Iraqi children have been starving to death by the thousands for well over a year.
Correction (amplification). The sanctions have been in place for over ten years. Children have been starving and dying of cancer at highly above-normal rates for much of that time. After the Gulf War conditions were pretty bad even to start with because of the destruction of basic infrastructure. Iraq has seen children playing in streets covered in raw sewage, emergency vehicles and hospital equipement lying idle for want of spare parts, patients treated with anaesthetic. This was a country that before the Gulf War had a high quality socialized healthcare system and relatively good living standards (due to oil exports, of course). The US has stood by and callously blocked the import of essential medicines, anaesthetics and spare parts. Make no mistake, the US government is fully aware of their complicity in the suffering and death of innocent Iraqi civilians.
We have already seen extremist from the left and the right, within and without, attempt to advance their "cause" on the back of this tragedy. Surely just as horrendous a crime as the act itself. These extremists must also be dealt with.
Um no, fuck off. No way does expressing an opinion ever equate to terrorism. No matter how extreme.
Okay, you probably didn't mean it quite like that. But still, it had to be said. You may hate the opinions of allegedly "extreme" left-wingers like me, but don't go around calling us terrorists.
No-one is saying the terrorists were justified. What we are saying is they may have had legitimate greivances against the US, and maybe, just maybe we should sit up and take notice. There is a difference, it's not that subtle.
First of all, Iraq gets tons of food and medical supplies, which are often intercepted by the military away from their own people.
You have swallowed US bullshit propaganda whole. Learn to be a bit more skeptical, damnit! I trust individuals like Halliday who have staked their careers on these allegations rather than the vicious US government. How many times do we have to say Don't believe government propaganda without question. If they were killing children they wouldn't admit it, would they?
Now to the facts at issue. Iraq does not get enough supplies. For a long time the UK, France, Russia, etc. have been pushing for better targeted sanctions - all of them acknowledged there was a humanitarian relief problem. The US has up to now maintained its hardline stance. More info and analysis acan be found at the excellent CASI site:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/index.html
Notable quotes:
"if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998" Unicef, 12 August 1999.
"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998
Great question! As has been pointed out already, the mainstream media by and large don't want to face up to unpalatable truths about American aggression and support of repressive regimes worldwide for the last >50 years. Try these:
"* bizarre or repetitive behavior patterns such as uncontrollable head banging, screaming fits, arm flapping
* self-destructive behavior
* very distressed by minor changes in the environment...
Not a pleasant existence, by any means (and I am talking about the most severe cases, here). I think this is a justified use for the Christian term "natural evil" - evil for which no-one can be held responsible.
if the approach was changed from RTFM to a little friendlier attack.
RTFM?? You should count yourself lucky. The more common approach seems to be "RTFM! Oops, wait, I haven't written any docs yet... But anyway, stop whining, and WTFM!"
First of all, the "unix model" of streams of data is absurd when talking about interactive applications. Do I need to set up a filter to insert a table into my document? Now, I know that that there are those of you who use LaTeX with a stream model to spell-check, etc, but I'm sorry -- you are living a crude, stone-age world. I like having my mispelled words underlined. The green-screen luddites need to get a clue.
Hear hear! Someone needed to deflate this stupid idea. I'm a command-line guy as well, but I wouldn't want to do something like try draw a diagram at the command line. (It has some novelty, I admit, but it quickly wears off and becomes annoying.)
What I'm wondering is what IBM will think about this proposed law. Sure they could probably add the necessary mods to Linux lickety-spit and release a legal version - but all the guru developers would desert it in droves or go underground - and the guru developers are what has made Linux the world-class kernel it is today. And the whole open source development of Linux in the US would be effectively illegal, because it would be "unvetted"! It just doesn't seem plausible that IBM would support this law as it stands - far too broad.
Open source is useful not because everyone is a programmer (they aren't), but because the potential is there for you to hire/ask someone who is, if you want a defect fixed or a new feature. This proposal is just an extension of the open source idea, in a way - design for customisability, not just legally allow customisation.
This is talking about customised solutions. Office apps aren't customised solutions, by and large - although MS Office allows you to build "apps" on top of it with VB(A), COM etc. But the point is you wouldn't necessarily be competing directly with Office here.
most users, on the order of 75% or more, will never ever want to customize their productivity tools beyond arranging a button or two, or perhaps defining a macro.
That's not the point. Office users (corporates/organizations) might be able to save lots of time by hiring programmers to automate repititive operations, but to make this viable it needs to be easy to script things in a modular way - without having to poke around in (often undocumented and seat-of-the-pants) open source code unless absolutely necessary. If you only want to fire 10 CTRL+X events you shouldn't have to hire a PhD candidate to make it happen!
For the rest of us, there are plenty of tools - command line tools like grep, sed, awk, and hundreds of others do just great.
