I don't think we disagree all that much, but here is where our opinions diverge:
Bush has taken a black eye and turned around and gave our enemies two in return.
I simply never saw Iraq as our enemy. We supported them in the Iran-Iraq war, for instance. After Desert Storm, perhaps you could say they were our enemy, but we picked that fight, not them.
I'm not saying the invasion of Kuwait was a good thing, but it's pretty obvious the reason we had to get them out of Kuwait (or "restore Democracy to Kuwait" if you're Bush) is because that would put too much oil in the hands of one crazy dude.
And after Desert Storm, Iraq may have been an enemy, but they were certainly no threat. As brutal a tool as the sanctions were, they did prevent him from funding his nuclear program. Sure, Saddam may have hated America (it's only natural after getting beat up), but he was in no position to do anything about it.
Essentially, we beat up Iraq, left them to suffer for twelve years, then did it again. There are certainly some valid reasons for both wars, (moreso for the first one in my opinion) but Iraq was never our enemy until we started shooting at them.
We started this fight, and we finished it. Unfortunately we waited twelve years to do so, during which time the rest of the world figured out that, after his initial trouncing, Saddam didn't actually pose a threat to anyone save his own countrymen.
The war on terror, that's a horse of a different color. I think it gets a lot of hype, because it's so new for us. But most of the rest of the world has been living with terror for decades, though certainly not on the scale of 9/11. I think one of the lessons of the 20th century is that terrorism is an effective political tool. I'm not saying I condone it, but in a Machiavellian sense, if it gets results then why not use it?
I don't know what the best course of action is. Going after Al Qaeda is pretty easy in Afghanistan, where our military can operate pretty much uncontested. But what about terrorists living in Germany or the UK or the Phillipines or even here in the USA? Is it a military issue or a law enforcement issue or some combination of both. And let's remember why those functions were separated; using the army as domestic police in the Reconstruction after the civil war, well, you can imagine how that would get ugly. And I think it's similar to some of the ugliness we see in Iraq; a tank shooting a cameraman at the Palestine hotel, for example. Our soldiers aren't trained to be policemen, and there are some real threats out there too. What if that camera had been a sniper scope? So this is a real challenge when you use a conquering army such as ours as a police force.
I'm kind of rambling now, so I'll wrap it up! I don't like seeing our army deployed as anything but conquerors. They are trained to destroy the enemy's ability to fight, not to police the streets and stop looters. (That should by all rights be the Iraqi army's job, but we dismantled them. Oops.) If we plan to extend the military war on terror beyond lawless regions like Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Iraq, it is going to take some real changes in the sorts of training and approach we use. I don't think counterterrorism can be achieved solely or primarily via use of the military. Unfortunately our intelligence is so shitty we don't really have much else to work with.
I have enjoyed this thread, you're certainly more fun to talk to than the AC who keeps chiming in.
If you scroll up, you'll see that my argument is, simply, five shells of mustard gas "aren't the droids we're looking for."
Wow, you're still pretending Clinton dismantled the constitution, when in fact, by your own words, it is Bush who has done so. There's a difference between what somebody might do and what they actually do. It's not a crime to daydream about the US getting nuked, as Saddam might have done, or Jerry Bruckheimer might do in a Hollywood movie. You're giving Bush a pass for what he has ACTUALLY done, and you've pilloried Clinton for what he MIGHT have done. Please, remove your head from your ass. Once you do that you might notice that the needle on your record player is stuck in the year 1997.
If it wasn't a sham, the iraqis would have pulled down that statue themselves. But we did it. Hence, it was not an expression of the Iraqi people, rather that of the U.S. army.
I don't think I'm racist, but let's say I am. So what? Does that mean my arguments are automatically invalid? That's bullshit.
Sharon, the "butcher of Haifa" has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. Pursuing terrorists who happen to be Jewish is not antisemitic, just as prosecuting criminals who happen to be black is not racist. While we're at it a big chunk of America probably is anti-Semitic, and racist to boot.
Journalism is more than opinion; it involves some degree of research, and it's also dispassionate. Nobody expects an unbiased view in a letter to the editor, but the reportage itself should be less colored by individual beliefs. Of course, if your choices are Fox, which is incedibly biased, and C-SPAN, which simply provides a window into Congress but no analysis, maybe all you're seeing is opinion.
1. Mustard gas != nuclear weapons, don't be silly.
2. You watch Fox? I hope that's not your single source of information.
3. So, Bush is the one who violated the Constitution. But let's talk about Clinton instead. Clinton did nothing to dismantle the Constitution, but he would have in a heartbeat! This sounds a lot like the logic behind the invasion: Saddam doesn't have nukes, but if he did, he'd launch them on missles he doesn't have, but if he did, we'd be in big trouble. Let's Roll!
4. My point was that the toppling of the statue was a photo-op, something to trot out on the nightly news. It was the "iraqis meeting us with flowers" moment that Rumsfeld predicted. And it was largely a sham.
5. Saddam Hussein is not a terrorist, at least not when it comes to the U.S., because he wears a military uniform and represents a sovereign nation. He may have committed atrocities against his own people, but those didn't really affect America. Or are we fighting a war on Terror on behalf of brown people everywhere now? If so, when do we go after Sharon?
6. Letters to the editor are not embedded journalists. Plus, the Stars and Stripes isn't even distributed within the USA. The letters there are basically "preaching to the choir" since the paper's audience is US armed forces personnel and their families stationed overseas. I will grant you that I was surprised by some of the frankness in the letters, but they're just that: letters. They are not journalism, they are opinion.
We can even agree that five shells is unacceptable. Since you know a lot about the military, I suppose we can agree that all the stockpiles at Aberdeen are unacceptable too. But that's another issue.:)
The thrust of my argument is this: Five shells of mustard gas is a far cry from the (what seems to be fabricated) intelligence assessment that got us into the war. In other words, your five shells represent a molehill, and you're trying to turn them into the mountain of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and what have you that the President sold Congress in the State of the Union. You asked where I draw the line. In this case, I'd expect to see a WMD program that resembles the one the President told Congress. You and I both know that Iraq's WMD program was vastly overhyped. Congressmen were told in closed-door briefings that Iraq had thousands of gallons of anthrax which could be loaded on to UAVs which were capable of reaching the east coast. That was a pipe dream, as was the nuclear program, as was the ability to launch WMDs from the battlefield in as little as 45 minutes.
