He has said on a number of occasions that he plans to donate 98% of his personal wealth - presumably most of it will go to the foundation.
There is no way in hell that he will even be able to actually get those money -- all he has is overvalued Microsoft stock. That means, all his "donations" will be in stock -- and still there will be no way to buy anything significant on it without driving the price into the ground. Then he would argue that falling of the stock price will cause harm to all the things, he donated it to, so his precious company should be preserved.
...and all are incompatible with things that already exist, I suspect that some intent other than improvement of the protocol is present. For example, XML demands to use Unicode (to be exact, standard was designed to make it really hard to do anything else unless everything is in ASCII). HTTP 1.1 is a one huge spec with various wild demands to applications made across all levels of content, presentation and transmission means, that can't be implemented separately of each other while remaining compliant to a spec. Java is both a language and a bunch of libraries that can't be ported or reimplemented in anything but java itself. And now more or less reasonable proposal of having one more level of multiplexing (compared to multiple TCP connections -- one however may argue that it would be better to attack the problem at its root and make a congestion control mechanism that can work across connections) is tied with use of XML instead of well-known, more efficient and more flexible MIME.
Good ideas that can be implemented separately are used to push dubious-quality "standards" that provide no benefits but pushing useless, semi-proprietary or simply harmful "inventions" by combining them in the same spec.
The "Cathedral" model was supposed to reflect FSF development, including Emacs, "Bazaar" one was shown on the examples of Linux kernel and fetchmail. ESR himself participated in Emacs and fetchmail.
Germans developed a lot of technology (I doubt about stealth though, as it would be extremely impractical at the moment), however it was nowhere close to being ready for production, given the state of German industry by then. Also the war was in the condition when no improvement to anything that files (bombers, missiles, helicopters, spaceships, bows and arrows, slingshots -- anything) will give any advantage to them unless it massively outnumbered anything that Russian had in the air or on the ground. Tanks could help, but there was no progress there, and there was a shortage of copper to make advanced things like electric transmission practical. So they were doomed in any case.
I'm aware that this contradicts what you learned in school. I've got a Russian friend (ethnic Russian, grew up in Moldova) who was *shocked* when I pointed out that Poland at one point had stretched as far east as Smolensk --- he wasn't taught *that*, either.
I don't know where he studied -- definitely not at the place where I did. The definition of "Poland" however is rather foggy over the all time when various stuff existed at its place.
Could you share your experience with us? I've spent a significant portion of my life overseas, in just about every country in western and central europe (including Croatia); while I have percieved a great deal of frustration with American *arrogance*, I have met only one person that I thought blindly hated this country and its people. From what I can tell, it's *not* universal.
If you are expecting irrational, cartoonish hatred, this is not what I am talking about.
Arguably Germany started a war with the US; it declared war as soon as we declared war on Japan.
I an talking about a territory of Germany in any meaningful way, not diplomatic arrangements, fighting far away from both countries, selling weapons, bombing territory without attacking it and other peripherial activities.
Re:Endangering lives (Score:2) by aphrael (burble@aphrael.org) on 11:00 AM June 25th, 2000 PDT (#262) (User Info) http://www.burble.org/aphrael I think it's just incorrect to say we're:"universally hated" My experience says otherwise. Could you share your experience with us? I've spent a significant portion of my life overseas, in just about every country in western and central europe (including Croatia); while I have percieved a great deal of frustration with American *arrogance*, I have met only one person that I thought blindly hated this country and its people. From what I can tell, it's *not* universal. All countries invaded by US in its history except Japan were weaker than US -- and only Japan happened to actually start a war with US. Arguably Germany started a war with the US; it declared war as soon as we declared war on Japan. Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating country in the world, has a US military base on its territory... Are you aware of the conditions under which that base came into existence? We fought a (probably unnecessary) war with Spain -- as a result of which we ended up with control of Cuba. Instead of turning it into a colony (which Spain had done), we made it an independant country, and leased the base from them --- and that government was quite happy about the arrangement. It wasn't until after the government was overthrown that the base became an issue.
