He declared, and engaged in, war against us, in so far as his capabilities allowed. Only one side need take up hostilities for the term 'war' to be appropriate, regardless of Congress getting around to speaking the war ritual and issuing a piece of paper. The President is allowed to take pro-active actions in the interest of the nation's security without waiting for a stamp from congress.
A sustained war clearly requires the permission and monetary support of Congress, but the assasination of a known enemy is a much simpler thing (or it was when the opportunity arose)
Assassinating an ass like Bin Laden would make us no better than the murderous thugs we're fighting.
I'm sorry, but you need to wrap your head around the concept of 'war.' By that time, Bin Laden had already staged a few murderous attacks on Americans around the world, and was an established enemy.
What do you do to wartime enemies? Kill them.
It's not about being better than them, we already know we are. It would take several years of multicuturalist-brainwashing to cause you to even question the fact that we're 'better' then them in every single quantitative or qualitative category you can come up with.
It's about winning, and taking away the enemy's ability to inflict harm on us.
Killing their most experienced head honcho planner degrades their capability significantly. As you continue to kill the leadership, their replacements have less and less experience and are much less effective in carrying out attacks on us.
Yes, I'm glad you pointed out how I was wrong when I said that the United States is and always was a selfless, peaceful nation.
Oh, wait. You said that. I didn't. I wrote about Europe, attacking the peaceful, secure fantasies they harbor about themselves.
The trouble with reading between the lines is that in your conceit, you read things that are neither literally there, nor even intended or implied.
Re:Wrong - the government *is* concerned
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The pentagon commisions all kinds of studies and contigency plans, 99.999% of which will never see use. They just write them so that if x situation comes up, they have a plan ready.
Getting worked up about what the pentagon has made plans for makes as much sense as getting worked up because your rural mechanic has the drum-brake removal tool for a Buggati Veyron.
He's prepared in case one ever comes around with a brake problem, but how likely is he to see it?
You wrote six paragraphs based mostly on what you imagine my attitudes to be, not on what I wrote. I will not respond to any of them, because you wrote them as an answer to the "dfenstrate" demon floating in your head, generated as a result of reading a pro-american paragraph that didn't have a five page disclaimer on 'root causes', 'multicultural apreciation', and 'apologizing for being an American.'
If you wish, you may try again, based only on what I wrote. For your convienence, I've reposted it in non-flamebait form. Although far less fun to write, you may find it helpful.
1.Europe had a long, colorful history of warring amongst themselves. 2.The US material contribution in the form of Lend-Lease, as well as the US contribution of manpower to europe (and victory in the pacific) was decisive in ending WW2. 3. Europe hasn't spent much time killing each other since the US installed dozens of bases across the continent. (we may argue about the precise cause and effect relationship, but not the timing of the installation of US bases and the cessation of western european wars) 4. No European nation, besides possibly Britain, currently has the werewithal to conduct a war by itself. 5. Social welfare spending now comprises a vast majority of European government spending. 6. With the dismally low birthrates, generous benefits, already high taxes, and early retirement ages you see across much of europe, many social welfare goverments face a bleak future financially. 7. The folks who are counting on this socialism will not be happy when the system collapses. This may lead to a bloody revolution, and we've seen a few of these in europe in the past 100 years or so. 8. Several countries around Europe have let in millions of muslims, who also pose violent challenges to those very countries. The prime example is France, who tolerated a week of muslim riots and car burnings, and had a bunch of muslim youths rampage through a train from Nice, performing gang rapes, beatings, and threatening anyone who started to call the police about it- and the police subsequently did little about it when they were summoned. Switzerland has a rising crime rate due almost soley to Muslim immigrants, and the netherlands had a film director murdered for making a film critical of muslims and their treatment of women (IIRC). 9. A google search would turn up several instances of bloody muslim borders(IE, They're usually looking for wars). Here's a list to start you off, with nothing more than a decade old: Sudan, Checnya,Phillipines, Indonesia, the Balkans. That entire 'jihad' thing kind of propels this along.
Would you like to try again? Don't read between the lines, read the lines themselves, or you may find yourself writing a novel based on little but your own sense of superiority.
