That was truly what I was thinking most about on 9/11: the expected knee-jerk police state measures, many of which came to pass.
You must lead a very sad life, if you watched those videos of the towers collapsing and your immediate reaction was "Oh, shit, the Bush administration is going to wiretap my phone!" I probably agree with you on the merits of the Patriot Act, but people who viewed the WTC attacks with about as much emotion as they'd watch a Jerry Bruckheimer movie really piss me off. If New York were nuked, assholes like you would still be blathering on about how "it's important to put this in context", but the government decides to fingerprint foreign visitors and you spew another masturbatory police state comparison.
It's worse than that. Apparently the administration had already been made aware that two of them were al Qaeda members, roughly two weeks before the attack, and was too fucking stupid to do anything about it. Hence the current stonewalling against the independent commission; Rove is probably sweating bullets thinking about how the Democrats will spin intelligence failures in the campaign.
The response from the right, of course, has been to blame Clinton again.
Yes, and the judge who ordered this showed such class:
"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," Federal Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva said in the court order.
Nothing I haven't heard on Slashdot before, but it makes even Scalia's rants seem. . . dignified.
He isn't left of center; he is merely claiming to be less conservative than he really is.
Wrong. Many Democrats, and most Slashdot posters, would probably consider me an unreconstructed reactionary, but I still usually vote Democratic, I despise the Republican party (although there are individuals in it whom I respect), and I think Bush is the worst president America has had in years. In the current spectrum of American politics, I am definitely left-of-center, if only slightly. I just don't think Bush is as awful, or as evil, as the more hysterical members of Slashdot seem to believe.
Her impression was that he regarded it about on the level of the "Support OUR Troops" stickers you see in the US. And this person is quite capable of seeing the difference between "Americans in general" and the policies of a particular administration
Okay, the difference: sloppy language aside (the "crusade" part), Bush has gone out of his way to say that he isn't against Islam or Muslims, and his efforts in the Israel mess have actually been very evenhanded. (Yes, I realize this doesn't make him less of a sucky president, or excuse the collateral damage in Iraq.) bin Laden, however, has made it very clear that he hates the American people as a whole.
You maybe haven't yet learned that that entire chapter of Ann Coulter's book was based on a lie?
I read the book, and most of the rebuttals, and I'm fully aware that it's a crock of shit from beginning to end. Unfortunately, I've seen this type of elitism firsthand. Coulter was wrong to try to smear the NYT with it, but having spent my entire life among upper-middle-class liberals (especially West Coast ones, which are even worse), I assure you that many really do think that way. (On the other hand, many of them also enjoy chain restaurants and WWF matches, so it's not a universal stereotype.)
Actually, though, I'd forgotten all about that part of the Coulter book when I wrote that comment; it's based on more recent experiences.
I would consider myself either a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican - both labels are now meaningless, however. Like I said, I voted for McCain in the primaries and then Gore in the general election. (I'm still registered as a Dem, but that'll end after the primary this year.)
Regardless, I try to read a broad range of news sources, from both the left and the right wing, which means I pick up quite a bit that both sides miss due to very selective or outright biased coverage. I am among the few liberals (of any stripe) who can claim to have read one of Ann Coulter's books cover to cover. (I still haven't recovered.)
Thank you! I try to craft everything I write to piss off extremists on both ends. Although there aren't enough right-wingers on Slashdot for it to really be fun.
To repeat the same tired phrase, "some of my best friends are Europeans." Some have the same problems as I discuss, and we're friends in spite of their obnoxious attitude. (Which was particularly annoying because they'd come to the USA to participate in our world-leading scientific research program, which welcomes foreign scholars from all over. Yeah, that's really "fascist" of us.) Some have made homes in the US, and have no intention of returning to Europe - and they'd be among the first to defend America, too.
Then we watched your elections being rigged and a fascist clique rising to power, like the USA was some two-bit eastern european or african nation.