So, some governments deserve sovereignty, some don't, and US is free to decide, which is which depending on how they support US? The world can't run on rules like this -- at least it will never be stable that way.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just blather? Since the Serbs had essentially forced all Albanians out of government structures *ten years before the war*, and had denied the peopel living there *the right to teach in their own language*, and had gone to great extents to drive non-Serbs out of the parts of Croatia and Bosnia under their control, I think the outcome you paint is unlikely.
That was going on-and-off over decades after WWII -- never reaching the extent of open war before Milosevic/KLA.
More likely --- and what we were afraid of --- was the Serbs driving the Albanians out, causing a massive refugee crisis in Albania (a country which is *awash* in guns because of a brief civil war a couple of years ago which followed on the heels of the collapse of a popular pyramid scheme) and Macedonia, and destablizing both countries.
That mostly started after US interfered. BTW, Albania was the worst place in Europe even in the time of peace.
Yes, this is a modern-day domino effect. And it's reasonable to question if it would have happened that way --- certainly the refugee crisis which *did* happen failed to destabilize either country. But... there's *no* evidence at all that I can detect that the Milosevic government would have done *anything at all* to bring the Kosovars back into the government or give them back the autonomy which they had had until his government came to power.
US interfered at the time in the middle of civil war. Definitely Yugoslavian government was not in a position to do anything meaningful in Kosovo at the time. Common sense indicates that no country ever benefits from foreign involvement in its civil war.
Depends. If you're in business, what you are supposed to do is get Office for Windows or the Mac. The business world has standardized on Word format. Resent it all you want, but welcome to the real world.
Everything that happend in the real world changes what the "real world" is. Even this message where I call you a Microsoft sheep and one of major causes of the bullshit "proprietary standards" dominance, changes the "real world" toward more widespread understanding of it.
If you weren't a complete idiot you would know that every single family in the USA at that time was touched by WWII. Many lost their sons to the war, others lost their neighbors.
Poor Americans -- lost their neighbors! What about being invaded by Nazi and losing 1/4 of population (Belorussia)? Compared to all other nations involved in WWII US suffered the least, unnoticeable compared to anyone else.
We'd probably have spent another 6 months to a year fighting our way north up the island. Russia would've invaded from the North from Mongolia and we would've ended up meeting somewhere in the middle.
Great knowledge of geography here -- probably a result of famous American education. I knew, there is something special about those maps with US in the center instead of Greenwich meridian, and my home city misspelled.
It would've been the same thing that happened with Germany.. North and South Japan. No, I'm sorry, thanks for playing. 2 A-Bombs were the best way to end an already too-bloody war. What was it.. 50 million people dead? It is pissant people like you who can sit back in your comfortable chair behind your computer 50 years later and monday night quarterback the whole war that really piss me off.
Great political thinking here -- we are afraid of Russians, let's first demand help from Russians, then kill more Japanese than there are Russians there. I hope, actual american generals didn't base their decisions on that idea -- otherwise I would be embarrassed to belong to the human race.
Are we talking about Chechnya here? Or Russia? I'm sure whatever "uncivilized" aspects of Chechen society have been cleansed by bombing the shit out of Grozny.
We are talking about early 19'th century, the last time when Chechnya was independent.
Someone needed an explanation, why American citizens are hated as much as their government. I hope, the above message gives a good example of something that can piss off even the most civilized and non-judgmental foreigner.
Yeah, I'll say. What the fuck was the US thinking, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate France? All those white crosses at Normandy, that's a monument to American selfishness, right?
Invasion in Normandy happened at the time when Germany was if not dead but lethally wounded -- there was no possible turn of event could end with Nazi surviving (except, of course, an unlikely one in which US, the only country that was not weakened by a war, would switch sides and start supporting them). Until that point US didn't touch Europe, and the idea of "liberation" of France was a complete farce. At that point US was afraid of Soviet influence over Europe, not anything else.
Imagine a software engineer in Belarus Republic in 1993, graduated from university (6 years), working at governmental organization that among other things monitors post-Chernobyl radioactive contamination, as a programmer, sysadmin, admin of a "WAN" based on inadequate phone lines and the worst modems that they could find and local Novell-based LAN, getting for that a salary, not significantly above the poverty level. Add dealing with broken custom software, written in foxpro and sold to that organization by some lame company, owned by a bunch of local crooks. Add the fact that all promising jobs for a programmer are in communication, and infrastructure happens to be so underdeveloped, all positions are already filled. Add fluctuation of government that brought nationalists to power and army draft in the same year, and the fact that the engineer is jewish-ukrainian by origin. What the above mentioned engineer is supposed to do? Remaining in the country promises at least major suckage of life until economy improves and at most death in the army, as conditions there were closer to a jail than to anything else even before nationalists came to power. Moving to other country can be realistic, however only two choices are present -- US and Israel.