I was taken aback by the cheap shot at Muslims in the grandparent post. If I remember my history correctly, the "Holy war" was King Richard of England's doing due to his fondness of wars. The muslims only defended their land as any people on their right mind would do. What would you expect them to do? Just welcome their new overlords?
Why is it that whenever anyone wants to defend muslims and impugn christians they have to go back several centuries? I'll let you ponder the significance of that.
In terms of making Rambo proud, didn't you ever hear the old comment that NATO was to "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down."? It worked.
As for WW2, nothing you wrote is new information to me. It still remains true that the material contributions of the Lend-Lease program, and the military involvement of the US in WW2 were decisive in an ultimate allied victory.
People like to point out that the Russians lost 17 million in WW2, so they must have done the most work. The same folk also convienently forget to mention that the russians had a rifle and 10 bullets for every two soldiers and a chain of command that would murder conscripts who didn't seem dedicated enough.
As for what the US military failed to achieve... in vietnam our soldiers were shackled by a series of over-involved and too hesitant administrations. The military was never told to win, they were ordered to play tit-for-tat escalation games and kept fighting with one hand behind their backs. We did not lose vietnam to VC military prowess, we lost because we lacked the will to prosecute the affair as a war. The reasons we played tit for tat games and why we were even there will be debated for decades more, but all along we had the capability to win. That means little without the will to win.
In terms of Iraq, you need to pay attention to a few more information sources. The popular media would have you believe it's a lost cause, when progress is continuous. I don't care to be your educator in this instance, but WW@ had a history of holdouts as well, who ultimately gave up after a few years.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Just because it shows the lie of your multiculture-diversity-rainbow philosophy doesn't mean it's not based in fact.
Here's some more for you. In the US, 75% of murderers have prior felony convictions. However, so do 50% of murder victims. You've got scum killing scum, basically, and I'm hard pressed to care about it. So the murder rate for decent human beings is actually about half of the 6/100,000 number. I'm not saying the dead felons deserved to be killed, but it's a predictable result of engaging in a criminal lifestyle.
As for skin color vs crime, it's also true that blacks perpetuate and are victims of crimes in disproportionate numbers, as compared to other skin-tone associated groups. I don't make this shit up, you can check it yourself.
thats wonderful. i dont know where to begin with the logic flaws in this 'argument'.
You can begin by visiting the US Department of Justice website, looking at the stats, and seeing that you are in error, not the OP.
Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe. This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying. As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness.
Since you saved so much on militaries, this allowed you to entrench your socialist welfare states, which are now strangulating your countries one by one, and when you can no longer pay the bills you'll see another bloody revolution (the sort the continent was famous for), or simply be killed off or enslaved by the Muslims you're allowing into your countries in huge numbers to prop up your falling demographics and pathetic birth rates.
Both Post-revolution-types and Muslims are usually looking for wars, so you'll need some good ol' USA protection when that time comes along. Hopefully our mere presence will continue to dissuade everyone from starting a war, but you can never be too sure about that.
Just look at how Bush is pussy footing around North-Korea while invading a non-treating country like Iraq since they knew they didn't have any WMD
You're ignoring the heavy influence of China in keeping it's pet NK on a short leash, and the fact that we have ships around the korean penninsula boarding what we damn well please.
How do you think Libya was convinced to start playing ball a couple years ago?
Because we captured a bunch of nuclear weapons making equipment being shipped from NK, and told Qadaffi that he's our bitch. He agreed.
The rest of your post is just American-hating drivel, devoid of any real point.
From what I understand, the hanging chads were most likely the result of voter fraud by the election officials in charge.
They would take a stack of ballots, and run an icepick through their preferred candidate's hole.
If their candidate was the same as the voters, the card was unchanged. If it wasn't, a new hole would be made and the vote invalided for multiple voting. Since Icepicks weren't the proper instrument for voting, they left chads hanging.
Of course, who you think the fraudulent election officials were fucking up ballots for depends largely on your party affiliation.
Personally, I only remember one candidate in the 2000 election trying to cherry-pick areas to recount, and these chosen areas became famous for their hanging chads.
Of course, I don't have any substatiation of this, so take it with a grain of salt.