The fileutils etc. are stuck in the 70s. What about operations that are only accessible via GUIs, like much of KDE? GUIs need to be fully programmable, or at least "scriptable". (Defining a "simple" non-Turing-complete scripting language is pretty pointless IMO because you'll always end up needing to make it Turing-complete eventually.)
Yeah, and as a result the default UI leaves most of us completely lost. C-X C-S? WTF??
What is the fastest way to turn on the inadequate-but-better-than-nothing Windows-style feel? I found the help impossible to navigate last time I tried.
The reason for this is simple. MS does not lose many customers due to this crap coding. They can afford to code up completely stupid O(N^3) algorithms in a rush and slap over the more critical bugs with half-assed fixes, as long as they don't lose too many customers over it (ever tried to save a big file direct to a floppy? - sure feels like an O(N^3) algorithm - I'd swear my Amstrad PCW had a faster data transfer rate!)
The trouble is, MS has so many monopolies now, they will not lose very many customers over nearly anything now - which gives them impunity. (Their main competition for Word etc. is themselves, so if the old version has a worse version of the same bug, that's an incentive to upgrade!!) Which is exactly why tough and swift antitrust enforcement is sorely needed.
Moreover, the logical conclusion of that argument is we should be fucking like rabbits, to avoid missing another Beethoven. Seriously - there is nothing in that argument that makes it stop at conception. As if nothing was more important than producing more children(!?!) Which is exactly the mistake pro-lifers make.
I'm exceptionally smart, but I hardly ever suffer from significant depression - despite reading pretty grim political essays most days (ZNet sustainers).
Who knows though, you might be right and I might be an outlier or not smart enough, but remember observational selection effects: You pay more attention to what makes you go "wow!"
At a certain point you have to make quality of life judgements.
Bringing up a child with severe autism, for example, can suck up all your time and can be extremely frustrating, according to what I've heard (that's assuming you're not rich enough to pay for 24hr nursing support, which most people aren't). It's really not a fate I would wish on anyone. And the severely autistic kid I worked with didn't seem to be too happy, either (this was a pretty good day, for him, according to his parents). Can't be much fun if you're unable to emotionally bond with anyone else in the world. IIRC, some animals go completely insane if removed from their mothers and isolated at birth - but that's effectively the experience of severely autistic kids - they don't appear to have the capacity to form relationships with other people.
It may sound really cruel, but I think it would be better - for everyone - had they never been born, in the cases of severe autism.
But I suspect that MDs are dispensed with for routine pregnancy counselling and diagnoses in order to save money,
Oh, and privatized hospitals never try to cut costs. Noooo, sir.
Re:Why you should help
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Shouldn't that be the Federal Govt's job? I'm not trolling, I'm making a serious point.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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These people who consider "all life to be sacred", have no problem bombing clinics and shooting doctors for what they consider the greater good. These people are terrorists as well and are just as bad as any Palestinian suicide bomber.
Similar hypocrisy from our leaders. Tony Blair: "These people have utterly no respect for the sanctity of human life"... then next minute he's implying massive military retaliation.
I'm sorry, the hard truth is hardly anyone believes in the sanctity of human life - only pacifists, and there aren't many of them about any more. Obviously those calling for total carpetbombing of Palestine or Afghanistan don't believe in the sanctity of human life. Some of them don't even see Arabs as human at all. Now that is sick.
On the other hand, if you commit suicide, the Prophet said you will be condemned to relive your suicide for all enternity. Scary.
The question is, is attacking your enemy in a way certain to cause your death, still suicide? It's a debatable point.
Moral complexities are something that religious nuts never think about, though. Everything is black and white for them. To keep this up they have to throw away rationality.
Re:And here comes Spam, too.
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That just takes the biscuit. Snivelling little shits can be the most self-righteous of all.
Re:What the hell do you expect?
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They have attempted to live with these animals and treat them as human.
You, sir, are a racist. Hitler had two legs, but that does not make all two-legged people evil. Likewise, just because a handful of Palestinians were suicide bombers, does not mean all Palestinians are like that.
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Correction (amplification). The sanctions have been in place for over ten years. Children have been starving and dying of cancer at highly above-normal rates for much of that time. After the Gulf War conditions were pretty bad even to start with because of the destruction of basic infrastructure. Iraq has seen children playing in streets covered in raw sewage, emergency vehicles and hospital equipement lying idle for want of spare parts, patients treated with anaesthetic. This was a country that before the Gulf War had a high quality socialized healthcare system and relatively good living standards (due to oil exports, of course). The US has stood by and callously blocked the import of essential medicines, anaesthetics and spare parts. Make no mistake, the US government is fully aware of their complicity in the suffering and death of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Um no, fuck off. No way does expressing an opinion ever equate to terrorism. No matter how extreme.