In Israel he can expect large number of people with exactly the same education that he got, not much of a software industry, language that he doesn't know and doesn't want to know, ideology that he doesn't share, war with Palestinians that engineer wants no part of and Judaism that engineer wants no part of either, being agnostic or atheist, depending on how you define it.
In US he can expect major humiliation, frightening corporate power, a position of non-citizen for many years, stupid politicians, yet almost guaranteed decent job for anyone who got his CS education in non-american school, and has some resemblance of programming talent.
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia).
First, US was an ally with Britain, France and Russia -- as opposed to KLA that was no one's ally -- formally was and remains a terrorist organization.
Second, Nazi Germany was left alone even though it invaded US allies, so actually US extremely poorly performed its own obligations as an ally. US participated in insignificant fighting in Africa, and other things that didn't significantly affect the events in Europe until it became absolutely clear that Russia will not be destroyed (all USSR territory was back in Soviets' hands), and Germany will be defeated, this way or another. Not until that happened, US started pulling its shit together to actually attack Germany in any meaningful way.
As I have said it many times, US behavior in WWII in Europe was extremely selfish, bordering on being a traitor to other allies.
Bosnia was indeed 'left alone' as you say, and 200 thousand people died. 'Doing nothing' ('letting the rock fall') caused the death of tenthousand muslims in Sebrenica. Is that the kind of peace and sovereignty of nations you envision?
Actually yes. Conflicts like that, no matter how much third parties will try to suppress them, will claim their number of victims. There is no "good" way out for people involved, and suppressing conflict earlier will cause more deaths later -- perpetuating the hatred and making the end result worse.
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo.
There was however US influence in Europe that decreased because of the formation of EU. US needed to reaffirm its dominant position in NATO, establish presence in the Eastern Europe, and create a country (Kosovo is de-facto a colonized country now) dependent on US military force -- something that Europe never had before.
so you wont discuss with me because i prooved to you that ussr did indeed harm its own citizens...
USSR harmed its own citizen -- as well as US and almost every country in the world. However I talk about using military force to do that, what was claimed in a previous post.
i am not native english speaker so thats why my english may be fucked up (bosnian/croatian/serbian is my native language)... anyway gulag are nothing else than work camps for soviet ppl that didnt share same opinion as stalin did
"GULAG" is a Russian abbreviation for "State Department of [Penitentiary] Camps" -- camps themselves NEVER were mentioned as "GULAG" or "GULAGs", only a system as a whole. Therefore it couldn't be in plural in any language.
Between 1950 and 1995 most such ventures were part of the not quite war between the US and USSR.
Actually that was used as a cause, but rarely was the reason. USSR avoided doing anything outside its borders unless was seriously threatened, and even US didn't actually threaten it to justify anything of the kind.
Perhaps you would rather the US and USSR had fought a pitched battle in Western Europe?
All european countries including USSR, avoided military conflicts after WWII -- and last time I checked, US is not located in Europe, so if a potential war between US and USSR would have any effect on Europe, it would only affect US missile bases there. However considering MAD, it wouldn't be possible, so it didn't happen.
Or maybe you would have liked eating lots of black bread and sending your tax returns to Moscow?
As a matter of fact, I like black bread (one made in Russia, not something I see in local stores that looks like clay with hay mixed in, and tastes like one, too). However the political situation at the time of Cold War reliably prevented direct military confrontation.
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
It's still a question if the haste was worth the result -- both sides in Northern Ireland are in unstable position toward the political results -- fighting (actually random acts of terrorism) stopped at the price of bringing up all the political tension, and sides don't seem to be ready to come to the agreement, so it has all chances to resume.
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
Pressure on Israel government seem to have little effect on large (and vocal!) percentage of population that got kicked out of their homes, got their religious feeling insulted, or both. Again, fixing one problem, creating another. If Arabs didn't see Israel as being so dependent on US in everything they probably would be more willing to negotiate (plus see what I said in other message about Iran and religious bigotry).
