
Sorry, but you are wrong there.
There are quite a few countries and individuals out there who are not under direct control of one nuclear superpower but are an ally of another nuclear superpower.
Use of nuclear weapons today would end in retaliation. If not against the primary aggressor, then against his allies.
It would probably not lead to an all out nuclear war, but the first nuke WOULD be retaliated against, with equal or harsher response.
And you don't need nukes to commit genocide. Poisons and diseases would do just fine.
Are you saying someone would have incinerated Israel if they had nuked Egypt or Syria, or would Israel using nukes be another one of your righteous and justified cases?
HAD Israel used the nukes, that would have meant that the USA had used them. Against the USSR.
Yom Kippur War was just another tiny war where USA and USSR used other nations to fight for them.
Following that, the USSR would be handing nukes out like candies to every single enemy of the Israel who would come knocking.
Draw your own conclusions from there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens