It's facile to suggest that you can create peace by making war. The whole Arab world is now even more hostile to the US (and now the UK too) than ever it was before.
You reap what you sow. As witness the events of September 11.
If so, that's not only depressing, it has horrible implications for future global peace and stability. But maybe the polls were rigged - and I do admit that as far as anecdotal evidence goes, people on both sides of the issue are likely to claim that they are in the majority.
Drat.. the orphaned line at the end was hidden from me by font problems which cropped up since I installed the latest KDE updates. It broke anti-aliasing in mozilla too, which is actually starting to give me a headache.
Well, no...I guess the picture you get depends upon the media you get your news from, but a couple of weeks before kick off when opposition to the war was at its strongest here in the UK, it was - disappointingly - very much under-reported even on domestic BBC news broadcasts. CNN etc. seemed to be showing even more anti war activity in the US so assuming the inevitable biased reporting I'd have to guess that opposition to the war in the US was at the least very significant. At the same time also, the increasing pro-war "support" seemed to consist, for most people, of a kind of resigned and grudging acceptance (pretty much as it has been in the UK).
Although the mainstream media falling in line with the govts have tried to show boosted support (some attempts to do so looked pretty contrived) the only representatives of the public who've been shown on TV openly supporting the war in broadcasts from both your country and mine are so uncritically flag-wavingly gung ho about "our boys" (cringe) and the heroic, humanitarian mission (please!!) that they probably ought to be out there on the front line themselves.
Now *there's* an idea that makes me smile...
and its supposed aims looked to be from the less-educated sections of society and were
First definition: large crowds of booted skinheads and homeless "alternative lifestyle" (eg alcholic and heavy drug abusing) ex-punks with spiderweb tattoos, on the rampage, smashing in storefront windows, defacing public monuments and lobbing half-bricks at the riot police.
Second definition: you and me with our short attention spans, surfing on slashdot, getting extra annoyed for a few minutes about the latest outragous piece of IP legislation and maybe thinking about possibly sending an angry email to, well, whatever email address somebody was kind enough to post. Well, hell, at least we'll actively gripe about it to our friends at the water cooler in the office the next day.
The Second Superpower has no teeth. As witness the way support for the anti-war movement just melted away in the last days leading up to the war - right about the time it became really clear that Bush didn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. The vast majority of people just gave up. I don't wish to be hypocritical; I count myself among them.
It's just the way people are. Trouble is, we all know that you can only take a protest so far before it becomes outright revolution, and then things get broken and you might get in trouble with the law or get hurt. As long as people have comfortable lives to return to they will have no truck with revolution. You need to have nothing to lose before you will risk everything.
That's why every government likes to create and maintain a large and comfortable middle class even if there are some people without a job or a roof over their heads. The apathy of the former acts as an effective buffer against the anger of the latter ever gaining enough support to make a significant impact.
Invented, maybe. But as with the other two inventions, most people didn't really get interested until they found they could use it to get rude pictures.
Remember that widespread literacy in the western world didn't even really get started until the late nineteenth century at the earliest. But while few people wanted books or other textual material, there was a larger market for dirty pictures. I've no proof but I would guess that this must have sustained many small printing businesses.
What we do know for sure is that pornographic material has been available and distributed widely ever since man first learned to express a creative urge. Some of the oldest human artefacts that have been discovered are crude models of (for example) generously proportioned women. These are dryly described in the literature as "fertility symbols". Riiiight. I'm sure you can imagine how they would have been viewed by males without a mate and nothing else to look at.
Corporate environments based on NT infrastructure suck badly. For a whole raft of reasons.
But you know, roaming profiles often don't work that well anyway, even when you're using IE for a browser. The profile may only half replicate and then fall over, or it may fail to replicate out at all. Unpredictably.
And then you log in and get this dialogue: "your thingummy profile is newer than the one on the whatsit, which one do you want to keep, you have only 5 seconds to mnake up your mind, quickly now...54321 too late! Mwahahaha!!!" At least that's how it feels.
Fucking Microsoft shite, I hate it, every day. Gimme Unix.
But then there's that odd "recoil mitigation" hurdle that I still don't understand the cause of.
Perhaps you skimmed the spec a little too quickly:
upon release of the TIS-1 trigger, the CO 2 N 2 He gas mixture is released via a reservoir relief valve into an annular constricting throat . . .
The passage of the CO 2 N 2 He gas through the throat results in the
acceleration of the gas mixture to supersonic speed . . . [at] a gas density of 27.26 kg/m 3.
I guess that might wobble the weapon around a little bit.
Note that the date this proposal was submitted was back in 1999. Four years ago! This has been hanging around for a while but, guess what, we still don't have laser rifles. It's obviously no more than a concept on paper intended to pique the military's interest in order to gain funding. The technology just isn't there yet and may never be for all we know.
Oh no! Every battlefield would end up looking and sounding like a 1970's disco - smoke...laser effects... and pew! pew-pew-pew!... crappy electronic synthesizer drum effects from the futuristic laser rifles.
All that's missing is the glittery disco ball.
But wait...maybe the soldiers will have to wear cheap plastic slabs of anti-laser armour and garish radiation-proof metallic wigs and lipstick.
Then instead of jogging along singing "I don't know but I was told..." they could all do Sarah Brightman's 1978 disco hit "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" as they mince through the smoke doing jerky robot moves.
Er, let's *not* have the smoke after all....*shudder*...
There's nothing worse than an edeologue (except for an ideologue with a gun, that is).
You've conveniently forgotten that most gunshot wounds are inflicted on people who are already carrying a gun. It's an established fact that carrying a gun only increases the risk of getting hurt or killed in a firearms incident.
Which reveals everything you said to be complete hogwash.
Carrying a gun might make you *feel* safe, but it can also encourage you to feel overconfident and get you into more trouble than you'd really like.
The proposed legislation is bankrolled by the telecoms industry and is intended to stamp out small companies offering VoIP (Voice over IP) services.
If VoIP takes off in a big way, the price of long distance calls will fall through the floor and the telecoms companies will not be able to sell metered voice telephone calls any more.
Needless to say they will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
The proposed legislation will give the force of law to their T&C when (as your ISP or your ISP's ISP) they give you a broadband service contract which bans VoIP calls over your internet connection.
The problem is development costs. Modern hardware is so advanced that new products cost a fortune to develop. This is only possible because the mass market of Windows users is large enough to defray these costs. In 1993, yes small players could have developed new and exciting products for the limited PC market then in existence. But today I think you need to hit high volumes or you'll never recoup your (very large) investment in R&D.
I think you are being a little naive. This is most likely what Microsoft is planning:
1) "Designed for XP" certification begins to appear on some products. 2) Clueless buyers (most of them) show sufficient preference for products with the sticker that it hurts sales of any competing products that aren't certified. 3) Certification becomes necessary for anyone who has a software or hardware product they want to sell to the mass market. 4) Microsoft now has control. 5) Certification criteria are updated to force certifiable products to be non-interoperable with other OS such as Linux, probably justified by some DRM control freakery relating to Palladium. 6) Vendors comply in order to retain certification. 7) Only non-certified products are now suitable for use with minority OS eg Linux. The market for these is too small for most vendors to bother with. 8) Drastically reduced range of products now available to minority OS users. 9) Due to lack of support by vendors, minority OS is now doomed to return to being a vanishingly small fraction of the market. 10) Microsoft celebrates.
What the UN took 12 years to not do will take less than 1 week of direct action
1 week of direct action plus many billions of dollars and
how many lives?
Blix says that weapons inspections, backed by pressure from the UN over the last few months, were in fact working.
That country is France, and God help them if it turns out they were doing more to help Hussein and his brutal regime stay in power.
LOL! You mean, like the US was doing before the first Gulf war? While Hussain was gassing his own citizens? This is hypocracy of the first order. Many (if not most) of the brutal regimes of the late twentieth century have been supported by US money, US intelligence and both covert and overt US military help. Iraq was one of those until quite recently (as were the Mujaheddin and Osama bin Laden). The US is in no position whatever to preach about brutal regimes. The US has demonstrated over and over that its support for any regime is contingent only upon what's advantageous to the US, it has nothing whatsoever to do with humanity or brutality.
[...]soverign Iraq with a democratic peaceful regime will rise from the Socialist Ba'athist ashes
All fine and good, but I feel that's beside the point. The majority of the world believes in the UN and feels that no extra-legal coalition of nations ought to be off prosecuting a war on their own. And the reason you didn't get the backing of the UN Security Council is that (1) they knew Saddam could be disarmed peacefully and (2) they also knew the US wanted the war not for moral reasons but to obtain economic and political advantage, and (3) if despite clear objections from the Security Council some nation takes it upon itself to violate the sovereignty of another nation, that is a very dangerous precedent. Must we all now fear what will happen should anyone else fall out of favour with the US?
Each country getting one vote is not a reflection of power in the world and I for one am opposed to the UN on those grounds as it ignores the proportionality of power in the world.
Oh really. China's population outnumbers the US's by a ration of 5 to 1. By your argument the Chinese would be the most powerful member by far, and India would be second. So I think you either don't really know what you are saying or else you are just being disingenuous. The fact is that we do have a Security Council and however it is composed there is broad agreement among its members that its resolutions should be honoured. By everybody. Even, and especially, by its most powerful members. Otherwise there is little point in its existence, and no security to be had for the world.
...each nation must deal with their own problems internally, independent of world opinion. If nations wish to ally or make treaties on their own behalf let them...
Invading another nation is not the same as dealing with your own problems internally.
As to going it alone and ignoring world opinion, the world order you would apparently prefer says to hell with consensus and let the devil take the hindmost. This won't suit you so well when your economy finally catches up with reality and you are overtaken by the EU (and eventually by China). What goes around comes around, and it's this very concept that underlies the raison d'etre of the UN. Too bad if one of its members thinks that what applies to everybody else doesn't apply to them. That's pure hubris.
the US should not submit itself to unilateral treaties where we are the only one punished.
If that remark were at all justified then so might be your position. But the sad truth is that treaties cannot by definition be "unilateral", that the treaties you are thinking of weren't crafted to punish the US specifically or indeed alone, and that the US invariably absents itself from any treaty where it might merely be one of many to suffer some sort of sanction or restriction. In other words, the US makes few treaties, and when it does make a treaty it's usual mode of operation is to enforce it rigidly upon others but to refuse itself to abide by its terms when its own turn comes.
If you don't regard this as a damning indictment of your country's behaviour then I don't think there can be sufficient common ground for any meaningful discussion.
Why is there this rush to make moral equivalence between Iraq and the US
You misunderstand the nature of the objections against you (at least, from those of us who know what is really going on). I don't see moral equivalence between the US and Iraq at all. I couldn't care less if there is or if there isn't. But Iraq isn't a threat to anyone more than a hundred miles beyond its borders, while the US has shown that it's *own* military machine is a clear and present threat to every nation in the world, its political establishment is corrupt and out of control with respect to its own electorate, and its apparent everlasting greed for disproportionate wealth and ab
If the US position is that it must defend even purely economic interests regardless of any and all questions of morality, then the rest of the world can only regard the US as overtly inimical to all of *it's* interests.
Does the US really want to go it alone in the world?
It's a very weak argument to insist that the US must remain free of outside influence just because that's what it says in the Consitution. It's analogous to a business justifying some unpopular practice with the overused phrase "because its company policy". You might as well just say "it's because that's what we want and that's what we decided".
The US really has no moral right to declare itself above and beyond the reach of international institutions such as the International Court and the UN Security Council while cynically using those institutions to prosecute those it dislikes.
And the US should not get riled about carbon emission concessions for developing countries, when its own citizens, the richest on earth, pay less than $2/gallon for their gasoline. i.e. they pay less relative to GDP than is sensible, considering their enornous appetite for it. It only encourages them to squander this precious resource at an alarming rate (with consequent damage to the atmosphere).
Constitution or no constitution, US Americans must learn to accommodate the concerns of the people who inhabit the rest of the planet, just as those others do with each other. The United Nations cannot survive when one of its most powerful members apparently feels free to pick and choose between the resolutions it wants enforced in its favour and the others which it wants to ignore. It has to be all or nothing. That's cooperation. That's democracy.
But perhaps US Americans feel their nation is so powerful that if it comes to that they can just dispense with international co-operation altogether and seek a military "solution" whenever they feel they're not getting their own way.
That's the impression we're getting from your current leadership, especially Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld.
The US can do whatever it likes with its sovereignty over its own country and people. But it definitely ought to surrender its self-proclaimed sovereignty over the rest of the planet, which is what those nations & people who don't support the war are saying. A position that doesn't necessarily imply a liberal point of view, just one that isn't both American and selfish.
People in other islamic countries will feel threatened by the US.
That's an understatement. I'm white "secular christian" in the UK, therefore nominally a US ally, and I'm beginning to feel threatened by the US already. I'm hardly alone in this.
While people from the US are redefining the meaning of political terms like "good" and "evil", and blowing off about their military superiority, people elsewhere in the world are beginning to question the increasingly naked display of US military ambition. There are even nervous whispers about a "Fourth Reich".
Those of you who support this war are so convinced you are right. Some of you because of the govt. propaganda about human rights (not an issue uniquely exemplified by Iraq). Some of you because of the govt. propaganda about a supposed military threat (despite the fact that Iraq has been peacefully contained since the Gulf War, and Blix's continued insistence that weapons inspections were working). And then there are the hawks who support the war for no better reason than an openly amoral stance that America as the mightiest of nations can do whatever it damn well pleases.
Many people outside the US instinctively feel that the latter view is the one that really motivates the Pentagon and the Whitehouse, despite all their bland and pious (and inconsistent and clearly half-hearted) rhetoric. We're afraid that this war with Iraq is just America stretching its muscles. We're wondering: who's going to be next?
For the former group who, misguided and misled, are basically moral people who, misinformed, support the war for moral reasons - how are you going to feel when the next war starts, with some other undermatched state (nobody big enough to really hurt you of course) as the fall guy? With another set of trumped-up justification?
I'm reminded of the Michael Douglas character's dismay at the end of the movie "Falling Down": "I'm the bad guy? I'm the bad guy?" Is that going to be you?
But maybe by then you will all have learned to feel more comfortable with yourselves as owners of a global empire accumulated and protected through military might, at the expense of the rest of the world. Just as we in the backward "old europe" UK, France and Germany did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Gee, I see that the USA isn't so different from us after all.
Godwin's Law and all that, yadda yadda, but I really do see parallels with the 1930's in the current situation - and the threat in this case isn't some tinpot middle-eastern dictator with a few hundred rusty ex-soviet-surplus Scud missiles. The real threat is the most powerful military machine in the world, led by the most aggressive government in the world (right now demonstrating its utter lack of interest in any kind of international consensus) and funded by the wealthiest nation in the world which is not coincidentally very hungry for cheap oil (Americans pay less than $2/gallon at the gas pump!) since their own will soon run out.
Re:It's big, it's old, and we're stuck with it
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XFree86 Politics
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Alan is a respected developer and a major contributor to the linux kernel. You, however, are apparently an ignorant racist. We don't want your sort here. Now...fuck off.
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It's facile to suggest that you can create peace by making war. The whole Arab world is now even more hostile to the US (and now the UK too) than ever it was before.
You reap what you sow. As witness the events of September 11.
You mean, mostly former communist bloc countries which are very strapped for cash and ready to ingratiate themselves with the world's richest nation.
If so, that's not only depressing, it has horrible implications for future global peace and stability.
But maybe the polls were rigged - and I do admit that as far as anecdotal evidence goes, people on both sides of the issue are likely to claim that they are in the majority.
Drat.. the orphaned line at the end was hidden from me by font problems which cropped up since I installed the latest KDE updates. It broke anti-aliasing in mozilla too, which is actually starting to give me a headache.
Well, no...I guess the picture you get depends upon the media you get your news from, but a couple of weeks before kick off when opposition to the war was at its strongest here in the UK, it was - disappointingly - very much under-reported even on domestic BBC news broadcasts. CNN etc. seemed to be showing even more anti war activity in the US so assuming the inevitable biased reporting I'd have to guess that opposition to the war in the US was at the least very significant. At the same time also, the increasing pro-war "support" seemed to consist, for most people, of a kind of resigned and grudging acceptance (pretty much as it has been in the UK).
Although the mainstream media falling in line with the govts have tried to show boosted support (some attempts to do so looked pretty contrived) the only representatives of the public who've been shown on TV openly supporting the war in broadcasts from both your country and mine are so uncritically flag-wavingly gung ho about "our boys" (cringe) and the heroic, humanitarian mission (please!!) that they probably ought to be out there on the front line themselves.
Now *there's* an idea that makes me smile...
and its supposed aims looked to be from the less-educated sections of society and were
In caricature, then, to clarify the distinction:
First definition: large crowds of booted skinheads and homeless "alternative lifestyle" (eg alcholic and heavy drug abusing) ex-punks with spiderweb tattoos, on the rampage, smashing in storefront windows, defacing public monuments and lobbing half-bricks at the riot police.
Second definition: you and me with our short attention spans, surfing on slashdot, getting extra annoyed for a few minutes about the latest outragous piece of IP legislation and maybe thinking about possibly sending an angry email to, well, whatever email address somebody was kind enough to post. Well, hell, at least we'll actively gripe about it to our friends at the water cooler in the office the next day.
The Second Superpower has no teeth. As witness the way support for the anti-war movement just melted away in the last days leading up to the war - right about the time it became really clear that Bush didn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. The vast majority of people just gave up. I don't wish to be hypocritical; I count myself among them.
It's just the way people are. Trouble is, we all know that you can only take a protest so far before it becomes outright revolution, and then things get broken and you might get in trouble with the law or get hurt. As long as people have comfortable lives to return to they will have no truck with revolution. You need to have nothing to lose before you will risk everything.
That's why every government likes to create and maintain a large and comfortable middle class even if there are some people without a job or a roof over their heads. The apathy of the former acts as an effective buffer against the anger of the latter ever gaining enough support to make a significant impact.
I've had a stab at answering your question.
Oh no! Flying glittery disco balls!
Invented, maybe. But as with the other two inventions, most people didn't really get interested until they found they could use it to get rude pictures.
Remember that widespread literacy in the western world didn't even really get started until the late nineteenth century at the earliest. But while few people wanted books or other textual material, there was a larger market for dirty pictures. I've no proof but I would guess that this must have sustained many small printing businesses.
What we do know for sure is that pornographic material has been available and distributed widely ever since man first learned to express a creative urge. Some of the oldest human artefacts that have been discovered are crude models of (for example) generously proportioned women. These are dryly described in the literature as "fertility symbols". Riiiight. I'm sure you can imagine how they would have been viewed by males without a mate and nothing else to look at.
I feel your pain.
Corporate environments based on NT infrastructure suck badly. For a whole raft of reasons.
But you know, roaming profiles often don't work that well anyway, even when you're using IE for a browser. The profile may only half replicate and then fall over, or it may fail to replicate out at all. Unpredictably.
And then you log in and get this dialogue: "your thingummy profile is newer than the one on the whatsit, which one do you want to keep, you have only 5 seconds to mnake up your mind, quickly now...54321 too late! Mwahahaha!!!" At least that's how it feels.
Fucking Microsoft shite, I hate it, every day. Gimme Unix.
Crotchdot? Hmm...
Hey, Taco...I have an idea...
Perhaps you skimmed the spec a little too quickly:
I guess that might wobble the weapon around a little bit.
Note that the date this proposal was submitted was back in 1999. Four years ago! This has been hanging around for a while but, guess what, we still don't have laser rifles. It's obviously no more than a concept on paper intended to pique the military's interest in order to gain funding. The technology just isn't there yet and may never be for all we know.
Oh no! Every battlefield would end up looking and sounding like a 1970's disco - smoke...laser effects... and pew! pew-pew-pew!... crappy electronic synthesizer drum effects from the futuristic laser rifles.
...*shudder*...
All that's missing is the glittery disco ball.
But wait...maybe the soldiers will have to wear cheap plastic slabs of anti-laser armour and garish radiation-proof metallic wigs and lipstick.
Then instead of jogging along singing "I don't know but I was told..." they could all do Sarah Brightman's 1978 disco hit "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" as they mince through the smoke doing jerky robot moves.
Er, let's *not* have the smoke after all.
Nnnnooooo...I believe you are actually thinking of pornography, not warfare :o^)
(pornography drove the mass adoption of communication technologies such as paper, the printing press and most recently the internet itself).
There's nothing worse than an edeologue (except for an ideologue with a gun, that is).
You've conveniently forgotten that most gunshot wounds are inflicted on people who are already carrying a gun. It's an established fact that carrying a gun only increases the risk of getting hurt or killed in a firearms incident.
Which reveals everything you said to be complete hogwash.
Carrying a gun might make you *feel* safe, but it can also encourage you to feel overconfident and get you into more trouble than you'd really like.
The proposed legislation is bankrolled by the telecoms industry and is intended to stamp out small companies offering VoIP (Voice over IP) services.
If VoIP takes off in a big way, the price of long distance calls will fall through the floor and the telecoms companies will not be able to sell metered voice telephone calls any more.
Needless to say they will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
The proposed legislation will give the force of law to their T&C when (as your ISP or your ISP's ISP) they give you a broadband service contract which bans VoIP calls over your internet connection.
The problem is development costs. Modern hardware is so advanced that new products cost a fortune to develop. This is only possible because the mass market of Windows users is large enough to defray these costs. In 1993, yes small players could have developed new and exciting products for the limited PC market then in existence. But today I think you need to hit high volumes or you'll never recoup your (very large) investment in R&D.
I think you are being a little naive. This is most likely what Microsoft is planning:
1) "Designed for XP" certification begins to appear on some products.
2) Clueless buyers (most of them) show sufficient preference for products with the sticker that it hurts sales of any competing products that aren't certified.
3) Certification becomes necessary for anyone who has a software or hardware product they want to sell to the mass market.
4) Microsoft now has control.
5) Certification criteria are updated to force certifiable products to be non-interoperable with other OS such as Linux, probably justified by some DRM control freakery relating to Palladium.
6) Vendors comply in order to retain certification.
7) Only non-certified products are now suitable for use with minority OS eg Linux. The market for these is too small for most vendors to bother with.
8) Drastically reduced range of products now available to minority OS users.
9) Due to lack of support by vendors, minority OS is now doomed to return to being a vanishingly small fraction of the market.
10) Microsoft celebrates.
1 week of direct action plus many billions of dollars and how many lives?
Blix says that weapons inspections, backed by pressure from the UN over the last few months, were in fact working.
LOL! You mean, like the US was doing before the first Gulf war? While Hussain was gassing his own citizens? This is hypocracy of the first order. Many (if not most) of the brutal regimes of the late twentieth century have been supported by US money, US intelligence and both covert and overt US military help. Iraq was one of those until quite recently (as were the Mujaheddin and Osama bin Laden). The US is in no position whatever to preach about brutal regimes. The US has demonstrated over and over that its support for any regime is contingent only upon what's advantageous to the US, it has nothing whatsoever to do with humanity or brutality.
All fine and good, but I feel that's beside the point. The majority of the world believes in the UN and feels that no extra-legal coalition of nations ought to be off prosecuting a war on their own. And the reason you didn't get the backing of the UN Security Council is that (1) they knew Saddam could be disarmed peacefully and (2) they also knew the US wanted the war not for moral reasons but to obtain economic and political advantage, and (3) if despite clear objections from the Security Council some nation takes it upon itself to violate the sovereignty of another nation, that is a very dangerous precedent. Must we all now fear what will happen should anyone else fall out of favour with the US?
Oh really. China's population outnumbers the US's by a ration of 5 to 1. By your argument the Chinese would be the most powerful member by far, and India would be second. So I think you either don't really know what you are saying or else you are just being disingenuous. The fact is that we do have a Security Council and however it is composed there is broad agreement among its members that its resolutions should be honoured. By everybody. Even, and especially, by its most powerful members. Otherwise there is little point in its existence, and no security to be had for the world.
Invading another nation is not the same as dealing with your own problems internally.
As to going it alone and ignoring world opinion, the world order you would apparently prefer says to hell with consensus and let the devil take the hindmost. This won't suit you so well when your economy finally catches up with reality and you are overtaken by the EU (and eventually by China). What goes around comes around, and it's this very concept that underlies the raison d'etre of the UN. Too bad if one of its members thinks that what applies to everybody else doesn't apply to them. That's pure hubris.
If that remark were at all justified then so might be your position. But the sad truth is that treaties cannot by definition be "unilateral", that the treaties you are thinking of weren't crafted to punish the US specifically or indeed alone, and that the US invariably absents itself from any treaty where it might merely be one of many to suffer some sort of sanction or restriction. In other words, the US makes few treaties, and when it does make a treaty it's usual mode of operation is to enforce it rigidly upon others but to refuse itself to abide by its terms when its own turn comes.
If you don't regard this as a damning indictment of your country's behaviour then I don't think there can be sufficient common ground for any meaningful discussion.
You misunderstand the nature of the objections against you (at least, from those of us who know what is really going on). I don't see moral equivalence between the US and Iraq at all. I couldn't care less if there is or if there isn't. But Iraq isn't a threat to anyone more than a hundred miles beyond its borders, while the US has shown that it's *own* military machine is a clear and present threat to every nation in the world, its political establishment is corrupt and out of control with respect to its own electorate, and its apparent everlasting greed for disproportionate wealth and ab
If the US position is that it must defend even purely economic interests regardless of any and all questions of morality, then the rest of the world can only regard the US as overtly inimical to all of *it's* interests.