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Maybe per month compared to situation in the middle of civil war, but not the total amount -- if left alone, fighting would cease earlier, without the amount of political complications that were caused by US/NATO bombing what they were supposed to protect and supporting every accusation against Serbs, valid or invalid one, thus fueling the hatred between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. If US wouldn't interfere, Serbs would defeat KLA (killing some but mostly frightening the rest, causing them to disband), keep the control over Kosovo, and would be forced to give some semi-autonomy to Kosovo, letting some Albanians into local governmental structures. US didn't like that, and needed a cause for military presence in Europe.
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
US motivation never was to preserve anyone's lives -- it either was political, up to "those people are oppressed by their insufficiently democratic government -- let's kill or starve them all to death, so their evil government will be destroyed with them", or economical, up to "we need some cheap labor here and oil there".
Subtly but significantly: is the IMF controlled by or only dependent on the US? In other words, does it do what the US tells it to do, or what it separately believes will benefit the US or certain parts thereof?
Since it's unlikely that they will tell it by themselves (what, someone expects them to say "Since US threatened that it will decrease the supply of dollars we decided to deny loans to countries that won't duplicate the exact text of DMCA in their laws"?), I can only speculate about that. The results of their activity suggest that since they encourage loans that have no chances to be paid in a reasonable timeframe, and economy in the recipient countries doesn't improve, it's likely that they are influenced by ones who benefit from it. Who happen to be large, mostly American, companies.
Comparison with other economy reconstruction plans where the goals actually included the recovery of economy (Japanese recovery after WWII -- US had a goal of eliminating Japanese military threat in Pacific, not paving a road for American companies into Japanese economy) suggests that there is something beyond plain incompetence here.
Soviet Union never used military force against its own people and neither US did. USSR was for all purposes a single country, and yes, order in it was remarkable considering the diversity of nations that it contained (much more diverse than US) and relatively peaceful means that it was achieved with.
I however talk about messing with other countries -- something that USSR did rarely and with some more or less understandable reasons. It can be compared to a predator that would kill its prey only when it is hungry. OTOH, US attacked a lot of countries without being under any threat -- what can be compared to a hunter that will kill anything that moves just to prove to himself that his gun indeed is a valid extension of his penis.
Now, note that the first situation applies to the 1953 act. (Still not sure I support such skulduggery, even in such a case - the long-term hostility may outweigh temporary gains. The US is hated in Iran.) The second case is more relevant today, as applies to the following paragraph.
Iran is an interesting case. After having a lot of greasy fingers of foreign powers messing in Iran's internal affairs, it ended up hating almost everyone, adopted blatantly reactionary theocracy and became one of the major reasons for turning previously mostly political unity of nearby Arab countries into the ideas of religious bigotry and "we-hate-everyone" jihad. In the end it benefited no one, and after decades of isolation and war (that, BTW, demonstrated that "ideologically powerful" Iran had an army that couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag) reached a condition where even in its state of completely un-democratic theocracy it had to go through a painful political reform that is in progress now. If not meddling of other countries decades ago, Iran would reach its current state much earlier and without costing lives (and limbs) of many people, without strenghtening the political position of Iraq (BTW, another "great fighter" of Middle East that was worth its long-time opponent), and without creating the current amount of religion-based isolation of Arab countries from the rest of the world, and tensions between Arabs themselves. Even Afghanistan probably wouldn't end up in its current situation, and Russian intervention there would be prevented -- at that time Communists learned how not to mess with other countries unless threat from them is evident.
No argument on both points in this paragraph. Who runs the IMF? What cross-section does it represent? (US? Others?)
Since US dollar is artificially "stabilized" and used in international trade because of the lack of usable way to deal with less powerful and more volatile currencies, IMF significantly depends on US.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so _this_ is why their stock dropped recently.
He has said on a number of occasions that he plans to donate 98% of his personal wealth - presumably most of it will go to the foundation.
There is no way in hell that he will even be able to actually get those money -- all he has is overvalued Microsoft stock. That means, all his "donations" will be in stock -- and still there will be no way to buy anything significant on it without driving the price into the ground. Then he would argue that falling of the stock price will cause harm to all the things, he donated it to, so his precious company should be preserved.
...and all are incompatible with things that already exist, I suspect that some intent other than improvement of the protocol is present. For example, XML demands to use Unicode (to be exact, standard was designed to make it really hard to do anything else unless everything is in ASCII). HTTP 1.1 is a one huge spec with various wild demands to applications made across all levels of content, presentation and transmission means, that can't be implemented separately of each other while remaining compliant to a spec. Java is both a language and a bunch of libraries that can't be ported or reimplemented in anything but java itself. And now more or less reasonable proposal of having one more level of multiplexing (compared to multiple TCP connections -- one however may argue that it would be better to attack the problem at its root and make a congestion control mechanism that can work across connections) is tied with use of XML instead of well-known, more efficient and more flexible MIME.
Good ideas that can be implemented separately are used to push dubious-quality "standards" that provide no benefits but pushing useless, semi-proprietary or simply harmful "inventions" by combining them in the same spec.
Don't be too hard on him. Nikolai Bezroukov (who wrote the thing) is a nice and knowledgeable guy, however he has two problems:
The "Cathedral" model was supposed to reflect FSF development, including Emacs, "Bazaar" one was shown on the examples of Linux kernel and fetchmail. ESR himself participated in Emacs and fetchmail.
File formats, other specs, or whatever, won't get anyone killed by it's release.
I won't bet on it -- people do a lot of awful things out of disgust.
Germans developed a lot of technology (I doubt about stealth though, as it would be extremely impractical at the moment), however it was nowhere close to being ready for production, given the state of German industry by then. Also the war was in the condition when no improvement to anything that files (bombers, missiles, helicopters, spaceships, bows and arrows, slingshots -- anything) will give any advantage to them unless it massively outnumbered anything that Russian had in the air or on the ground. Tanks could help, but there was no progress there, and there was a shortage of copper to make advanced things like electric transmission practical. So they were doomed in any case.
I'm aware that this contradicts what you learned in school. I've got a Russian friend (ethnic Russian, grew up in Moldova) who was *shocked* when I pointed out that Poland at one point had stretched as far east as Smolensk --- he wasn't taught *that*, either.
I don't know where he studied -- definitely not at the place where I did. The definition of "Poland" however is rather foggy over the all time when various stuff existed at its place.
Could you share your experience with us? I've spent a significant portion of my life overseas, in just about every country in western and central europe (including Croatia); while I have percieved a great deal of frustration with American *arrogance*, I have met only one person that I thought blindly hated this country and its people. From what I can tell, it's *not* universal.
If you are expecting irrational, cartoonish hatred, this is not what I am talking about.
Arguably Germany started a war with the US; it declared war as soon as we declared war on Japan.
I an talking about a territory of Germany in any meaningful way, not diplomatic arrangements, fighting far away from both countries, selling weapons, bombing territory without attacking it and other peripherial activities.
Re:Endangering lives (Score:2) by aphrael (burble@aphrael.org) on 11:00 AM June 25th, 2000 PDT (#262) (User Info) http://www.burble.org/aphrael I think it's just incorrect to say we're :"universally hated" My experience says otherwise. Could you share your experience with us? I've spent a significant portion of my life overseas, in just about every country in western and central europe (including Croatia); while I have percieved a great deal of frustration with American *arrogance*, I have met only one person that I thought blindly hated this country and its people. From what I can tell, it's *not* universal. All countries invaded by US in its history except Japan were weaker than US -- and only Japan happened to actually start a war with US. Arguably Germany started a war with the US; it declared war as soon as we declared war on Japan. Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating country in the world, has a US military base on its territory ... Are you aware of the conditions under which that base came into existence? We fought a (probably unnecessary) war with Spain -- as a result of which we ended up with control of Cuba. Instead of turning it into a colony (which Spain had done), we made it an independant country, and leased the base from them --- and that government was quite happy about the arrangement. It wasn't until after the government was overthrown that the base became an issue.
So, some governments deserve sovereignty, some don't, and US is free to decide, which is which depending on how they support US? The world can't run on rules like this -- at least it will never be stable that way.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just blather? Since the Serbs had essentially forced all Albanians out of government structures *ten years before the war*, and had denied the peopel living there *the right to teach in their own language*, and had gone to great extents to drive non-Serbs out of the parts of Croatia and Bosnia under their control, I think the outcome you paint is unlikely.