I'm really curious if you've read any of the post-mortem analysis of the intelligence on Iraq, because I'm pretty much parroting it all here. Seymour Hirsch's article "The Stovepipe" in The New Yorker does a great job of explaining how the White House, for the first time, demanded access to unvetted raw intel, then cherry-picked the data they wanted to justify the war, ignoring anything that didn't further the cause. A lot of these claims were based on single sources of human intel of questionable reliability. Then there was the public spin job, with Condi saying "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" when there was no real evidence that Iraq had a nuclear program. (The aluminum tubes idea had been discredited long before the invasion took place.) It all adds up to a smoke and mirrors job, a bait and switch, because Bush desperately wanted this war, but needed to convince a skeptical America that Iraq actually posed a threat to us.
Finally, there's a very good reason why you would have a mobile hydrogen truck: So you can take your weather balloon out in the desert somewhere and fill it up with hydrogen when you get there. It would be pretty dangerous to transport a balloon filled with gaseous hydrogen hunreds of kilometers to the launch site.
Five shells? That's not WMD. Five thousand shells would be. Don't you recall President Bush's statement that Iraq had 5,000 tons or 5,000 gallons or was it 5,000 barrels of anthrax? Your five shells are a joke. Five shells are not even close to the threat that was presented in the State of the Union speech last year, and you know it.
Every intelligence assessment of the trucks (aka mobile labs) after the first one concludes that they were used to process hydrogen for military weather balloons. Of course Fox didn't report on that so much.
The aluminum tubes were for ballistic missiles, not for a centrifuge. Every intelligence assessment except for the one you rely on reaches this same conclusion. "Plans" do not constitute a nuclear weapons program. Plans are just that, plans, and frankly it's not all that hard to figure out the plans in this day and age. The first hard part is actually obtaining the uranium, the next hard part is actually building the sophisticated machinery to refine it. Then there's the issue of payload delivery, and Saddam's best missiles had a very limited range and even worse accuracy.
Yes, Clinton was a slimeball, but I don't see how he dismantled the Constitution. Well, perhaps you're referring to the DMCA and the NET act, but since you didn't specify I'll have to give you the benefit of the doubt on that point. If you'd care to elaborate I'm listening.
Ordered to cheer... you think this is any different under Bush? You truly believe that, for example, there were spontaneous cheering crowds of Iraqis on the strees when our tanks pulled down that statue of Saddam? Any sane Iraqi person does not go near an American tank in Baghdad, especially so early in the occupation. The media is manipulated quite well by Republicans and Democrats alike. The Pentagon especially learned this lesson in Vietnam, where too many journalists presented too much information that painted a rather bleak picture. Now the body bags are off-limits to cameras, and the journalists are all "embedded" which means they are muzzled and censored.
You believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11? There are simply NO facts to support that assertion. Recognize the difference between what is known and what you think/hope/wish/justify/rationalize is the truth. Saddam may have condoned 9/11, but that's hardly the same as having anything to do with it. Fact is, if there were any terrorists hiding in Iraq, their safe harbor was the No-Fly Zone in the north which presented Saddam from going after them (and the Kurds too.)
Morale in the military is never great. Read some of the letters in the Stars and Stripes and you'll hear plenty of griping about current conditions.
Personally I feel that Clinton is more of a sleazebag, and Bush is more of a tool. I wouldn't trust either of them with a hundred dollars, though.
For what it's worth, the marine I mentioned served in Desert Storm, Somalia, and Panama. I haven't quite figured out why he got out. To a degree I think it's because he personally feels the occupation of Iraq isn't worth dying for. This is a guy who joined the Marines because the USMC saved his life as a child; he signed on to repay the debt to the soldiers who died saving him.
Am I the only one who raised an eyebrow at the program to fast-track US citizenship for foreign nationals joining the Army? I can see the justification for rewarding wannabe Americans who put their lives on the line. But somehow I can't help but see a resemblance to all those American jobs that have been moved overseas.
The draft legislation, as I've heard it, is intended to make sure that all Americans bear the brunt of the war equally. I'm fine with that in principle. Unfortunately in this instance I personally believe our Commander in Chief continues to be completely dishonest about the reasons for his wars. Perhaps my newfound ideological stance on "principle" is merely an offshoot of cowardice, I don't know. But I don't see the point in joining the 500+ Americans who have already died to protect us from WMDs that we now know (and as many suspected all along) simply don't exist.
I do hope that Marines everywhere are questioning their superiors all the way up to the men who started the wars, and that some day the reasons behind Afghanistan and Iraq will be brought to light. However I doubt that will happen in this decade. Not that I don't think it's worth 500 dead soldiers to keep OPEC on the dollar. A crash of the dollar would be orders of magnitude more devastating than 500 deaths. But that will never be spoken, such candor is suicidal in politics. However for me to go and die in Iraq I demand some frankness and plain talk. Until someone in charge can give me a valid reason why I should put my life on the line, I will continue to call "bullshit."
Interesting thing about Democrats and Republicans, Democrats tend to be more likely to have served in the military, and it seems Republicans are more likely to send in the military. I wonder if seeing it first-hand makes Democrats "soft," or if not facing combat personally makes it easier for a Repulican President to send others off to die?
don't blame the afghan (or iraq) mess on me. I was one of those people saying we never should have gone in there in the first place!
personally i think most americans do hate the arab world. how many times have you heard the comment "just nuke the whole place and turn it into a parking lot." arabs/muslims are still outsiders. there's plenty of jokes that start "a priest, a preacher, and a rabbi walk in to a bar" but most americans don't even know what a muslim priest is called. muslims are culturally foreign and that pretty much means they are hated.
the pentagon recently hired somebody for the draft board position. that was clue number one. then there was the story on drudge report "national guard numbers point to exodus." You know two people still in the military, I know one who quit rather than be deployed to iraq. i'm talking 19 years in the marine corps.
how big is the army? 250K? if we need 150K to hold Iraq, we will need more, assuming they get a break ever.
the parent just doesn't get it. neither does the guy who modded you flamebait.
the u.s. doesn't deliberately target civilians for the simple sake of harming innocents. however they are very quick to pull the trigger when they feel threatened. there have been several widely publicized incidents demonstrating this. There were the nine children killed in Afghanistan as a result of going after some Al qaeda figure. according to the iraqometer, there are something like 10000 civilian casualties in iraq. it's not that we deliberately target civilians, but if your house happens to be next to the television station or a military base or an important factory... well it's not like the u.s. is going to come by and say "we'll be dropping cluster bombs all over this motherfucker tomorrow, maybe you should move."