Yeah, well, um, this sort of reinforces my point. I voted for Gore (would've voted for McCain, but he didn't last long enough) and didn't think much of the 2000 election, but I don't think the election was "rigged" or that the Bush administration is a fascist clique. (Actually, most of the reports I've seen in mainstream publications have indicated that Bush probably would have won anyway - very narrowly, of course, and possibly still without a national majority - if a fair count was done.) Since I've lived here, I got to hear the same things about Clinton, coming from what Bob Dole called the "double-Y chromosome crowd." This ranting sounds just as dumb coming from Democrats or snotty Europeans.
Let's keep things in perspective; the USA has experienced many crises, but our system of government and our free and open society has proven resilient in the past, albeit with changes. There have been far worse threats to liberty and democracy in the past 225 years than Bush and Ashcroft, and scarred though we may be we've survived them all. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be constantly on the lookout for new threats like the Patriot Act or the illegal detentions, but I don't view these as heralding the end of American democracy. They're just another crisis we'll have to work out, without meddling from snotty EU bureaucrats.
We do NOT hate the people of the USA as a whole (but we do wish they'd learn a little logical and rhetorical skills so they can see through the lies and bluster of their glorious leaders)
This illustrates my point even better. You assume that the majority (okay, 49% or so, but even more voted for Republicans in 2002) voted for Bush because they're ignorant dolts easily wowed by a cowboy act. Most Democrats appear to believe this as well, hence the NASCAR/Wal-Mart allusion. In fact, a great deal of the people here really do support Bush's policies, and, more importantly, don't like snobby outsiders telling them what to think. I'm very sympathetic towars the latter view, especially after reading too much Chomsky and having too many run-ins with snobby Europeans and lefty Democrats, both of which tend to be just as insular and ignorant as the rubes they mock.
Frankly, we don't need advice from the Europeans on running a stable, pluralistic democracy.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sorry, but modern feminism seems to spend 90% of its time advocating for abortion to the exclusion of everything else. You see, while there's still a long way to go for equal rights, enough advances have been made that (most) American women appear to be generally happy with their lives and future prospects, so there isn't a good stimulus for rapid change. Groups like NOW can't survive without a health dose of oppression, so they try to convince women that "JOHN ASHCROFT WANTS TO OWN YOUR UTERUS" in order to keep the donations flowing, and reject any restrictions on abortion out of hand, no matter how minor or abuse-proof. (Example here.)
I don't have much sympathy for this type of behavior. I firmly believe in equal rights - I'd vote for the ERA if it came up again - and I'm sick of being told that I'm "anti-woman" because I think abortion is wrong. And I'm still disturbed by how quickly so-called feminists forgave Bill Clinton. Real feminists are out earning engineering degrees, serving in the military, or helping educate girls in lower-class communities, not whining to legislators.
The difference may be that Dubya may be hated by billions, though the vast majority of his haters are overseas.
I'm constantly amazed at this, and I'm not particularly happy with this administration. Europeans seem to foam at the mouth over the merest mention of Bush much more quickly than Americans. The "Bush is an Idiot" meme seems even more popular in the EU than in my part of the world (SF Bay!). They all seem to have fixed on an image of Bush as nothing more than a chimpanzee in cowboy gear. The truth is, of course, much more complicated, but I think it must fit nicely with their opinion of Americans in general.
This sort of falls into the same category as effete upper-middle-class liberals sneering at NASCAR fans and Wal-Mart shoppers; apparently arrogant elitism is no longer considered rude.
Noam Chomsky? Good God. He's the most anti-American guy out there.
More important, he's known to distort or selectively cite facts to advance his own political views. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "lying", but he's not a dependable source of information if you really want to learn about a topic in depth. He's an unrepentant apologist for totalitarianism and genocide (Cambodia being the worst example), as long as he can make America look bad in the process.
I'm a lifelong moderate/liberal, and I'm ashamed of what Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, or any of their ilk did to the Third World, but Chomsky is the worst kind of charlatan, and totally blind to the disastrous effects of Communism in the last century. The right side won the Cold War, and he still can't come to terms with that.
No, he's right - evolution is not random. The process by which mutations occur is, but they are under heavy selective pressure and those which are propagated are not truly "random". This does not mean that evolution has some guiding direction (although you often hear sloppy terminology used, e.g. "evolution designed this organsim to blah blah blah"), only that the process by which mutations are incorporated is based on a complex set of mathematical/chemical/biological rules.