More directly on topic, I'm all for wisconsin's law to be adopted here in New Hampshire for electronic voting machines. The voting machine computer tally could be hand counted (or verified by a machine from a completely different vendor for speed) in maybe 1-3% of the voting districts, randomly chosen after the election, for consistency.
Depressed? That's rather common on the left, truthfully. Why is it that the right is so much more full of optimists? Because the leftist mentality is inherently de-humanizing and depressing?
blah blah blah blah I'll get you next time batman blah blah blah blah
Really, I had a paragraph written or two on how you've got me and international power all wrong, but I decided to delete it because it would be lost on you.
So I'll give you this: Nations do what they can get away with when it suits their interest. It was ever thus, and it ever will be.
Refresh my memory, when did the US aquire the right to shoot down their sattelites?
The same time everyone else lost their ability to stop us.
If we think it's time to start shooting down europe's sattelites, we're hardly going to be concerned with what European nations consider what we have the 'right' to do.
Not that I think we'll have cause to shoot down any satellites any time in the forseeable future, but your post implied fantasies about 'international law' that just aren't so.
If at the end of the day the money in the register doesn't add up, guess who is paying for that? Hint: It's not the company.
Who did you work for?
I worked in retail for years in the US, and drawers came up short a few cents routinely, a buck or two occasionally, and $50 short once. No one was made or asked to pay, and management didn't care much so long as there was no pattern to it. The dollar amount of drawer shortages paled in comparison to the cost of items ruined in store, marked down for damage, sold at a loss to clear out the shelves, and outright stolen. Just another part of doing business really. Incidentally, you had the same little useless slip of paper to sign if your drawer was under, or over.
Moreover, you can hardly demand your $8 an hour workers repay a loss that isn't clearly criminal. Everywhere I've lived, unskilled labor was in demand- help wanted signs everywhere. They could get another job within a day.
Well, the physical testing and analysis that Consumer reports can conduct on physical goods, and report the results thereof, carry alot more weight than the sort of "Report Card" I was ranting about. I believe the distinction is clear, but I'm too tired right now to go into any significant depth.
If I had to shoot someone in the foot or in the shoulder I would, but only in defense.
You must be some kind of trick shot, huh?
'Cause everyone else aims for center of mass. Better chance to hit, and therefor disable, your assailant. Center of Mass hits also have death as a common side effect, but he should have thought of that before he decided to ransom your life for your possesions.
There's a difference between "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not murder". Some modern translations of the bible believe the latter to be more accurate, especially since God condones killing in several parts of the bible, especially thieves breaking into your house at night.
Maybe that's not the reason you don't think you'd ever kill someone, and certainly such an act is a heavy burden to bear no matter how much the SOB had it coming.
It always irks me when some NGO feels it's appropriate to issue a 'report card' on any other organization, and even more so when it gets any attention.
The entire concept implies that that writer of the report card has superior knowledge about the issue at hand, like a teacher, and is dispensing wisdom to those lesser informed 'students.'
More often than not, the organization criticized has all the experience there is to be had in that particular field, while the issuers of the 'report card' are just assholes with a questionable, ill-founded agenda.
Moreover, the issuance of a report card is symbolic of a complete lack of humility, something I think most people could use more of. They don't consider themselves adults having a disagreement, they consider themselves unquestionably superior to the ESRB. I'm not particularly religous, but the right amount of humility causes you to seriously reflect on yourself, your motivations and your knowledge before you take decisive action. It also allows you to take criticism constructively instead of ignoring it or lashing out defensively.
You're still on that non-sequitir train. It does not follow that Iraqis being killed = Americans getting fat. Aside from that, we'll not go into a discussion on the ins and outs of Iraq in a thread about couch potatoes.
McDonald's in Brazil blah blah blah
Like I said, many of those elements exist in other countries, but combine them all together, and you get a bunch of fat Americans.
It's really quite amusing how far the depths of deranged America-hating has taken some of those on the supposedly sophisticated euro-elite sort.
I bet you fancy yourself quite clever for connecting American Obesity to your disgust for American Foriegn policy, don't you? And all those other more rational reasons I listed just serve to distract from the "root causes" you like to fetishize about.
I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to live in the shadow of a nation you feel is so vastly inferior to whatever socio-political model you prefer. I'll bet it gnaws on you day and night, doesn't it?
Wow. You got modded up for such a ridiculous non-sequiter? We're fat because we're depressed, and we're depressed because we feel guilty as a nation?
How bout we're fat because we started and continue to support Mcdonalds, whose high-calorie food no one can eat without feeling hungry 90 minutes later? (By design, most likely.)
How bout we're fat because our dietary habits are different? For example, American meals are generally served all courses at the same time, where as in Europe each course/type of food is seperated by a few minutes allowing more time for one to feel full from less?
How about because our food is generally bland so it requires larger portions to satisfy? Or that food is so ridiculously cheap nowadays because we've become so efficient at food production? (we throw tons of food out for the slightest imperfection or for price control)
Or because we're one of the most productive nations in the world and lots of us earn handsome livings with minimal physical activity? Or that we're wealthy enough to afford all kinds of computer and video games, whereby we can be entertained without actually getting off our asses?
Sure, some of these things apply to other nations, but together they represent alot more likely reasons to explain our fatness than 'national guilt.'
Also, much of American violence is contained within inner cities and is perpetuated by criminals on each other. A problem that needs to be dealt with, surely, but irrellevant in practice to most of America. 2/3 of convicted Murderers have prior felony convictions, but so do 1/2 of murder victims- again, criminals preying on each other accounts for a lot of violence.
Try to think for three minutes before posting some irrational leap from Fat ---> national guilt ----> violence. Occam's razor is there for you too, buddy.
Slashdot Mirror
You're the asshole who starts talking politics in the middle of every discussion, aren't you?
Example from your life:
Coworker: So I started talking to this hot babe at the bar yesterday, and we were really hitting it off...
You, interupting: Bush wants to take away her voting rights and chain her to the stove!
we didn't declare war on Osama bin Laden
He declared, and engaged in, war against us, in so far as his capabilities allowed. Only one side need take up hostilities for the term 'war' to be appropriate, regardless of Congress getting around to speaking the war ritual and issuing a piece of paper. The President is allowed to take pro-active actions in the interest of the nation's security without waiting for a stamp from congress.
A sustained war clearly requires the permission and monetary support of Congress, but the assasination of a known enemy is a much simpler thing (or it was when the opportunity arose)
Assassinating an ass like Bin Laden would make us no better than the murderous thugs we're fighting.
I'm sorry, but you need to wrap your head around the concept of 'war.' By that time, Bin Laden had already staged a few murderous attacks on Americans around the world, and was an established enemy.
What do you do to wartime enemies?
Kill them.
It's not about being better than them, we already know we are. It would take several years of multicuturalist-brainwashing to cause you to even question the fact that we're 'better' then them in every single quantitative or qualitative category you can come up with.
It's about winning, and taking away the enemy's ability to inflict harm on us.
Killing their most experienced head honcho planner degrades their capability significantly. As you continue to kill the leadership, their replacements have less and less experience and are much less effective in carrying out attacks on us.
Yes, I'm glad you pointed out how I was wrong when I said that the United States is and always was a selfless, peaceful nation.
Oh, wait. You said that. I didn't. I wrote about Europe, attacking the peaceful, secure fantasies they harbor about themselves.
The trouble with reading between the lines is that in your conceit, you read things that are neither literally there, nor even intended or implied.
The pentagon commisions all kinds of studies and contigency plans, 99.999% of which will never see use. They just write them so that if x situation comes up, they have a plan ready.
Getting worked up about what the pentagon has made plans for makes as much sense as getting worked up because your rural mechanic has the drum-brake removal tool for a Buggati Veyron.
He's prepared in case one ever comes around with a brake problem, but how likely is he to see it?
You wrote six paragraphs based mostly on what you imagine my attitudes to be, not on what I wrote. I will not respond to any of them, because you wrote them as an answer to the "dfenstrate" demon floating in your head, generated as a result of reading a pro-american paragraph that didn't have a five page disclaimer on 'root causes', 'multicultural apreciation', and 'apologizing for being an American.'
If you wish, you may try again, based only on what I wrote. For your convienence, I've reposted it in non-flamebait form. Although far less fun to write, you may find it helpful.