I'm not trying to say that the u.s. is "terrorists" whatever that might mean. (though, encircling an iraqi village in razor wire is clearly designed to strike fear into the people's hearts. but i digress.)
How often have you seen on the news, about some tragedy, something like this: "A ferry capsized in Bangladesh, killing 800. Six americans were among the dead." Lets face it most people don't care about the deaths of non-americans. It's pretty obvious that the u.s. military doesn't care all that much either.
The difference between terrorists and the U.S. military is that the u.s. military does not target civilians. (Actually that's very much in doubt; how do they tell if someone is a terrorist? not by the uniform. but anyway) As I said the US does not target civilians. That's not to say that they don't kill shitloads of them. But they don't plan their military campaign by aiming for the schools and such. Which is good, what's the military advantage in blowing up a school? But they don't worry too much about civilian damage either. By contrast, Al Qaeda sees a great tactical value in blowing up a school or something, and so it's on their list. These are two different organizations fighting in two totally different ways. Frankly I think it's about an even contest. One thing is for sure: The US response has killed more civilians than Al Qaeda did on 9/11.
I don't really see what the big fuss is about. Anybody who knows anything about war should know that it is the civilians who bear the brunt of it. Period, end of story. No amount of smart-bombs and laser sights can change that. My complaint is with people like the parent, who seem to think that when the US takes a shit, it doesn't stink. Get real.
The only other alternative to a bomb-dropping tank-rolling war I can think of is political assassinations, which we tried to do with Saddam and failed miserably. And of course that opens the door for retaliation, and it "wouldn't be prudent" to make George W. a target for a tit-for-tat assassination. Though, now that Uday and Qusay are gone, I wonder how soundly Jenna and Barbara sleep at night.
Or to put it another way, if you want to make an omelet you've got to crack some eggs. We felt the need to do something after Al Qaeda attacked us, and we felt the need to keep that momentum rolling and take Iraq too. That's two omelets, and the only cost the Pentagon should be caring about about is the 600+ american soldiers who have died and several thousand wounded who will never fight again. (Actually, they have another problem, people are fleeing the military, so they'll have to bring back the draft to maintain these sorts of troop levels, but that's another story.)
One area where you can get on the U.S. for a "terrorist" action is their use of DU weapons. Any chemist or biologist will tell you that inhaling or ingesting tiny particles of ANY heavy metal is BAD BAD BAD. The dust from all this uranium has been strongly correlated with Gulf War Syndrome, and we are seeing ridiculously high rates of health problems years dowh the road in areas where these weapons have been used. If for no other reason than to protect the combat engineers who have to clean up after the A-10s fly by, we should stop using DU. (And while we're at it, cluster bombs and land mines.)
had the USSR been able to obtain some sort of clear military supremacy, they absolutely would have used that power to expand, and the economic boost gained through expansion may have enabled them to survive, grow and expand even more.
Instead the US won, and now we're in Afghanistan and Iraq. Any bets on which country the Imperial Capitalist Dogs will conquer next?
Hi, I am not much of a TV watcher but I have a question about picture quality. This is kind of a mini Ask Slashdot.
A few years back a roommmate had some sort of satellite TV (don't know which brand) and one of those hacked cards so we could watch everything. Notting Hill at 8, 8:30, 9, 9:30, and 10:00. Yes, they had five channels just of Notting Hill.
Anyway, the channel selection was great, the price was even better (tee hee), but the picture quality itself was LOUSY. Especially in something like The Matrix, dark areas became HORRIBLY splotchy and pixellated. This I assume has to do with the compression used by digital satellite, something analog cable isn't crippled with. I have seen similar artifacts on digital cable systems of a few years back, but they weren't as noticeable. That may be because the satellite system I was watching was on the top of the line Sony HD projection model, and digital cable on some 27" JVC.
Do these artifacts and such still exist? I found them incedibly annoying, to the point that if I were going to enhance my TV options, I would completely avoid digital in any form and stick with analog cable.
I shop at safeway, and i use my credit card to make a purchase. but somehow the record of that purchase doesn't include the fact that I received a "discount" because i used savings card #blahblahblah
Come on. it will be trivial to find the parity set of savings card/credit card transactions. Or even transactions that follow something of a pattern, i.e. cards used by a single purchaser or even household.
And Safeway has their headquarters in NJ or something. So how does your California law apply? The correlation between your credit card number/purchase history and your savings card number might not happen until the data is safely out of that jurisdiction. Heck it might not happen within the United States at all.
Nice law, don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of McBrother.
Right, that's why war is "good" too. It was WWII and women working that started this mess (according to me, several posts ago.)
I liked the analogy when Bush was appointing his cabinet. His Sectretary of Agriculture nominee was described as thinking of a forest as "nothing more than an elaborate storage system for boards."
Look at Iraq, we spent a lot of money to build all those tanks and bombs. Then we used them. Now there's tons of work to be done rebuilding the infrastructure, and tons of money to be made by Haliburton, Bechtel, et. al.
If we have to consume to stay afloat, eventually that's a problem. Especially with more and more consumers every day and finite resources.
Any economist would tell you that these are questions for politicians; that economists can't answer them. But the Almighty Dollar doesn't listen to much else. I forget who said "the capitalism will eat itself" or words to that effect but it seems inevitable./end rant.
People pay $3k for a top of the line ailenware machine. A geek friend of mine, quite capable of building his own system, just did this. He wanted the convenience and he wanted a slick rig. It was worth it to him. (I buy parts and tweak, but that's just me.) Or as others have pointed out a high-end Mac will cost that much.