To return to the/dev/random joke, this would be comparable to evolution if you only accepted strings that had a valid TLD in them (as well as the proper form of email address), and then filtered them to leave only those where mail delivery was successful. Which is more or less what spammers already do with Hotmail and Yahoo.
You are repeating the same old lefty lie that Bush claimed Iraq was an "imminent threat". In fact, in his State of the Union address, Bush explicitly said that Iraq was NOT an imminent threat.
Okay, strike the quotes - I know he didn't use those words. However, the record of statements by administration officials indicates that this is exactly the message they wanted to convey; remember Cheney predicting a mushroom cloud over Manhattan? I read mostly conservative news/opinion sites, and all of those guys seemed to be under the impression (or at least working hard to propagate it) that Saddam was going to attack us very soon if we didn't invade.
On the topic of unfair misquotes, by the way, I'm inclined to forgive the use of "imminent threat" given that people are still repeating the tired old "Gore claims to have invented the Internet" bullshit.
Actually you are not correct. One of the MANY reasons the U.S. and 60+ other allies declared war on Iraq was because of the weapons of mass distruction. The core reason the war came about was because of Iraq's unwillingness to comply with their U.N. agreement. Now I can't say that I blame them, because they got away without compliance for almost 9 years, and believed that the current administration would behave the same as the last.
This is correct, and some liberal commentators said that the war was justified entirely on these grounds, without the phony "imminent threat" that the Bush administration cooked up.
Perhaps the last administration didn't feel that a full invasion and nation-building was the appropriate way to respond, given that Hussein appeared to have been more or less neutered and Iraq was a far more advanced country than Kosovo or Somalia. (Look up the recent history of Kurdistan for an example of how continued Allied military presence kept Saddam in check.) It would, of course, be interesting to know why Saddam continued rebuffing the UN/US, if he didn't really have weapons.
Another point for war was that it was shown that there is a connection between O.B.L. and Sadaam.
Bullshit. This has still not been proven; the Mohammed Atta connection remains wishful thinking. The terrorists operating up near Kurdistan haven't been shown to be either linked directly with al Qaeda, or (as far as I know) directly supported by Saddam, and they certainly weren't operating outside of Iraq.
Another point was that Iraq was training terrorist for use against the U.S. and it's friends.
He was indeed supporting Palestinian terrorism on the side, but that's no justification for a US invasion. It certainly wasn't at the level of the Taliban hosting bin Laden. Hussein even had Abu Nidal, one of the founders of modern Islamic terrorism, killed because he became an embarassment.
I'm very wishy-washy on this subject, and I certainly don't care for the chorus of leftists that keeps comparing Bush and Saddam and thinks it's all about oil. However, the retroactive justifications from the right sound more absurd each time I hear them. Answer the fucking question, don't make up excuses about how you really had other reasons all along.
There are many places in the world where far worse human rights abuses occur (and where the US doesn't have as long a history of aiding or ignoring these issues, as HW Bush and Reagan did with Iraq); Congo and Sudan come to mind. I'd love to see us clean them up too, but I don't hear the neocons using those crises as a justification for invasion.
Sir, I think it's time to go back to FoxNews, lest real news cloud your mind.
Actually, keep in mind that BBC apparently told its reporters not to refer to Saddam as a "dictator", because he'd been democratically elected. This about a man who personally machine-gunned his political opponents. So I'd take any politically charged reporting on the BBC with a grain of salt; at least with Fox I can be instantly sure it's crap.
You seem to be in the minority among people I've talked to. Anyway, I was referring to the phony re-enactment of the Roman vs. Carthaginian battle, where the gladiators beat the shit out of the guys coming after them on chariots. I could watch that scene by itself over and over again.
Hmmmm, I saw it last night and thought it was thoroughly BADASS, but I have a few quibbles or additions:
The battle scenes.