That was going on-and-off over decades after WWII -- never reaching the extent of open war before Milosevic/KLA.
More likely --- and what we were afraid of --- was the Serbs driving the Albanians out, causing a massive refugee crisis in Albania (a country which is *awash* in guns because of a brief civil war a couple of years ago which followed on the heels of the collapse of a popular pyramid scheme) and Macedonia, and destablizing both countries.
That mostly started after US interfered. BTW, Albania was the worst place in Europe even in the time of peace.
Yes, this is a modern-day domino effect. And it's reasonable to question if it would have happened that way --- certainly the refugee crisis which *did* happen failed to destabilize either country. But ... there's *no* evidence at all that I can detect that the Milosevic government would have done *anything at all* to bring the Kosovars back into the government or give them back the autonomy which they had had until his government came to power.
US interfered at the time in the middle of civil war. Definitely Yugoslavian government was not in a position to do anything meaningful in Kosovo at the time. Common sense indicates that no country ever benefits from foreign involvement in its civil war.
Depends. If you're in business, what you are supposed to do is get Office for Windows or the Mac. The business world has standardized on Word format. Resent it all you want, but welcome to the real world.
Everything that happend in the real world changes what the "real world" is. Even this message where I call you a Microsoft sheep and one of major causes of the bullshit "proprietary standards" dominance, changes the "real world" toward more widespread understanding of it.
If you weren't a complete idiot you would know that every single family in the USA at that time was touched by WWII. Many lost their sons to the war, others lost their neighbors.
Poor Americans -- lost their neighbors! What about being invaded by Nazi and losing 1/4 of population (Belorussia)? Compared to all other nations involved in WWII US suffered the least, unnoticeable compared to anyone else.
We'd probably have spent another 6 months to a year fighting our way north up the island. Russia would've invaded from the North from Mongolia and we would've ended up meeting somewhere in the middle.
Great knowledge of geography here -- probably a result of famous American education. I knew, there is something special about those maps with US in the center instead of Greenwich meridian, and my home city misspelled.
It would've been the same thing that happened with Germany.. North and South Japan. No, I'm sorry, thanks for playing. 2 A-Bombs were the best way to end an already too-bloody war. What was it.. 50 million people dead? It is pissant people like you who can sit back in your comfortable chair behind your computer 50 years later and monday night quarterback the whole war that really piss me off.
Great political thinking here -- we are afraid of Russians, let's first demand help from Russians, then kill more Japanese than there are Russians there. I hope, actual american generals didn't base their decisions on that idea -- otherwise I would be embarrassed to belong to the human race.
To my knowledge, the US has never started a war by invading another country. Can you give an example?
Vietnam, Grenada, Panama to name a few most blatant ones that immediately come to mind.
America comes in to defend freedom.
Invading a sovereign country has nothing to do with "freedom", no matter what the invader thinks of himslef.
Are we talking about Chechnya here? Or Russia? I'm sure whatever "uncivilized" aspects of Chechen society have been cleansed by bombing the shit out of Grozny.
We are talking about early 19'th century, the last time when Chechnya was independent.
Someone needed an explanation, why American citizens are hated as much as their government. I hope, the above message gives a good example of something that can piss off even the most civilized and non-judgmental foreigner.
Yeah, I'll say. What the fuck was the US thinking, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate France? All those white crosses at Normandy, that's a monument to American selfishness, right?
Invasion in Normandy happened at the time when Germany was if not dead but lethally wounded -- there was no possible turn of event could end with Nazi surviving (except, of course, an unlikely one in which US, the only country that was not weakened by a war, would switch sides and start supporting them). Until that point US didn't touch Europe, and the idea of "liberation" of France was a complete farce. At that point US was afraid of Soviet influence over Europe, not anything else.