Sure, the price has droppped a little. I seem to recall a boss that spent $4k at Dell when the Pentium Pro 200 came out. Or how about $9k for a Mac II FX back in 1990? So things aren't quite that expensice any more. And the cheap stuff has gotten dramatically cheaper. (Duron 1.6GHz for fifty bucks, anyone?) But a top of the line x86 system will still set you back at least two grand.
As for the popcorn, that (total concession revenue) is actually more of a money maker than ticket sales. Not sure how much more, but there it is.
WHen I go to moveis, unless I must go to opening night, I go to the second-run theater where the tickets are like three bucks. The money i "save" goes right to popcorn!
Satellite cable. Isn't that kind of an oxymoron? Cable is distinguished by the presence of a piece of cable connecting your TV to the broadcast center, completely unlike satellite. Once the bird is up it costs nothing to maintain the network. Or are laws routinely written this way in order to group together physically dissimilar technologies into the same logical group? Would it be possible to challenge this tortuous chain of logic that establishes the crime of descrambling satellite signals?
In other words, is this the same thing as where cryptography is in the same classification as dangerous munitions when it comes to exporting it? A purely arbitrary decision, but at least that was done with the justification of "national security," not to protect a private corporate interest.
I think the laws protecting "sattelite cable" go too far. As we've seen, the only real enforcement comes via a witch-hunt whereby you find out every person who has purchased a smart card reader and then sue them. Wouldn't it be a better use of the company's resources to devise a better encryption technology? Don't tell me it can't be done. (Perhaps buying the legislature was cheaper?) And wouldn't it be a better use of the legislature's time to let the market decide which businesses will succeed, rather than create special laws for "sattelite cable" which seem to fly in the face of the Constitutional right we have to monitor the airwaves?
DirecTV, I'm really sorry you spent all that money putting a bird into orbit. But let's face it what is the function of a satellite? It broadcasts to an entire continent. Now you have to put up all sorts of barriers to make it harder for us landlubbers to get your signal. Frankly that's your problem, not the problem of any of us citizens down here on Earth, legal contrivances notwithstanding.
I wonder if there is a jurisdiction issue here. Since the encrypted signal came from space, how is it a violation of US law for me to monitor that? Do US laws extend as far up as geosynchronous orbit now?
And, for the record, I will *never* be a DirecTV customer. (Though, at one time, I did have a roommate who had a hacked card.) Frankly I barely watch TV at all, and the picture quality is not half as good as analog cable. Those arguments notwithstanding, I refuse to give my cash to a company that rewards its customers with lawsuits.
Didn't you know? The No Electronic Theft act of 199x moved copyright infringement from the civil courts to the criminal courts. So now the FBI gets to be Hollywood's bitch.
They use aluminum because it's lighter. The CPU core can only handle so much weight bearing down on it. Copper is actually a better (the best mettalic) conductor of heat.
Take, for example, the Zalman 7000a heatsink. They make a pure-copper version, and an AlCu version. The pure copper version has 10% better thermal characteristics, but it weights 75% more. In fact, tue pure-copper heatsink exceeds AMD's specifications for how much a heatsink can weigh.
There may be other reasons, like it's easier (cheaper) to forge an aluminum heatsink, or it's less likely to get bent out of shape in shipping, but I have to think the weight is the main reason. And shipping lighter items should cost less too.
While I don't disagree with your comment, I am reminded of that line from the movie Johnny Mnemonic. I think it was one that Henry Rollins got to say: "If you're not a consumer, you're mentally ill!"
For sure, you can sit on welfare and get your food stamps, and lead the zero-earner lifestyle. But simple things like owning a home are extremely hard to pull off without the financial strength of two.
You've overstated the case about the "needs" of modern life. If your TV is destroyed in an earthquake, FEMA will grant you the money for a new one. Because a TV is a necessity of modern life (think emergency communications). So is a fridge. But 30 years ago, a TV wasn't covered. The things you mention as "fake needs" are slowly creeping their way into governmentally-approved needs. (School vouchers anyone?)
And don't get me started on the suburbs/lack of mass transit. Truly one of the great American failures of the latter half of the 20th century. However, this is the bed we've made.
One thing I just thought of is the 40-hour work week. Maybe a reason we need two earners in a modern family is because those two are working less.
Don't be sorry. Off-topic discussions are the lifeblood of Slashdot. Well, at least they are for me. I care a lot more about the underlying social and political issues than the minutiae of some snippet of code.
That is a good point about paying-for-two, since one essentially couldn't work.
Slavery had the same drawback -- it was very costly to actually own slaves, since you had to provide them food, shelter, and you might actually want to provide them health care too, in order to protect your investment. Employing the working poor was actually cheaper; there was not all the overhead. (I'm talking about American slavery here, and I guess it's pretty obviuos that I'm no expert.) It's the same reason we see employers use contractors at a high hourly rate rather than bring employees on board and then have to pay for benefits and such.
I don't really have a point any more. Let's see if I can find one. By doubling the labor pool, which is basically what bringing women into the labor force did, we've certainly become wealthier on paper. But is it healthy? Does sending little Timmy off to day-care make society a better place? It's made us richer, and unfortunately that seems to be the only metric. "Family Values" have certainly morphed into something completely different than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, with the rise of the nuclear family and the existence of this thing called "teenagers" who in previous generations would simply be workers or making babies at the age today's kids are downloading MP3s. So I guess "progress" has its pros and cons. I think a lot of the "family values" movement (the Jerry Fallwell style) stems from the fact that the busting up of the core husband-wife division of labor has opened the floodgates of change. If it is not writ in stone than a man is the breadwinner and a woman the homemaker, then why does it even need to be a man and a woman? If both are equal in the labor force, why not two men or two women together? If men and women are interchangeable as units of economic utility, that is a huge change which will reverberate throughout society for generations. And in a captial system, where economics and the creation of wealth is ultimately where the rubber meets the road, it portends a vast restructuring of the society, and a LOT of inertia to overcome.
Thank you for your insightful post. It gives me plenty to think about.
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I don't think we disagree all that much, but here is where our opinions diverge:
Bush has taken a black eye and turned around and gave our enemies two in return.
I simply never saw Iraq as our enemy. We supported them in the Iran-Iraq war, for instance. After Desert Storm, perhaps you could say they were our enemy, but we picked that fight, not them.
