Oh, and I forgot: Why did you think a link to Al Jazeera was somehow a subscription-only link to the New York Times? They quote Ahmadinejad directly - perhaps you missed that he was quoting the Ayatollah, and then reaffirming his quote. Learn2read.
And are you really saying that in a comparison of the civilian, "peacetime" deaths that Hussein caused, we should be tallying up the insurgents and terrorists - the people who are blowing up marketplaces and mosques, innocents, women and children - we should feel the same way about their deaths as we do the thousands of Kurds that Hussein gassed, or the tens of thousands of ethnic minorities and political dissidents that his regime tortured and killed without warrant?
You're comparing apples and oranges - the mass graves aren't full of Iranian bodies that the Iraqis trucked back across the border just so that they could dump them in a pit. They're full of Iraqi citizens, most of them executed without trials, "disappeared" in the best Venezuelan tradition. For the real bigwigs, their families were also killed - wives raped in front of husbands, children killed in front of mothers. These are the people in those graves. Now tell me how that compares, at all, to insurgent deaths, or to the deaths of coalition troops who fight, whether or not you agree with it, to make that country a better place. They may or may not succeed, but they sure as hell are dying there for better reasons than "I happened to be in a village an all-time mass murdering dictator decided to hit with nerve gas."
If you want to say the real translation is elsewhere, please post it, o Arabic expert. How is it that your version is canonical and not simply anti-war apologist? Proof before grandstanding. Since when is the New York Times shilling for Bush? They *hate* him. Dumb dumb dumb.
Mostly from the war you guys forced him into.
Nope, mostly internal, sorry - Kurds and dissidents. That number actually didn't take into account Iran - it's solely from the mass graves found in Iraq (and we may not have found them all.) He's in the top 10 of all-time mass murderers, up there with guys like Pol Pot, although falling short of Hitler and Stalin (perhaps had he killed in the tens of millions, you'd be more impressed?)
The 35,000 number (which is 38,000) is from Iraq Body Count I presume. This figure only represents "violent deaths reported in two English media publications". It doesn't count insurgents. It doesn't count "terrorists". It completely ignores deaths due to the lack of clean water, sewage, food, heathcare. It ignores collalition losses. It ignores the initial massacre of the Iraqi army during the invasion. The correct figure is nearer 100,000. Now redo your "deaths per year" maths please...
Yes, I'll take math lessons from someone who can't spell simple words. In any case, no, that number was the one that both the feds and several sources (Amnesty, IRC) have posted. Most of the Iraqi army (which numbered in the 1.5 million range) turned and fled. Thanks for stating "the correct figure" without anything to back it up. Solid argument, kid.
only the ones we hear about and when they are forced to acknowledge it and MUST be seen to be doing something about it.
Hm, then why were we the ones that broke the Haditha story?
That's no excuse, but believing that "own soldiers are genetically/culturally unable to torture" is crazy.
Huh. Well, I was really referring to the civilian killings and whatnot, but you took this in a totally fun new direction, even if you conveniently ignored my point. Who are you quoting when you say "own soldiers are genetically/culturally unable to torture"? Not me.
Emm, are we talking about the same Iran? The one that hasn't attacked another country in over a century?
The one that's building nukes? Or is that all faulty intelligence? And how do you account for the many statements that Iran's president has made in recent months, including the tone of the letter he sent Bush? (Right, I know... you haven't read it.) Are those all propaganda-laden mistranslations by liberal newspapers as well? Or perhaps it's the country that is internationally considered the most potentially destabilizing in the region. Maybe it's that their human rights record is way down there with the lowest of the low (you may count the U.S. in that tally if you wish - I concede the point.) But in the anti-Bush anti-war apologist world, Iran is a happy place full of kittens, and just happens to be building a nuclear refinery that's many times more effective than need be for power plants, at crippling cost to their economy. What a coincidence.
that attitude is present in with Bush, he'd quite happilly bring about the end of the world.
Stupidest statement you've made. An iota of evidence? Why not just send the launch orders now? We still have 6,000 nukes just sitting around. Do you ever actually think about these things before you write them, just to check if they make any sense at all? Besides which, ignorance FTW again. While evangelical Christians may believe in the Rapture etc., none in the mainstream (short of KKK/Davidian types, which he is not) desires to cause it, or for that matter, thinks that they, instead of God, are the ones who should. You clearly don't understand the subject matter on a very basic level. That's simply not what his brand (or, really, any widespread brand) of Christianity believes.
Try backing up one or two of your claims, and do some homework before getting on this particularly rickety soapbox again.
it seems that America's leadership has the uncommon Christian attitude that the end of the world isn't really a bad thing and helping it along would be Jesus's work.
Way to show off your ignorance there, buddy. You may disagree with what Bush has done, but he's anything but apocalyptic. There's a large camp of people who will take any shot at him, no matter how little sense it makes. You're among them.
What's dumb about that is that there's plenty of material to use against Bush that makes perfect sense. I'll never understand why people have to resort to the outlandish.
They have no desire to take over the world. They don't want the whole world to be islamic
Actually, Bin Laden and many others have had a long-term vision for how to turn the United States into an Islamic state... but perhaps that's one of those "details" you're considering as trifling. Here, and plenty of other places if you bother to look.
And the "wipe Israel off the map" thing is deliberate disinfomation, no one in power ever said that.