I disagree. I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this. I'm probably forgetting something too. I would also rank the final fight in "Fellowship" above all the fights in the trilogy. It's important to note that these are all done on a smaller scale (even "Ryan" focuses on a small piece of beach) and with much less CG work. The CG work was excellent in RotK, but my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. The "Fellowship" fight, on the other hand, looked brutal and realistic.
Shelob
I didn't think Jackson could make a giant spider frighten me after at least ten viewings of "Aliens". I was wrong. Major, major props.
The signal fire scene.
I agree, but I doubt this was undiluted New Zealand. . . Jackson said very plainly at one point that while NZ was ideal for them, they did some doctoring to get it to look just right. Personally, after repeated viewings I still can't quite tell what shots that aren't immediately obvious as CG are manipulated, and what are original, but I doubt the signal fire scene was all natural. Still, very impressive.
Legolas's required stunt scene
I'm sorry, but the horse mounting in Two Towers fucking rocked, even if every female in the audience simultaneously climaxed. What made it so cool was the whole slo-mo lead-in from Legolas shooting arrows, and that what happens next is totally unexpected. When I watch the movies I keep rewinding that part (no, I'm not gay): I think it's the most impressively directed/coreographed scene in the trilogy. Just eye candy, yes, and nothing to do with the books, but utterly effective.
On that note, I was disappointed that they left out the part of "Fellowship" where Legolas shoots down one of the winged steeds at night (from a boat!). None of the elf stunts in the movies seemed out of place because I remembered reading that, but I wish they'd left it in - it really establishes that Elves are bad motherfuckers.
Eowyn struck me as such a sighing wench that I was dreading what was going to happen to her later on. My impression from the books was of someone of a much stronger character
Well, there's two facets to her character: she falls hard for Aragorn (doesn't she go slightly nuts?), and she desperately wants to be a warrior and not a housewife. The first was very clear in the movie of TTT, and there were elements of the second as well: sparring with Aragorn, and wanting to fight when the Wargs attack (not even in the book!). And, in the extended edition, there's the issue of her cooking. It wouldn't make sense for them to leave the fight with the winged steed out, because she's already been set up as a potential badass. Anyway, in the RotK trailer, you clearly see her dressed in battle armor and wearing a helmet, and holding on to Merry (who I believe is involved in the same fight - he ends up killing a half-troll or something).
I need to re-read the books again (it's been two years - not gonna happen before I see RotK, though), but my recollection is that she ends up with another fairly major character at the end. If they leave that out, I'll be somewhat pissed.
I always got the feeling that when Tolkien was writing about Great Events he used the more poetic and formal language (i.e., more like Yoda-speak with back-assward syntax); when dealing with Hobbits, he (puposely?) slipped into more "Common" speech.
Yes! My dad first pointed this out years ago when I first read the books - I'd noticed a difference in style as the trilogy progressed. I always thought that Fellowship was by far the best written section because of this. By RotK, it starts to feel like the Silmarillion - interesting, but not exactly fun to read. The closing puts it back into context, showing again that these are simple people transformed by great events largely beyond their control.
Linus really calls it the way he sees it, doesn't he?
Your logic is fundamentally flawed, and/or your reading skills are deficient.
You are a weasel, and you are trying to make the world look the way you want it to, rather than the way it _is_.
Wow. I hope someday I'm enough of a badass to be able to flame people like that and get away with it. (That said, it's particularly impressive how Linus can fling these barbs at people and still come off as a reasonable guy, unlike quite a few open-source "leaders". Having a sense of humor seems to help quite a bit.)
Some of us want the internet to be free of US control as well. I think that there should be freedom of speech on the internet but that is just a dream. Currently the US wants DMCA, *IAA etc. and the rest of the world does not see why the US should restrict what they do.
Right, I'm sure Saudi Arabia is pushing for UN control so that its citizens can download Britney tunes without fear of RIAA subpoenas.
Additionally, simulating nuclear weapons on a giant computer means that there'll be one fewer glassy patch in New Mexico or cratered atoll in the Pacific.
Slashdot Mirror
That was truly what I was thinking most about on 9/11: the expected knee-jerk police state measures, many of which came to pass.