I'm not saying the invasion of Kuwait was a good thing, but it's pretty obvious the reason we had to get them out of Kuwait (or "restore Democracy to Kuwait" if you're Bush) is because that would put too much oil in the hands of one crazy dude.
And after Desert Storm, Iraq may have been an enemy, but they were certainly no threat. As brutal a tool as the sanctions were, they did prevent him from funding his nuclear program. Sure, Saddam may have hated America (it's only natural after getting beat up), but he was in no position to do anything about it.
Essentially, we beat up Iraq, left them to suffer for twelve years, then did it again. There are certainly some valid reasons for both wars, (moreso for the first one in my opinion) but Iraq was never our enemy until we started shooting at them.
We started this fight, and we finished it. Unfortunately we waited twelve years to do so, during which time the rest of the world figured out that, after his initial trouncing, Saddam didn't actually pose a threat to anyone save his own countrymen.
The war on terror, that's a horse of a different color. I think it gets a lot of hype, because it's so new for us. But most of the rest of the world has been living with terror for decades, though certainly not on the scale of 9/11. I think one of the lessons of the 20th century is that terrorism is an effective political tool. I'm not saying I condone it, but in a Machiavellian sense, if it gets results then why not use it?
I don't know what the best course of action is. Going after Al Qaeda is pretty easy in Afghanistan, where our military can operate pretty much uncontested. But what about terrorists living in Germany or the UK or the Phillipines or even here in the USA? Is it a military issue or a law enforcement issue or some combination of both. And let's remember why those functions were separated; using the army as domestic police in the Reconstruction after the civil war, well, you can imagine how that would get ugly. And I think it's similar to some of the ugliness we see in Iraq; a tank shooting a cameraman at the Palestine hotel, for example. Our soldiers aren't trained to be policemen, and there are some real threats out there too. What if that camera had been a sniper scope? So this is a real challenge when you use a conquering army such as ours as a police force.
I'm kind of rambling now, so I'll wrap it up! I don't like seeing our army deployed as anything but conquerors. They are trained to destroy the enemy's ability to fight, not to police the streets and stop looters. (That should by all rights be the Iraqi army's job, but we dismantled them. Oops.) If we plan to extend the military war on terror beyond lawless regions like Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Iraq, it is going to take some real changes in the sorts of training and approach we use. I don't think counterterrorism can be achieved solely or primarily via use of the military. Unfortunately our intelligence is so shitty we don't really have much else to work with.
I have enjoyed this thread, you're certainly more fun to talk to than the AC who keeps chiming in.
Peace!
If you scroll up, you'll see that my argument is, simply, five shells of mustard gas "aren't the droids we're looking for."
Wow, you're still pretending Clinton dismantled the constitution, when in fact, by your own words, it is Bush who has done so. There's a difference between what somebody might do and what they actually do. It's not a crime to daydream about the US getting nuked, as Saddam might have done, or Jerry Bruckheimer might do in a Hollywood movie. You're giving Bush a pass for what he has ACTUALLY done, and you've pilloried Clinton for what he MIGHT have done. Please, remove your head from your ass. Once you do that you might notice that the needle on your record player is stuck in the year 1997.
If it wasn't a sham, the iraqis would have pulled down that statue themselves. But we did it. Hence, it was not an expression of the Iraqi people, rather that of the U.S. army.
I don't think I'm racist, but let's say I am. So what? Does that mean my arguments are automatically invalid? That's bullshit.
Sharon, the "butcher of Haifa" has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. Pursuing terrorists who happen to be Jewish is not antisemitic, just as prosecuting criminals who happen to be black is not racist. While we're at it a big chunk of America probably is anti-Semitic, and racist to boot.
Journalism is more than opinion; it involves some degree of research, and it's also dispassionate. Nobody expects an unbiased view in a letter to the editor, but the reportage itself should be less colored by individual beliefs. Of course, if your choices are Fox, which is incedibly biased, and C-SPAN, which simply provides a window into Congress but no analysis, maybe all you're seeing is opinion.
Try signing in, AC.
1. Mustard gas != nuclear weapons, don't be silly.
2. You watch Fox? I hope that's not your single source of information.
3. So, Bush is the one who violated the Constitution. But let's talk about Clinton instead. Clinton did nothing to dismantle the Constitution, but he would have in a heartbeat! This sounds a lot like the logic behind the invasion: Saddam doesn't have nukes, but if he did, he'd launch them on missles he doesn't have, but if he did, we'd be in big trouble. Let's Roll!
4. My point was that the toppling of the statue was a photo-op, something to trot out on the nightly news. It was the "iraqis meeting us with flowers" moment that Rumsfeld predicted. And it was largely a sham.
5. Saddam Hussein is not a terrorist, at least not when it comes to the U.S., because he wears a military uniform and represents a sovereign nation. He may have committed atrocities against his own people, but those didn't really affect America. Or are we fighting a war on Terror on behalf of brown people everywhere now? If so, when do we go after Sharon?
6. Letters to the editor are not embedded journalists. Plus, the Stars and Stripes isn't even distributed within the USA. The letters there are basically "preaching to the choir" since the paper's audience is US armed forces personnel and their families stationed overseas. I will grant you that I was surprised by some of the frankness in the letters, but they're just that: letters. They are not journalism, they are opinion.
Okay, we can agree to disagree.
:)
We can even agree that five shells is unacceptable. Since you know a lot about the military, I suppose we can agree that all the stockpiles at Aberdeen are unacceptable too. But that's another issue.
The thrust of my argument is this: Five shells of mustard gas is a far cry from the (what seems to be fabricated) intelligence assessment that got us into the war. In other words, your five shells represent a molehill, and you're trying to turn them into the mountain of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and what have you that the President sold Congress in the State of the Union. You asked where I draw the line. In this case, I'd expect to see a WMD program that resembles the one the President told Congress. You and I both know that Iraq's WMD program was vastly overhyped. Congressmen were told in closed-door briefings that Iraq had thousands of gallons of anthrax which could be loaded on to UAVs which were capable of reaching the east coast. That was a pipe dream, as was the nuclear program, as was the ability to launch WMDs from the battlefield in as little as 45 minutes.