1.Europe had a long, colorful history of warring amongst themselves.
2.The US material contribution in the form of Lend-Lease, as well as the US contribution of manpower to europe (and victory in the pacific) was decisive in ending WW2.
3. Europe hasn't spent much time killing each other since the US installed dozens of bases across the continent. (we may argue about the precise cause and effect relationship, but not the timing of the installation of US bases and the cessation of western european wars)
4. No European nation, besides possibly Britain, currently has the werewithal to conduct a war by itself.
5. Social welfare spending now comprises a vast majority of European government spending.
6. With the dismally low birthrates, generous benefits, already high taxes, and early retirement ages you see across much of europe, many social welfare goverments face a bleak future financially.
7. The folks who are counting on this socialism will not be happy when the system collapses. This may lead to a bloody revolution, and we've seen a few of these in europe in the past 100 years or so.
8. Several countries around Europe have let in millions of muslims, who also pose violent challenges to those very countries. The prime example is France, who tolerated a week of muslim riots and car burnings, and had a bunch of muslim youths rampage through a train from Nice, performing gang rapes, beatings, and threatening anyone who started to call the police about it- and the police subsequently did little about it when they were summoned. Switzerland has a rising crime rate due almost soley to Muslim immigrants, and the netherlands had a film director murdered for making a film critical of muslims and their treatment of women (IIRC).
9. A google search would turn up several instances of bloody muslim borders(IE, They're usually looking for wars). Here's a list to start you off, with nothing more than a decade old: Sudan, Checnya,Phillipines, Indonesia, the Balkans. That entire 'jihad' thing kind of propels this along.
Would you like to try again? Don't read between the lines, read the lines themselves, or you may find yourself writing a novel based on little but your own sense of superiority.
I was taken aback by the cheap shot at Muslims in the grandparent post. If I remember my history correctly, the "Holy war" was King Richard of England's doing due to his fondness of wars. The muslims only defended their land as any people on their right mind would do. What would you expect them to do? Just welcome their new overlords?
Why is it that whenever anyone wants to defend muslims and impugn christians they have to go back several centuries? I'll let you ponder the significance of that.
In terms of making Rambo proud, didn't you ever hear the old comment that NATO was to "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down."? It worked.
As for WW2, nothing you wrote is new information to me. It still remains true that the material contributions of the Lend-Lease program, and the military involvement of the US in WW2 were decisive in an ultimate allied victory.
People like to point out that the Russians lost 17 million in WW2, so they must have done the most work. The same folk also convienently forget to mention that the russians had a rifle and 10 bullets for every two soldiers and a chain of command that would murder conscripts who didn't seem dedicated enough.
As for what the US military failed to achieve... in vietnam our soldiers were shackled by a series of over-involved and too hesitant administrations. The military was never told to win, they were ordered to play tit-for-tat escalation games and kept fighting with one hand behind their backs. We did not lose vietnam to VC military prowess, we lost because we lacked the will to prosecute the affair as a war. The reasons we played tit for tat games and why we were even there will be debated for decades more, but all along we had the capability to win. That means little without the will to win.
In terms of Iraq, you need to pay attention to a few more information sources. The popular media would have you believe it's a lost cause, when progress is continuous. I don't care to be your educator in this instance, but WW@ had a history of holdouts as well, who ultimately gave up after a few years.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Just because it shows the lie of your multiculture-diversity-rainbow philosophy doesn't mean it's not based in fact.
Here's some more for you.
In the US, 75% of murderers have prior felony convictions. However, so do 50% of murder victims. You've got scum killing scum, basically, and I'm hard pressed to care about it. So the murder rate for decent human beings is actually about half of the 6/100,000 number.
I'm not saying the dead felons deserved to be killed, but it's a predictable result of engaging in a criminal lifestyle.
As for skin color vs crime, it's also true that blacks perpetuate and are victims of crimes in disproportionate numbers, as compared to other skin-tone associated groups. I don't make this shit up, you can check it yourself.
thats wonderful. i dont know where to begin with the logic flaws in this 'argument'.
You can begin by visiting the US Department of Justice website, looking at the stats, and seeing that you are in error, not the OP.