Imagine a software engineer in Belarus Republic in 1993, graduated from university (6 years), working at governmental organization that among other things monitors post-Chernobyl radioactive contamination, as a programmer, sysadmin, admin of a "WAN" based on inadequate phone lines and the worst modems that they could find and local Novell-based LAN, getting for that a salary, not significantly above the poverty level. Add dealing with broken custom software, written in foxpro and sold to that organization by some lame company, owned by a bunch of local crooks. Add the fact that all promising jobs for a programmer are in communication, and infrastructure happens to be so underdeveloped, all positions are already filled. Add fluctuation of government that brought nationalists to power and army draft in the same year, and the fact that the engineer is jewish-ukrainian by origin. What the above mentioned engineer is supposed to do? Remaining in the country promises at least major suckage of life until economy improves and at most death in the army, as conditions there were closer to a jail than to anything else even before nationalists came to power. Moving to other country can be realistic, however only two choices are present -- US and Israel.
In Israel he can expect large number of people with exactly the same education that he got, not much of a software industry, language that he doesn't know and doesn't want to know, ideology that he doesn't share, war with Palestinians that engineer wants no part of and Judaism that engineer wants no part of either, being agnostic or atheist, depending on how you define it.
In US he can expect major humiliation, frightening corporate power, a position of non-citizen for many years, stupid politicians, yet almost guaranteed decent job for anyone who got his CS education in non-american school, and has some resemblance of programming talent.
What would the engineer choose?
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia).
First, US was an ally with Britain, France and Russia -- as opposed to KLA that was no one's ally -- formally was and remains a terrorist organization.
Second, Nazi Germany was left alone even though it invaded US allies, so actually US extremely poorly performed its own obligations as an ally. US participated in insignificant fighting in Africa, and other things that didn't significantly affect the events in Europe until it became absolutely clear that Russia will not be destroyed (all USSR territory was back in Soviets' hands), and Germany will be defeated, this way or another. Not until that happened, US started pulling its shit together to actually attack Germany in any meaningful way.
As I have said it many times, US behavior in WWII in Europe was extremely selfish, bordering on being a traitor to other allies.
Bosnia was indeed 'left alone' as you say, and 200 thousand people died. 'Doing nothing' ('letting the rock fall') caused the death of tenthousand muslims in Sebrenica. Is that the kind of peace and sovereignty of nations you envision?
Actually yes. Conflicts like that, no matter how much third parties will try to suppress them, will claim their number of victims. There is no "good" way out for people involved, and suppressing conflict earlier will cause more deaths later -- perpetuating the hatred and making the end result worse.
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo.
There was however US influence in Europe that decreased because of the formation of EU. US needed to reaffirm its dominant position in NATO, establish presence in the Eastern Europe, and create a country (Kosovo is de-facto a colonized country now) dependent on US military force -- something that Europe never had before.
so you wont discuss with me because i prooved to you that ussr did indeed harm its own citizens...
USSR harmed its own citizen -- as well as US and almost every country in the world. However I talk about using military force to do that, what was claimed in a previous post.
i am not native english speaker so thats why my english may be fucked up (bosnian/croatian/serbian is my native language) ... anyway gulag are nothing else than work camps for soviet ppl that didnt share same opinion as stalin did
"GULAG" is a Russian abbreviation for "State Department of [Penitentiary] Camps" -- camps themselves NEVER were mentioned as "GULAG" or "GULAGs", only a system as a whole. Therefore it couldn't be in plural in any language.
Between 1950 and 1995 most such ventures were part of the not quite war between the US and USSR.
Actually that was used as a cause, but rarely was the reason. USSR avoided doing anything outside its borders unless was seriously threatened, and even US didn't actually threaten it to justify anything of the kind.
Perhaps you would rather the US and USSR had fought a pitched battle in Western Europe?
All european countries including USSR, avoided military conflicts after WWII -- and last time I checked, US is not located in Europe, so if a potential war between US and USSR would have any effect on Europe, it would only affect US missile bases there. However considering MAD, it wouldn't be possible, so it didn't happen.
Or maybe you would have liked eating lots of black bread and sending your tax returns to Moscow?
As a matter of fact, I like black bread (one made in Russia, not something I see in local stores that looks like clay with hay mixed in, and tastes like one, too). However the political situation at the time of Cold War reliably prevented direct military confrontation.
so how about all those millions ppl that were sent to gulags in siberia...
The word "GULAG" has no plural. I refuse to discuss Russian history with a person that doesn't know why.