Does the US really want to go it alone in the world?
It's a very weak argument to insist that the US must remain free of outside influence just because that's what it says in the Consitution. It's analogous to a business justifying some unpopular practice with the overused phrase "because its company policy". You might as well just say "it's because that's what we want and that's what we decided".
The US really has no moral right to declare itself above and beyond the reach of international institutions such as the International Court and the UN Security Council while cynically using those institutions to prosecute those it dislikes.
And the US should not get riled about carbon emission concessions for developing countries, when its own citizens, the richest on earth, pay less than $2/gallon for their gasoline. i.e. they pay less relative to GDP than is sensible, considering their enornous appetite for it. It only encourages them to squander this precious resource at an alarming rate (with consequent damage to the atmosphere).
Constitution or no constitution, US Americans must learn to accommodate the concerns of the people who inhabit the rest of the planet, just as those others do with each other. The United Nations cannot survive when one of its most powerful members apparently feels free to pick and choose between the resolutions it wants enforced in its favour and the others which it wants to ignore. It has to be all or nothing. That's cooperation. That's democracy.
But perhaps US Americans feel their nation is so powerful that if it comes to that they can just dispense with international co-operation altogether and seek a military "solution" whenever they feel they're not getting their own way.
That's the impression we're getting from your current leadership, especially Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld.
The US can do whatever it likes with its sovereignty over its own country and people. But it definitely ought to surrender its self-proclaimed sovereignty over the rest of the planet, which is what those nations & people who don't support the war are saying. A position that doesn't necessarily imply a liberal point of view, just one that isn't both American and selfish.
That's an understatement. I'm white "secular christian" in the UK, therefore nominally a US ally, and I'm beginning to feel threatened by the US already. I'm hardly alone in this.
While people from the US are redefining the meaning of political terms like "good" and "evil", and blowing off about their military superiority, people elsewhere in the world are beginning to question the increasingly naked display of US military ambition. There are even nervous whispers about a "Fourth Reich".
Those of you who support this war are so convinced you are right. Some of you because of the govt. propaganda about human rights (not an issue uniquely exemplified by Iraq). Some of you because of the govt. propaganda about a supposed military threat (despite the fact that Iraq has been peacefully contained since the Gulf War, and Blix's continued insistence that weapons inspections were working). And then there are the hawks who support the war for no better reason than an openly amoral stance that America as the mightiest of nations can do whatever it damn well pleases.
Many people outside the US instinctively feel that the latter view is the one that really motivates the Pentagon and the Whitehouse, despite all their bland and pious (and inconsistent and clearly half-hearted) rhetoric. We're afraid that this war with Iraq is just America stretching its muscles. We're wondering: who's going to be next?
For the former group who, misguided and misled, are basically moral people who, misinformed, support the war for moral reasons - how are you going to feel when the next war starts, with some other undermatched state (nobody big enough to really hurt you of course) as the fall guy? With another set of trumped-up justification?
I'm reminded of the Michael Douglas character's dismay at the end of the movie "Falling Down": "I'm the bad guy? I'm the bad guy?" Is that going to be you?
But maybe by then you will all have learned to feel more comfortable with yourselves as owners of a global empire accumulated and protected through military might, at the expense of the rest of the world. Just as we in the backward "old europe" UK, France and Germany did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Gee, I see that the USA isn't so different from us after all.
Godwin's Law and all that, yadda yadda, but I really do see parallels with the 1930's in the current situation - and the threat in this case isn't some tinpot middle-eastern dictator with a few hundred rusty ex-soviet-surplus Scud missiles. The real threat is the most powerful military machine in the world, led by the most aggressive government in the world (right now demonstrating its utter lack of interest in any kind of international consensus) and funded by the wealthiest nation in the world which is not coincidentally very hungry for cheap oil (Americans pay less than $2/gallon at the gas pump!) since their own will soon run out.
Alan is a respected developer and a major contributor to the linux kernel. You, however, are apparently an ignorant racist. We don't want your sort here. Now...fuck off.
(Score:-1 Racist taunt, uncalled for)