The reason: Muslim immigrants.
(I can say it, because I'm in that 'facist police state', the USA)
Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe. This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying. As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness.
Since you saved so much on militaries, this allowed you to entrench your socialist welfare states, which are now strangulating your countries one by one, and when you can no longer pay the bills you'll see another bloody revolution (the sort the continent was famous for), or simply be killed off or enslaved by the Muslims you're allowing into your countries in huge numbers to prop up your falling demographics and pathetic birth rates.
Both Post-revolution-types and Muslims are usually looking for wars, so you'll need some good ol' USA protection when that time comes along. Hopefully our mere presence will continue to dissuade everyone from starting a war, but you can never be too sure about that.
Just look at how Bush is pussy footing around North-Korea while invading a non-treating country like Iraq since they knew they didn't have any WMD
You're ignoring the heavy influence of China in keeping it's pet NK on a short leash, and the fact that we have ships around the korean penninsula boarding what we damn well please.
How do you think Libya was convinced to start playing ball a couple years ago?
Because we captured a bunch of nuclear weapons making equipment being shipped from NK, and told Qadaffi that he's our bitch. He agreed.
The rest of your post is just American-hating drivel, devoid of any real point.
Thanks for the additional info. Like I said, I have no substatiation and I don't even remember were I heard it.
From what I understand, the hanging chads were most likely the result of voter fraud by the election officials in charge.
They would take a stack of ballots, and run an icepick through their preferred candidate's hole.
If their candidate was the same as the voters, the card was unchanged. If it wasn't, a new hole would be made and the vote invalided for multiple voting. Since Icepicks weren't the proper instrument for voting, they left chads hanging.
Of course, who you think the fraudulent election officials were fucking up ballots for depends largely on your party affiliation.
Personally, I only remember one candidate in the 2000 election trying to cherry-pick areas to recount, and these chosen areas became famous for their hanging chads.
Of course, I don't have any substatiation of this, so take it with a grain of salt.
More directly on topic, I'm all for wisconsin's law to be adopted here in New Hampshire for electronic voting machines. The voting machine computer tally could be hand counted (or verified by a machine from a completely different vendor for speed) in maybe 1-3% of the voting districts, randomly chosen after the election, for consistency.
Depressed? That's rather common on the left, truthfully. Why is it that the right is so much more full of optimists? Because the leftist mentality is inherently de-humanizing and depressing?
blah blah blah blah I'll get you next time batman blah blah blah blah
Really, I had a paragraph written or two on how you've got me and international power all wrong, but I decided to delete it because it would be lost on you.
So I'll give you this:
Nations do what they can get away with when it suits their interest.
It was ever thus, and it ever will be.
Refresh my memory, when did the US aquire the right to shoot down their sattelites?
The same time everyone else lost their ability to stop us.
If we think it's time to start shooting down europe's sattelites, we're hardly going to be concerned with what European nations consider what we have the 'right' to do.
Not that I think we'll have cause to shoot down any satellites any time in the forseeable future, but your post implied fantasies about 'international law' that just aren't so.
Still, better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
If at the end of the day the money in the register doesn't add up, guess who is paying for that? Hint: It's not the company.
Who did you work for?
I worked in retail for years in the US, and drawers came up short a few cents routinely, a buck or two occasionally, and $50 short once. No one was made or asked to pay, and management didn't care much so long as there was no pattern to it. The dollar amount of drawer shortages paled in comparison to the cost of items ruined in store, marked down for damage, sold at a loss to clear out the shelves, and outright stolen. Just another part of doing business really. Incidentally, you had the same little useless slip of paper to sign if your drawer was under, or over.
Moreover, you can hardly demand your $8 an hour workers repay a loss that isn't clearly criminal. Everywhere I've lived, unskilled labor was in demand- help wanted signs everywhere. They could get another job within a day.
Your post makes sense in the realm of diplomacy, and truly deserves +5 insightful.
That being said, if the nature of international diplomacy is such simpering pussy-footing, it's no wonder the UN is so useless and corrupt.
Well, the physical testing and analysis that Consumer reports can conduct on physical goods, and report the results thereof, carry alot more weight than the sort of "Report Card" I was ranting about. I believe the distinction is clear, but I'm too tired right now to go into any significant depth.