You must lead a very sad life, if you watched those videos of the towers collapsing and your immediate reaction was "Oh, shit, the Bush administration is going to wiretap my phone!" I probably agree with you on the merits of the Patriot Act, but people who viewed the WTC attacks with about as much emotion as they'd watch a Jerry Bruckheimer movie really piss me off. If New York were nuked, assholes like you would still be blathering on about how "it's important to put this in context", but the government decides to fingerprint foreign visitors and you spew another masturbatory police state comparison.
It's worse than that. Apparently the administration had already been made aware that two of them were al Qaeda members, roughly two weeks before the attack, and was too fucking stupid to do anything about it. Hence the current stonewalling against the independent commission; Rove is probably sweating bullets thinking about how the Democrats will spin intelligence failures in the campaign.
The response from the right, of course, has been to blame Clinton again.
Yes, and the judge who ordered this showed such class:
"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," Federal Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva said in the court order.
Nothing I haven't heard on Slashdot before, but it makes even Scalia's rants seem. . . dignified.
He isn't left of center; he is merely claiming to be less conservative than he really is.
Wrong. Many Democrats, and most Slashdot posters, would probably consider me an unreconstructed reactionary, but I still usually vote Democratic, I despise the Republican party (although there are individuals in it whom I respect), and I think Bush is the worst president America has had in years. In the current spectrum of American politics, I am definitely left-of-center, if only slightly. I just don't think Bush is as awful, or as evil, as the more hysterical members of Slashdot seem to believe.
Her impression was that he regarded it about on the level of the "Support OUR Troops" stickers you see in the US. And this person is quite capable of seeing the difference between "Americans in general" and the policies of a particular administration
Okay, the difference: sloppy language aside (the "crusade" part), Bush has gone out of his way to say that he isn't against Islam or Muslims, and his efforts in the Israel mess have actually been very evenhanded. (Yes, I realize this doesn't make him less of a sucky president, or excuse the collateral damage in Iraq.) bin Laden, however, has made it very clear that he hates the American people as a whole.
You maybe haven't yet learned that that entire chapter of Ann Coulter's book was based on a lie?
I read the book, and most of the rebuttals, and I'm fully aware that it's a crock of shit from beginning to end. Unfortunately, I've seen this type of elitism firsthand. Coulter was wrong to try to smear the NYT with it, but having spent my entire life among upper-middle-class liberals (especially West Coast ones, which are even worse), I assure you that many really do think that way. (On the other hand, many of them also enjoy chain restaurants and WWF matches, so it's not a universal stereotype.)
Actually, though, I'd forgotten all about that part of the Coulter book when I wrote that comment; it's based on more recent experiences.
I would consider myself either a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican - both labels are now meaningless, however. Like I said, I voted for McCain in the primaries and then Gore in the general election. (I'm still registered as a Dem, but that'll end after the primary this year.)
Regardless, I try to read a broad range of news sources, from both the left and the right wing, which means I pick up quite a bit that both sides miss due to very selective or outright biased coverage. I am among the few liberals (of any stripe) who can claim to have read one of Ann Coulter's books cover to cover. (I still haven't recovered.)
God bless rabid moderatism.
Thank you! I try to craft everything I write to piss off extremists on both ends. Although there aren't enough right-wingers on Slashdot for it to really be fun.
To repeat the same tired phrase, "some of my best friends are Europeans." Some have the same problems as I discuss, and we're friends in spite of their obnoxious attitude. (Which was particularly annoying because they'd come to the USA to participate in our world-leading scientific research program, which welcomes foreign scholars from all over. Yeah, that's really "fascist" of us.) Some have made homes in the US, and have no intention of returning to Europe - and they'd be among the first to defend America, too.
Then we watched your elections being rigged and a fascist clique rising to power, like the USA was some two-bit eastern european or african nation.
Yeah, well, um, this sort of reinforces my point. I voted for Gore (would've voted for McCain, but he didn't last long enough) and didn't think much of the 2000 election, but I don't think the election was "rigged" or that the Bush administration is a fascist clique. (Actually, most of the reports I've seen in mainstream publications have indicated that Bush probably would have won anyway - very narrowly, of course, and possibly still without a national majority - if a fair count was done.) Since I've lived here, I got to hear the same things about Clinton, coming from what Bob Dole called the "double-Y chromosome crowd." This ranting sounds just as dumb coming from Democrats or snotty Europeans.