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
It's still a question if the haste was worth the result -- both sides in Northern Ireland are in unstable position toward the political results -- fighting (actually random acts of terrorism) stopped at the price of bringing up all the political tension, and sides don't seem to be ready to come to the agreement, so it has all chances to resume.
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
Pressure on Israel government seem to have little effect on large (and vocal!) percentage of population that got kicked out of their homes, got their religious feeling insulted, or both. Again, fixing one problem, creating another. If Arabs didn't see Israel as being so dependent on US in everything they probably would be more willing to negotiate (plus see what I said in other message about Iran and religious bigotry).
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Maybe per month compared to situation in the middle of civil war, but not the total amount -- if left alone, fighting would cease earlier, without the amount of political complications that were caused by US/NATO bombing what they were supposed to protect and supporting every accusation against Serbs, valid or invalid one, thus fueling the hatred between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. If US wouldn't interfere, Serbs would defeat KLA (killing some but mostly frightening the rest, causing them to disband), keep the control over Kosovo, and would be forced to give some semi-autonomy to Kosovo, letting some Albanians into local governmental structures. US didn't like that, and needed a cause for military presence in Europe.
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
US motivation never was to preserve anyone's lives -- it either was political, up to "those people are oppressed by their insufficiently democratic government -- let's kill or starve them all to death, so their evil government will be destroyed with them", or economical, up to "we need some cheap labor here and oil there".
Subtly but significantly: is the IMF controlled by or only dependent on the US? In other words, does it do what the US tells it to do, or what it separately believes will benefit the US or certain parts thereof?
Since it's unlikely that they will tell it by themselves (what, someone expects them to say "Since US threatened that it will decrease the supply of dollars we decided to deny loans to countries that won't duplicate the exact text of DMCA in their laws"?), I can only speculate about that. The results of their activity suggest that since they encourage loans that have no chances to be paid in a reasonable timeframe, and economy in the recipient countries doesn't improve, it's likely that they are influenced by ones who benefit from it. Who happen to be large, mostly American, companies.
Comparison with other economy reconstruction plans where the goals actually included the recovery of economy (Japanese recovery after WWII -- US had a goal of eliminating Japanese military threat in Pacific, not paving a road for American companies into Japanese economy) suggests that there is something beyond plain incompetence here.
Soviet Union never used military force against its own people and neither US did. USSR was for all purposes a single country, and yes, order in it was remarkable considering the diversity of nations that it contained (much more diverse than US) and relatively peaceful means that it was achieved with.
I however talk about messing with other countries -- something that USSR did rarely and with some more or less understandable reasons. It can be compared to a predator that would kill its prey only when it is hungry. OTOH, US attacked a lot of countries without being under any threat -- what can be compared to a hunter that will kill anything that moves just to prove to himself that his gun indeed is a valid extension of his penis.
Now, note that the first situation applies to the 1953 act. (Still not sure I support such skulduggery, even in such a case - the long-term hostility may outweigh temporary gains. The US is hated in Iran.) The second case is more relevant today, as applies to the following paragraph.
Iran is an interesting case. After having a lot of greasy fingers of foreign powers messing in Iran's internal affairs, it ended up hating almost everyone, adopted blatantly reactionary theocracy and became one of the major reasons for turning previously mostly political unity of nearby Arab countries into the ideas of religious bigotry and "we-hate-everyone" jihad. In the end it benefited no one, and after decades of isolation and war (that, BTW, demonstrated that "ideologically powerful" Iran had an army that couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag) reached a condition where even in its state of completely un-democratic theocracy it had to go through a painful political reform that is in progress now. If not meddling of other countries decades ago, Iran would reach its current state much earlier and without costing lives (and limbs) of many people, without strenghtening the political position of Iraq (BTW, another "great fighter" of Middle East that was worth its long-time opponent), and without creating the current amount of religion-based isolation of Arab countries from the rest of the world, and tensions between Arabs themselves. Even Afghanistan probably wouldn't end up in its current situation, and Russian intervention there would be prevented -- at that time Communists learned how not to mess with other countries unless threat from them is evident.
No argument on both points in this paragraph. Who runs the IMF? What cross-section does it represent? (US? Others?)
Since US dollar is artificially "stabilized" and used in international trade because of the lack of usable way to deal with less powerful and more volatile currencies, IMF significantly depends on US.