If I had to shoot someone in the foot or in the shoulder I would, but only in defense.
You must be some kind of trick shot, huh?
'Cause everyone else aims for center of mass. Better chance to hit, and therefor disable, your assailant. Center of Mass hits also have death as a common side effect, but he should have thought of that before he decided to ransom your life for your possesions.
There's a difference between "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not murder". Some modern translations of the bible believe the latter to be more accurate, especially since God condones killing in several parts of the bible, especially thieves breaking into your house at night.
Maybe that's not the reason you don't think you'd ever kill someone, and certainly such an act is a heavy burden to bear no matter how much the SOB had it coming.
It always irks me when some NGO feels it's appropriate to issue a 'report card' on any other organization, and even more so when it gets any attention.
The entire concept implies that that writer of the report card has superior knowledge about the issue at hand, like a teacher, and is dispensing wisdom to those lesser informed 'students.'
More often than not, the organization criticized has all the experience there is to be had in that particular field, while the issuers of the 'report card' are just assholes with a questionable, ill-founded agenda.
Moreover, the issuance of a report card is symbolic of a complete lack of humility, something I think most people could use more of. They don't consider themselves adults having a disagreement, they consider themselves unquestionably superior to the ESRB. I'm not particularly religous, but the right amount of humility causes you to seriously reflect on yourself, your motivations and your knowledge before you take decisive action. It also allows you to take criticism constructively instead of ignoring it or lashing out defensively.
You're still on that non-sequitir train. It does not follow that Iraqis being killed = Americans getting fat. Aside from that, we'll not go into a discussion on the ins and outs of Iraq in a thread about couch potatoes.
McDonald's in Brazil blah blah blah
Like I said, many of those elements exist in other countries, but combine them all together, and you get a bunch of fat Americans.
It's really quite amusing how far the depths of deranged America-hating has taken some of those on the supposedly sophisticated euro-elite sort.
I bet you fancy yourself quite clever for connecting American Obesity to your disgust for American Foriegn policy, don't you? And all those other more rational reasons I listed just serve to distract from the "root causes" you like to fetishize about.
I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to live in the shadow of a nation you feel is so vastly inferior to whatever socio-political model you prefer. I'll bet it gnaws on you day and night, doesn't it?
Wow. You got modded up for such a ridiculous non-sequiter? We're fat because we're depressed, and we're depressed because we feel guilty as a nation?
How bout we're fat because we started and continue to support Mcdonalds, whose high-calorie food no one can eat without feeling hungry 90 minutes later? (By design, most likely.)
How bout we're fat because our dietary habits are different? For example, American meals are generally served all courses at the same time, where as in Europe each course/type of food is seperated by a few minutes allowing more time for one to feel full from less?
How about because our food is generally bland so it requires larger portions to satisfy? Or that food is so ridiculously cheap nowadays because we've become so efficient at food production? (we throw tons of food out for the slightest imperfection or for price control)
Or because we're one of the most productive nations in the world and lots of us earn handsome livings with minimal physical activity? Or that we're wealthy enough to afford all kinds of computer and video games, whereby we can be entertained without actually getting off our asses?
Sure, some of these things apply to other nations, but together they represent alot more likely reasons to explain our fatness than 'national guilt.'
Also, much of American violence is contained within inner cities and is perpetuated by criminals on each other. A problem that needs to be dealt with, surely, but irrellevant in practice to most of America. 2/3 of convicted Murderers have prior felony convictions, but so do 1/2 of murder victims- again, criminals preying on each other accounts for a lot of violence.
Try to think for three minutes before posting some irrational leap from Fat ---> national guilt ----> violence. Occam's razor is there for you too, buddy.
Also, women are not 'bat-shit insane.' They just see the world completely differently. They value completely different things than men.
Q: Where did "Women's intuition" come from?
A: It's the evolutionary result of five million years of not thinking!
thank you, I'll be here all week.
*fiancee doesn't read my slashdot posts.....
Quality Post sir. I salute you, and thank you.
Seriously, had I not participated in this discussion, I would have spent all my mod points rating that up.