Let's keep things in perspective; the USA has experienced many crises, but our system of government and our free and open society has proven resilient in the past, albeit with changes. There have been far worse threats to liberty and democracy in the past 225 years than Bush and Ashcroft, and scarred though we may be we've survived them all. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be constantly on the lookout for new threats like the Patriot Act or the illegal detentions, but I don't view these as heralding the end of American democracy. They're just another crisis we'll have to work out, without meddling from snotty EU bureaucrats.
We do NOT hate the people of the USA as a whole (but we do wish they'd learn a little logical and rhetorical skills so they can see through the lies and bluster of their glorious leaders)
This illustrates my point even better. You assume that the majority (okay, 49% or so, but even more voted for Republicans in 2002) voted for Bush because they're ignorant dolts easily wowed by a cowboy act. Most Democrats appear to believe this as well, hence the NASCAR/Wal-Mart allusion. In fact, a great deal of the people here really do support Bush's policies, and, more importantly, don't like snobby outsiders telling them what to think. I'm very sympathetic towars the latter view, especially after reading too much Chomsky and having too many run-ins with snobby Europeans and lefty Democrats, both of which tend to be just as insular and ignorant as the rubes they mock.
Frankly, we don't need advice from the Europeans on running a stable, pluralistic democracy.
Sorry, but modern feminism seems to spend 90% of its time advocating for abortion to the exclusion of everything else. You see, while there's still a long way to go for equal rights, enough advances have been made that (most) American women appear to be generally happy with their lives and future prospects, so there isn't a good stimulus for rapid change. Groups like NOW can't survive without a health dose of oppression, so they try to convince women that "JOHN ASHCROFT WANTS TO OWN YOUR UTERUS" in order to keep the donations flowing, and reject any restrictions on abortion out of hand, no matter how minor or abuse-proof. (Example here.)
I don't have much sympathy for this type of behavior. I firmly believe in equal rights - I'd vote for the ERA if it came up again - and I'm sick of being told that I'm "anti-woman" because I think abortion is wrong. And I'm still disturbed by how quickly so-called feminists forgave Bill Clinton. Real feminists are out earning engineering degrees, serving in the military, or helping educate girls in lower-class communities, not whining to legislators.
The difference may be that Dubya may be hated by billions, though the vast majority of his haters are overseas.
I'm constantly amazed at this, and I'm not particularly happy with this administration. Europeans seem to foam at the mouth over the merest mention of Bush much more quickly than Americans. The "Bush is an Idiot" meme seems even more popular in the EU than in my part of the world (SF Bay!). They all seem to have fixed on an image of Bush as nothing more than a chimpanzee in cowboy gear. The truth is, of course, much more complicated, but I think it must fit nicely with their opinion of Americans in general.
This sort of falls into the same category as effete upper-middle-class liberals sneering at NASCAR fans and Wal-Mart shoppers; apparently arrogant elitism is no longer considered rude.
Noam Chomsky? Good God. He's the most anti-American guy out there.
More important, he's known to distort or selectively cite facts to advance his own political views. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "lying", but he's not a dependable source of information if you really want to learn about a topic in depth. He's an unrepentant apologist for totalitarianism and genocide (Cambodia being the worst example), as long as he can make America look bad in the process.
I'm a lifelong moderate/liberal, and I'm ashamed of what Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, or any of their ilk did to the Third World, but Chomsky is the worst kind of charlatan, and totally blind to the disastrous effects of Communism in the last century. The right side won the Cold War, and he still can't come to terms with that.
No, he's right - evolution is not random. The process by which mutations occur is, but they are under heavy selective pressure and those which are propagated are not truly "random". This does not mean that evolution has some guiding direction (although you often hear sloppy terminology used, e.g. "evolution designed this organsim to blah blah blah"), only that the process by which mutations are incorporated is based on a complex set of mathematical/chemical/biological rules.