I'm really curious if you've read any of the post-mortem analysis of the intelligence on Iraq, because I'm pretty much parroting it all here. Seymour Hirsch's article "The Stovepipe" in The New Yorker does a great job of explaining how the White House, for the first time, demanded access to unvetted raw intel, then cherry-picked the data they wanted to justify the war, ignoring anything that didn't further the cause. A lot of these claims were based on single sources of human intel of questionable reliability. Then there was the public spin job, with Condi saying "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" when there was no real evidence that Iraq had a nuclear program. (The aluminum tubes idea had been discredited long before the invasion took place.) It all adds up to a smoke and mirrors job, a bait and switch, because Bush desperately wanted this war, but needed to convince a skeptical America that Iraq actually posed a threat to us.
Finally, there's a very good reason why you would have a mobile hydrogen truck: So you can take your weather balloon out in the desert somewhere and fill it up with hydrogen when you get there. It would be pretty dangerous to transport a balloon filled with gaseous hydrogen hunreds of kilometers to the launch site.
Five shells? That's not WMD. Five thousand shells would be. Don't you recall President Bush's statement that Iraq had 5,000 tons or 5,000 gallons or was it 5,000 barrels of anthrax? Your five shells are a joke. Five shells are not even close to the threat that was presented in the State of the Union speech last year, and you know it.
Every intelligence assessment of the trucks (aka mobile labs) after the first one concludes that they were used to process hydrogen for military weather balloons. Of course Fox didn't report on that so much.
The aluminum tubes were for ballistic missiles, not for a centrifuge. Every intelligence assessment except for the one you rely on reaches this same conclusion. "Plans" do not constitute a nuclear weapons program. Plans are just that, plans, and frankly it's not all that hard to figure out the plans in this day and age. The first hard part is actually obtaining the uranium, the next hard part is actually building the sophisticated machinery to refine it. Then there's the issue of payload delivery, and Saddam's best missiles had a very limited range and even worse accuracy.
Yes, Clinton was a slimeball, but I don't see how he dismantled the Constitution. Well, perhaps you're referring to the DMCA and the NET act, but since you didn't specify I'll have to give you the benefit of the doubt on that point. If you'd care to elaborate I'm listening.
Ordered to cheer... you think this is any different under Bush? You truly believe that, for example, there were spontaneous cheering crowds of Iraqis on the strees when our tanks pulled down that statue of Saddam? Any sane Iraqi person does not go near an American tank in Baghdad, especially so early in the occupation. The media is manipulated quite well by Republicans and Democrats alike. The Pentagon especially learned this lesson in Vietnam, where too many journalists presented too much information that painted a rather bleak picture. Now the body bags are off-limits to cameras, and the journalists are all "embedded" which means they are muzzled and censored.
You believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11? There are simply NO facts to support that assertion. Recognize the difference between what is known and what you think/hope/wish/justify/rationalize is the truth. Saddam may have condoned 9/11, but that's hardly the same as having anything to do with it. Fact is, if there were any terrorists hiding in Iraq, their safe harbor was the No-Fly Zone in the north which presented Saddam from going after them (and the Kurds too.)
Morale in the military is never great. Read some of the letters in the Stars and Stripes and you'll hear plenty of griping about current conditions.
Personally I feel that Clinton is more of a sleazebag, and Bush is more of a tool. I wouldn't trust either of them with a hundred dollars, though.
For what it's worth, the marine I mentioned served in Desert Storm, Somalia, and Panama. I haven't quite figured out why he got out. To a degree I think it's because he personally feels the occupation of Iraq isn't worth dying for. This is a guy who joined the Marines because the USMC saved his life as a child; he signed on to repay the debt to the soldiers who died saving him.
Am I the only one who raised an eyebrow at the program to fast-track US citizenship for foreign nationals joining the Army? I can see the justification for rewarding wannabe Americans who put their lives on the line. But somehow I can't help but see a resemblance to all those American jobs that have been moved overseas.
The draft legislation, as I've heard it, is intended to make sure that all Americans bear the brunt of the war equally. I'm fine with that in principle. Unfortunately in this instance I personally believe our Commander in Chief continues to be completely dishonest about the reasons for his wars. Perhaps my newfound ideological stance on "principle" is merely an offshoot of cowardice, I don't know. But I don't see the point in joining the 500+ Americans who have already died to protect us from WMDs that we now know (and as many suspected all along) simply don't exist.
I do hope that Marines everywhere are questioning their superiors all the way up to the men who started the wars, and that some day the reasons behind Afghanistan and Iraq will be brought to light. However I doubt that will happen in this decade. Not that I don't think it's worth 500 dead soldiers to keep OPEC on the dollar. A crash of the dollar would be orders of magnitude more devastating than 500 deaths. But that will never be spoken, such candor is suicidal in politics. However for me to go and die in Iraq I demand some frankness and plain talk. Until someone in charge can give me a valid reason why I should put my life on the line, I will continue to call "bullshit."
Interesting thing about Democrats and Republicans, Democrats tend to be more likely to have served in the military, and it seems Republicans are more likely to send in the military. I wonder if seeing it first-hand makes Democrats "soft," or if not facing combat personally makes it easier for a Repulican President to send others off to die?
don't blame the afghan (or iraq) mess on me. I was one of those people saying we never should have gone in there in the first place!
personally i think most americans do hate the arab world. how many times have you heard the comment "just nuke the whole place and turn it into a parking lot." arabs/muslims are still outsiders. there's plenty of jokes that start "a priest, a preacher, and a rabbi walk in to a bar" but most americans don't even know what a muslim priest is called. muslims are culturally foreign and that pretty much means they are hated.
You're right, it's different, yet the situation in Afghanistan seems very much the same.
Does the USA have any intention of leaving Western Europe, e.g. the UK? Is that different than the Soviets in the Balkans?
the pentagon recently hired somebody for the draft board position. that was clue number one. then there was the story on drudge report "national guard numbers point to exodus." You know two people still in the military, I know one who quit rather than be deployed to iraq. i'm talking 19 years in the marine corps.
how big is the army? 250K? if we need 150K to hold Iraq, we will need more, assuming they get a break ever.
the parent just doesn't get it. neither does the guy who modded you flamebait.
the u.s. doesn't deliberately target civilians for the simple sake of harming innocents. however they are very quick to pull the trigger when they feel threatened. there have been several widely publicized incidents demonstrating this. There were the nine children killed in Afghanistan as a result of going after some Al qaeda figure. according to the iraqometer, there are something like 10000 civilian casualties in iraq. it's not that we deliberately target civilians, but if your house happens to be next to the television station or a military base or an important factory... well it's not like the u.s. is going to come by and say "we'll be dropping cluster bombs all over this motherfucker tomorrow, maybe you should move."