Okay, you probably didn't mean it quite like that. But still, it had to be said. You may hate the opinions of allegedly "extreme" left-wingers like me, but don't go around calling us terrorists.
You have swallowed US bullshit propaganda whole. Learn to be a bit more skeptical, damnit! I trust individuals like Halliday who have staked their careers on these allegations rather than the vicious US government. How many times do we have to say Don't believe government propaganda without question. If they were killing children they wouldn't admit it, would they?
Now to the facts at issue. Iraq does not get enough supplies. For a long time the UK, France, Russia, etc. have been pushing for better targeted sanctions - all of them acknowledged there was a humanitarian relief problem. The US has up to now maintained its hardline stance. More info and analysis acan be found at the excellent CASI site:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/index.html
"if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998" Unicef, 12 August 1999.
"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998
The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People
Blowback
Terrorism, Television, and the Rage for Vengeance
For some background on Israel - try this for example: America's Last Taboo (Edward Said)
More at ZNet.
Please post more links to analysis as you find them! From whatever perspective. This is a much neglected issue.
"* bizarre or repetitive behavior patterns such as uncontrollable head banging, screaming fits, arm flapping
* self-destructive behavior
* very distressed by minor changes in the environment...
Not a pleasant existence, by any means (and I am talking about the most severe cases, here). I think this is a justified use for the Christian term "natural evil" - evil for which no-one can be held responsible.
RTFM?? You should count yourself lucky. The more common approach seems to be "RTFM! Oops, wait, I haven't written any docs yet... But anyway, stop whining, and WTFM!"
I've been guilty of this.
Hear hear! Someone needed to deflate this stupid idea. I'm a command-line guy as well, but I wouldn't want to do something like try draw a diagram at the command line. (It has some novelty, I admit, but it quickly wears off and becomes annoying.)
That's not the point. Office users (corporates/organizations) might be able to save lots of time by hiring programmers to automate repititive operations, but to make this viable it needs to be easy to script things in a modular way - without having to poke around in (often undocumented and seat-of-the-pants) open source code unless absolutely necessary. If you only want to fire 10 CTRL+X events you shouldn't have to hire a PhD candidate to make it happen!
For the rest of us, there are plenty of tools - command line tools like grep, sed, awk, and hundreds of others do just great.
The fileutils etc. are stuck in the 70s. What about operations that are only accessible via GUIs, like much of KDE? GUIs need to be fully programmable, or at least "scriptable". (Defining a "simple" non-Turing-complete scripting language is pretty pointless IMO because you'll always end up needing to make it Turing-complete eventually.)
What is the fastest way to turn on the inadequate-but-better-than-nothing Windows-style feel? I found the help impossible to navigate last time I tried.
The trouble is, MS has so many monopolies now, they will not lose very many customers over nearly anything now - which gives them impunity. (Their main competition for Word etc. is themselves, so if the old version has a worse version of the same bug, that's an incentive to upgrade!!) Which is exactly why tough and swift antitrust enforcement is sorely needed.
Who knows though, you might be right and I might be an outlier or not smart enough, but remember observational selection effects: You pay more attention to what makes you go "wow!"
Bringing up a child with severe autism, for example, can suck up all your time and can be extremely frustrating, according to what I've heard (that's assuming you're not rich enough to pay for 24hr nursing support, which most people aren't). It's really not a fate I would wish on anyone. And the severely autistic kid I worked with didn't seem to be too happy, either (this was a pretty good day, for him, according to his parents). Can't be much fun if you're unable to emotionally bond with anyone else in the world. IIRC, some animals go completely insane if removed from their mothers and isolated at birth - but that's effectively the experience of severely autistic kids - they don't appear to have the capacity to form relationships with other people.
It may sound really cruel, but I think it would be better - for everyone - had they never been born, in the cases of severe autism.
Oh, and privatized hospitals never try to cut costs. Noooo, sir.
Similar hypocrisy from our leaders. Tony Blair: "These people have utterly no respect for the sanctity of human life"... then next minute he's implying massive military retaliation.
I'm sorry, the hard truth is hardly anyone believes in the sanctity of human life - only pacifists, and there aren't many of them about any more. Obviously those calling for total carpetbombing of Palestine or Afghanistan don't believe in the sanctity of human life. Some of them don't even see Arabs as human at all. Now that is sick.
The question is, is attacking your enemy in a way certain to cause your death, still suicide? It's a debatable point.
Moral complexities are something that religious nuts never think about, though. Everything is black and white for them. To keep this up they have to throw away rationality.
You, sir, are a racist. Hitler had two legs, but that does not make all two-legged people evil. Likewise, just because a handful of Palestinians were suicide bombers, does not mean all Palestinians are like that.