/dev/random joke, this would be comparable to evolution if you only accepted strings that had a valid TLD in them (as well as the proper form of email address), and then filtered them to leave only those where mail delivery was successful. Which is more or less what spammers already do with Hotmail and Yahoo.
To return to the
You are repeating the same old lefty lie that Bush claimed Iraq was an "imminent threat". In fact, in his State of the Union address, Bush explicitly said that Iraq was NOT an imminent threat.
Okay, strike the quotes - I know he didn't use those words. However, the record of statements by administration officials indicates that this is exactly the message they wanted to convey; remember Cheney predicting a mushroom cloud over Manhattan? I read mostly conservative news/opinion sites, and all of those guys seemed to be under the impression (or at least working hard to propagate it) that Saddam was going to attack us very soon if we didn't invade.
On the topic of unfair misquotes, by the way, I'm inclined to forgive the use of "imminent threat" given that people are still repeating the tired old "Gore claims to have invented the Internet" bullshit.
Actually you are not correct. One of the MANY reasons the U.S. and 60+ other allies declared war on Iraq was because of the weapons of mass distruction. The core reason the war came about was because of Iraq's unwillingness to comply with their U.N. agreement. Now I can't say that I blame them, because they got away without compliance for almost 9 years, and believed that the current administration would behave the same as the last.
This is correct, and some liberal commentators said that the war was justified entirely on these grounds, without the phony "imminent threat" that the Bush administration cooked up.
Perhaps the last administration didn't feel that a full invasion and nation-building was the appropriate way to respond, given that Hussein appeared to have been more or less neutered and Iraq was a far more advanced country than Kosovo or Somalia. (Look up the recent history of Kurdistan for an example of how continued Allied military presence kept Saddam in check.) It would, of course, be interesting to know why Saddam continued rebuffing the UN/US, if he didn't really have weapons.
Another point for war was that it was shown that there is a connection between O.B.L. and Sadaam.
Bullshit. This has still not been proven; the Mohammed Atta connection remains wishful thinking. The terrorists operating up near Kurdistan haven't been shown to be either linked directly with al Qaeda, or (as far as I know) directly supported by Saddam, and they certainly weren't operating outside of Iraq.
Another point was that Iraq was training terrorist for use against the U.S. and it's friends.
He was indeed supporting Palestinian terrorism on the side, but that's no justification for a US invasion. It certainly wasn't at the level of the Taliban hosting bin Laden. Hussein even had Abu Nidal, one of the founders of modern Islamic terrorism, killed because he became an embarassment.
I'm very wishy-washy on this subject, and I certainly don't care for the chorus of leftists that keeps comparing Bush and Saddam and thinks it's all about oil. However, the retroactive justifications from the right sound more absurd each time I hear them. Answer the fucking question, don't make up excuses about how you really had other reasons all along.
There are many places in the world where far worse human rights abuses occur (and where the US doesn't have as long a history of aiding or ignoring these issues, as HW Bush and Reagan did with Iraq); Congo and Sudan come to mind. I'd love to see us clean them up too, but I don't hear the neocons using those crises as a justification for invasion.
Sir, I think it's time to go back to FoxNews, lest real news cloud your mind.
Actually, keep in mind that BBC apparently told its reporters not to refer to Saddam as a "dictator", because he'd been democratically elected. This about a man who personally machine-gunned his political opponents. So I'd take any politically charged reporting on the BBC with a grain of salt; at least with Fox I can be instantly sure it's crap.
You seem to be in the minority among people I've talked to. Anyway, I was referring to the phony re-enactment of the Roman vs. Carthaginian battle, where the gladiators beat the shit out of the guys coming after them on chariots. I could watch that scene by itself over and over again.
Hmmmm, I saw it last night and thought it was thoroughly BADASS, but I have a few quibbles or additions:
The battle scenes.
I disagree. I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this. I'm probably forgetting something too. I would also rank the final fight in "Fellowship" above all the fights in the trilogy. It's important to note that these are all done on a smaller scale (even "Ryan" focuses on a small piece of beach) and with much less CG work. The CG work was excellent in RotK, but my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. The "Fellowship" fight, on the other hand, looked brutal and realistic.