I'm not trying to say that the u.s. is "terrorists" whatever that might mean. (though, encircling an iraqi village in razor wire is clearly designed to strike fear into the people's hearts. but i digress.)
How often have you seen on the news, about some tragedy, something like this: "A ferry capsized in Bangladesh, killing 800. Six americans were among the dead." Lets face it most people don't care about the deaths of non-americans. It's pretty obvious that the u.s. military doesn't care all that much either.
The difference between terrorists and the U.S. military is that the u.s. military does not target civilians. (Actually that's very much in doubt; how do they tell if someone is a terrorist? not by the uniform. but anyway) As I said the US does not target civilians. That's not to say that they don't kill shitloads of them. But they don't plan their military campaign by aiming for the schools and such. Which is good, what's the military advantage in blowing up a school? But they don't worry too much about civilian damage either. By contrast, Al Qaeda sees a great tactical value in blowing up a school or something, and so it's on their list. These are two different organizations fighting in two totally different ways. Frankly I think it's about an even contest. One thing is for sure: The US response has killed more civilians than Al Qaeda did on 9/11.
I don't really see what the big fuss is about. Anybody who knows anything about war should know that it is the civilians who bear the brunt of it. Period, end of story. No amount of smart-bombs and laser sights can change that. My complaint is with people like the parent, who seem to think that when the US takes a shit, it doesn't stink. Get real.
The only other alternative to a bomb-dropping tank-rolling war I can think of is political assassinations, which we tried to do with Saddam and failed miserably. And of course that opens the door for retaliation, and it "wouldn't be prudent" to make George W. a target for a tit-for-tat assassination. Though, now that Uday and Qusay are gone, I wonder how soundly Jenna and Barbara sleep at night.
Or to put it another way, if you want to make an omelet you've got to crack some eggs. We felt the need to do something after Al Qaeda attacked us, and we felt the need to keep that momentum rolling and take Iraq too. That's two omelets, and the only cost the Pentagon should be caring about about is the 600+ american soldiers who have died and several thousand wounded who will never fight again. (Actually, they have another problem, people are fleeing the military, so they'll have to bring back the draft to maintain these sorts of troop levels, but that's another story.)
One area where you can get on the U.S. for a "terrorist" action is their use of DU weapons. Any chemist or biologist will tell you that inhaling or ingesting tiny particles of ANY heavy metal is BAD BAD BAD. The dust from all this uranium has been strongly correlated with Gulf War Syndrome, and we are seeing ridiculously high rates of health problems years dowh the road in areas where these weapons have been used. If for no other reason than to protect the combat engineers who have to clean up after the A-10s fly by, we should stop using DU. (And while we're at it, cluster bombs and land mines.)
had the USSR been able to obtain some sort of clear military supremacy, they absolutely would have used that power to expand, and the economic boost gained through expansion may have enabled them to survive, grow and expand even more.
Instead the US won, and now we're in Afghanistan and Iraq. Any bets on which country the Imperial Capitalist Dogs will conquer next?
Hi, I am not much of a TV watcher but I have a question about picture quality. This is kind of a mini Ask Slashdot.
A few years back a roommmate had some sort of satellite TV (don't know which brand) and one of those hacked cards so we could watch everything. Notting Hill at 8, 8:30, 9, 9:30, and 10:00. Yes, they had five channels just of Notting Hill.
Anyway, the channel selection was great, the price was even better (tee hee), but the picture quality itself was LOUSY. Especially in something like The Matrix, dark areas became HORRIBLY splotchy and pixellated. This I assume has to do with the compression used by digital satellite, something analog cable isn't crippled with. I have seen similar artifacts on digital cable systems of a few years back, but they weren't as noticeable. That may be because the satellite system I was watching was on the top of the line Sony HD projection model, and digital cable on some 27" JVC.
Do these artifacts and such still exist? I found them incedibly annoying, to the point that if I were going to enhance my TV options, I would completely avoid digital in any form and stick with analog cable.
Thanks.
If I get you six months of cable at $9.95 a month, will you chill out?
I fail to see how this law would be enforced.
I shop at safeway, and i use my credit card to make a purchase. but somehow the record of that purchase doesn't include the fact that I received a "discount" because i used savings card #blahblahblah
Come on. it will be trivial to find the parity set of savings card/credit card transactions. Or even transactions that follow something of a pattern, i.e. cards used by a single purchaser or even household.
And Safeway has their headquarters in NJ or something. So how does your California law apply? The correlation between your credit card number/purchase history and your savings card number might not happen until the data is safely out of that jurisdiction. Heck it might not happen within the United States at all.
Nice law, don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of McBrother.
Right, that's why war is "good" too. It was WWII and women working that started this mess (according to me, several posts ago.)
/end rant.
I liked the analogy when Bush was appointing his cabinet. His Sectretary of Agriculture nominee was described as thinking of a forest as "nothing more than an elaborate storage system for boards."
Look at Iraq, we spent a lot of money to build all those tanks and bombs. Then we used them. Now there's tons of work to be done rebuilding the infrastructure, and tons of money to be made by Haliburton, Bechtel, et. al.
If we have to consume to stay afloat, eventually that's a problem. Especially with more and more consumers every day and finite resources.
Any economist would tell you that these are questions for politicians; that economists can't answer them. But the Almighty Dollar doesn't listen to much else. I forget who said "the capitalism will eat itself" or words to that effect but it seems inevitable.
"This sniper cannot be seen. Unfortunately he has chosen a rather obvious piece of cover." :)
People pay $3k for a top of the line ailenware machine. A geek friend of mine, quite capable of building his own system, just did this. He wanted the convenience and he wanted a slick rig. It was worth it to him. (I buy parts and tweak, but that's just me.) Or as others have pointed out a high-end Mac will cost that much.
Sure, the price has droppped a little. I seem to recall a boss that spent $4k at Dell when the Pentium Pro 200 came out. Or how about $9k for a Mac II FX back in 1990? So things aren't quite that expensice any more. And the cheap stuff has gotten dramatically cheaper. (Duron 1.6GHz for fifty bucks, anyone?) But a top of the line x86 system will still set you back at least two grand.
As for the popcorn, that (total concession revenue) is actually more of a money maker than ticket sales. Not sure how much more, but there it is.
WHen I go to moveis, unless I must go to opening night, I go to the second-run theater where the tickets are like three bucks. The money i "save" goes right to popcorn!
I literally am borrowing it when I go to the library. See also my sig.
Satellite cable. Isn't that kind of an oxymoron? Cable is distinguished by the presence of a piece of cable connecting your TV to the broadcast center, completely unlike satellite. Once the bird is up it costs nothing to maintain the network. Or are laws routinely written this way in order to group together physically dissimilar technologies into the same logical group? Would it be possible to challenge this tortuous chain of logic that establishes the crime of descrambling satellite signals?
In other words, is this the same thing as where cryptography is in the same classification as dangerous munitions when it comes to exporting it? A purely arbitrary decision, but at least that was done with the justification of "national security," not to protect a private corporate interest.
I think the laws protecting "sattelite cable" go too far. As we've seen, the only real enforcement comes via a witch-hunt whereby you find out every person who has purchased a smart card reader and then sue them. Wouldn't it be a better use of the company's resources to devise a better encryption technology? Don't tell me it can't be done. (Perhaps buying the legislature was cheaper?) And wouldn't it be a better use of the legislature's time to let the market decide which businesses will succeed, rather than create special laws for "sattelite cable" which seem to fly in the face of the Constitutional right we have to monitor the airwaves?
DirecTV, I'm really sorry you spent all that money putting a bird into orbit. But let's face it what is the function of a satellite? It broadcasts to an entire continent. Now you have to put up all sorts of barriers to make it harder for us landlubbers to get your signal. Frankly that's your problem, not the problem of any of us citizens down here on Earth, legal contrivances notwithstanding.
I wonder if there is a jurisdiction issue here. Since the encrypted signal came from space, how is it a violation of US law for me to monitor that? Do US laws extend as far up as geosynchronous orbit now?
And, for the record, I will *never* be a DirecTV customer. (Though, at one time, I did have a roommate who had a hacked card.) Frankly I barely watch TV at all, and the picture quality is not half as good as analog cable. Those arguments notwithstanding, I refuse to give my cash to a company that rewards its customers with lawsuits.
Didn't you know? The No Electronic Theft act of 199x moved copyright infringement from the civil courts to the criminal courts. So now the FBI gets to be Hollywood's bitch.
eek, of course silver is the best mettalic conductor of heat. That's kinda the whole point of this article. So much for Preview.
They use aluminum because it's lighter. The CPU core can only handle so much weight bearing down on it. Copper is actually a better (the best mettalic) conductor of heat.
Take, for example, the Zalman 7000a heatsink. They make a pure-copper version, and an AlCu version. The pure copper version has 10% better thermal characteristics, but it weights 75% more. In fact, tue pure-copper heatsink exceeds AMD's specifications for how much a heatsink can weigh.
There may be other reasons, like it's easier (cheaper) to forge an aluminum heatsink, or it's less likely to get bent out of shape in shipping, but I have to think the weight is the main reason. And shipping lighter items should cost less too.
yes, you should spread the word. I just got a tube of arctic sivler 5 from newegg today, as it turns out.
While I don't disagree with your comment, I am reminded of that line from the movie Johnny Mnemonic. I think it was one that Henry Rollins got to say: "If you're not a consumer, you're mentally ill!"
For sure, you can sit on welfare and get your food stamps, and lead the zero-earner lifestyle. But simple things like owning a home are extremely hard to pull off without the financial strength of two.
You've overstated the case about the "needs" of modern life. If your TV is destroyed in an earthquake, FEMA will grant you the money for a new one. Because a TV is a necessity of modern life (think emergency communications). So is a fridge. But 30 years ago, a TV wasn't covered. The things you mention as "fake needs" are slowly creeping their way into governmentally-approved needs. (School vouchers anyone?)
And don't get me started on the suburbs/lack of mass transit. Truly one of the great American failures of the latter half of the 20th century. However, this is the bed we've made.
One thing I just thought of is the 40-hour work week. Maybe a reason we need two earners in a modern family is because those two are working less.
Don't be sorry. Off-topic discussions are the lifeblood of Slashdot. Well, at least they are for me. I care a lot more about the underlying social and political issues than the minutiae of some snippet of code.
That is a good point about paying-for-two, since one essentially couldn't work.
Slavery had the same drawback -- it was very costly to actually own slaves, since you had to provide them food, shelter, and you might actually want to provide them health care too, in order to protect your investment. Employing the working poor was actually cheaper; there was not all the overhead. (I'm talking about American slavery here, and I guess it's pretty obviuos that I'm no expert.) It's the same reason we see employers use contractors at a high hourly rate rather than bring employees on board and then have to pay for benefits and such.
I don't really have a point any more. Let's see if I can find one. By doubling the labor pool, which is basically what bringing women into the labor force did, we've certainly become wealthier on paper. But is it healthy? Does sending little Timmy off to day-care make society a better place? It's made us richer, and unfortunately that seems to be the only metric. "Family Values" have certainly morphed into something completely different than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, with the rise of the nuclear family and the existence of this thing called "teenagers" who in previous generations would simply be workers or making babies at the age today's kids are downloading MP3s. So I guess "progress" has its pros and cons. I think a lot of the "family values" movement (the Jerry Fallwell style) stems from the fact that the busting up of the core husband-wife division of labor has opened the floodgates of change. If it is not writ in stone than a man is the breadwinner and a woman the homemaker, then why does it even need to be a man and a woman? If both are equal in the labor force, why not two men or two women together? If men and women are interchangeable as units of economic utility, that is a huge change which will reverberate throughout society for generations. And in a captial system, where economics and the creation of wealth is ultimately where the rubber meets the road, it portends a vast restructuring of the society, and a LOT of inertia to overcome.
Thank you for your insightful post. It gives me plenty to think about.