Shelob
I didn't think Jackson could make a giant spider frighten me after at least ten viewings of "Aliens". I was wrong. Major, major props.
The signal fire scene.
I agree, but I doubt this was undiluted New Zealand. . . Jackson said very plainly at one point that while NZ was ideal for them, they did some doctoring to get it to look just right. Personally, after repeated viewings I still can't quite tell what shots that aren't immediately obvious as CG are manipulated, and what are original, but I doubt the signal fire scene was all natural. Still, very impressive.
Legolas's required stunt scene
I'm sorry, but the horse mounting in Two Towers fucking rocked, even if every female in the audience simultaneously climaxed. What made it so cool was the whole slo-mo lead-in from Legolas shooting arrows, and that what happens next is totally unexpected. When I watch the movies I keep rewinding that part (no, I'm not gay): I think it's the most impressively directed/coreographed scene in the trilogy. Just eye candy, yes, and nothing to do with the books, but utterly effective.
On that note, I was disappointed that they left out the part of "Fellowship" where Legolas shoots down one of the winged steeds at night (from a boat!). None of the elf stunts in the movies seemed out of place because I remembered reading that, but I wish they'd left it in - it really establishes that Elves are bad motherfuckers.
Eowyn struck me as such a sighing wench that I was dreading what was going to happen to her later on. My impression from the books was of someone of a much stronger character
Well, there's two facets to her character: she falls hard for Aragorn (doesn't she go slightly nuts?), and she desperately wants to be a warrior and not a housewife. The first was very clear in the movie of TTT, and there were elements of the second as well: sparring with Aragorn, and wanting to fight when the Wargs attack (not even in the book!). And, in the extended edition, there's the issue of her cooking. It wouldn't make sense for them to leave the fight with the winged steed out, because she's already been set up as a potential badass. Anyway, in the RotK trailer, you clearly see her dressed in battle armor and wearing a helmet, and holding on to Merry (who I believe is involved in the same fight - he ends up killing a half-troll or something).
I need to re-read the books again (it's been two years - not gonna happen before I see RotK, though), but my recollection is that she ends up with another fairly major character at the end. If they leave that out, I'll be somewhat pissed.
There's a real cool "woman vs. funky snake-headed dragon" faceoff.
Ooooh, that's the part where Eowyn takes down a Nazgul. Sweet, I was hoping they'd leave that in.
I always got the feeling that when Tolkien was writing about Great Events he used the more poetic and formal language (i.e., more like Yoda-speak with back-assward syntax); when dealing with Hobbits, he (puposely?) slipped into more "Common" speech.
Yes! My dad first pointed this out years ago when I first read the books - I'd noticed a difference in style as the trilogy progressed. I always thought that Fellowship was by far the best written section because of this. By RotK, it starts to feel like the Silmarillion - interesting, but not exactly fun to read. The closing puts it back into context, showing again that these are simple people transformed by great events largely beyond their control.
No, what would make it a joke is if they ignored all of their rules for someone, regardless of who that was.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Linus really calls it the way he sees it, doesn't he?
Your logic is fundamentally flawed, and/or your reading skills are deficient.
You are a weasel, and you are trying to make the world look the way you want it to, rather than the way it _is_.
Wow. I hope someday I'm enough of a badass to be able to flame people like that and get away with it. (That said, it's particularly impressive how Linus can fling these barbs at people and still come off as a reasonable guy, unlike quite a few open-source "leaders". Having a sense of humor seems to help quite a bit.)
Some of us want the internet to be free of US control as well. I think that there should be freedom of speech on the internet but that is just a dream. Currently the US wants DMCA, *IAA etc. and the rest of the world does not see why the US should restrict what they do.
Right, I'm sure Saudi Arabia is pushing for UN control so that its citizens can download Britney tunes without fear of RIAA subpoenas.
Additionally, simulating nuclear weapons on a giant computer means that there'll be one fewer glassy patch in New Mexico or cratered atoll in the Pacific.