Say Iran does get the bomb. What does that change?
Well, see, here's a word you need to look up: "apocalyptic". In this case, Iran's leadership actually has an uncommon extremist Muslim attitude that the end of the world isn't really a bad thing, and helping it along would be Allah's work. They don't mind triggering it. I know that in your little fantasy world, it's nice to think that they're just perfectly rational, Western-thinking people who just want to do what's best for their country; it's simply not the case. That's why it's relatively safer, for instance, for Israel or India to have the bomb - they truly care about self-preservation. Iran's leadership does not. Ignorance FTL.
No, thinking that invading was an improvement was lunacy.
Well, Saddam's regime killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 people, depending on which mass graves you count, over a period of around 25 years. That's 12,000 - 24,000 people a year. Right now, around 35,000 people have died over three years, the majority of whom died in the initial invasion... and that's if you ignore the lack of state-run torture chambers and the numbers of dead we simply haven't found. So actually, the death rate is lower (if you take the best-case numbers for Saddam) and, in fact, far lower (if you take a more realistic tally) than it was during Saddam's regime. That's right, the war there is killing fewer people than peace was. Learn2Count. And, if you've been paying attention, people who commit atrocities there (including some coalition soldiers) are being taken to task for crimes - this is new for Iraq, on any level. (Please spare me the "put Bush on trial" obvious inane response.)
And the history books don't have that many examples of an occupied country "making it".
Germany, Japan, the Phillipines, dozens of colonial countries thanks to England and France, some of which are doing well and others of which are not. Kuwait, however, I agree - they suffered under occupation. Good point.
Complete conjecture. Would Iran being communist be any worse than the current state of affairs? Without a time machine we cannot answer that.
Great - according to your argument here, it is impossible to discuss what would have happened if anything in the past had happened differently. So why discuss the past at all? You can dismiss anything people say like "NATO won the cold war" by saying "not necessarily - that's your interpretation" but as soon as anyone tries to discuss what would have happened had we not done what we'd done, you say "you can't prove that!" May as well just stick your fingers in your ears and scream so you don't have to hear what other people are saying; it's a toddler's conversational tactic.
If you want to sound smart, don't tell other people they're stupid when you can't spell "hypocrisy" or "sentence" (not to mention "agree", "asinine", "parallels", "aside", and a number of other grade-school words. We'll forgive your butchering of "Reichstag". That's a hard one.)
Nobody's saying that the U.S. has behaved well, either in the past or now, but at least some people are debating it with at least a decent grasp of both sides of the issue; you're just another grandstanding underinformed U.S.-hater, just as bad as the pro-America yahoos.
For instance, World of Warcraft has implemented a fantastic system of "reputation grinds" - a true innovation in the MMORPG space! Just think - do the same thing over and over for hours, and you get something! More hours? More something!
I'm just so glad they came up with it before anyone else did!
As long as they don't weild it as a patent troll I will just mind my own business. Hopefully they have better things to do than use it against competitors.
Lee thinks your plan stupidest idea ever STOP Lincoln not even that big a theater fan STOP Will probably have invented secret service in time to foil plot anyway STOP Come up with something else or quit wasting telegraph bandwidth with these moronic ideas STOP
"The Chicxulub meteor is thought to have been 6 miles wide, while the Wilkes Land meteor could have been up to 30 miles wide -- four or five times wider."
6... and 30... it's definitely five times wider. Not four.
Wow, you went from not making much sense to making none at all. Your country's educational system FTL. And when does you having to use a bucket to crap in have to do with America invading Iraq?
Except for the collapse of a quantum wave function upon a measurement... there's not actually time symmetry there, nor in the (related) measure of entropy; in one direction it always increases, in the other it decreases, and it's not symmetrical in the least.
Only an idiot would compare relativistic time dilation with cellular damage from radiation.
Also, only an idiot would think that any human has ever experienced anything more than a millionth of a second of time dilation, even from orbiting the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
And are you really saying that in a comparison of the civilian, "peacetime" deaths that Hussein caused, we should be tallying up the insurgents and terrorists - the people who are blowing up marketplaces and mosques, innocents, women and children - we should feel the same way about their deaths as we do the thousands of Kurds that Hussein gassed, or the tens of thousands of ethnic minorities and political dissidents that his regime tortured and killed without warrant?
You're comparing apples and oranges - the mass graves aren't full of Iranian bodies that the Iraqis trucked back across the border just so that they could dump them in a pit. They're full of Iraqi citizens, most of them executed without trials, "disappeared" in the best Venezuelan tradition. For the real bigwigs, their families were also killed - wives raped in front of husbands, children killed in front of mothers. These are the people in those graves. Now tell me how that compares, at all, to insurgent deaths, or to the deaths of coalition troops who fight, whether or not you agree with it, to make that country a better place. They may or may not succeed, but they sure as hell are dying there for better reasons than "I happened to be in a village an all-time mass murdering dictator decided to hit with nerve gas."
If you want to say the real translation is elsewhere, please post it, o Arabic expert. How is it that your version is canonical and not simply anti-war apologist? Proof before grandstanding. Since when is the New York Times shilling for Bush? They *hate* him. Dumb dumb dumb.
Mostly from the war you guys forced him into.
Nope, mostly internal, sorry - Kurds and dissidents. That number actually didn't take into account Iran - it's solely from the mass graves found in Iraq (and we may not have found them all.) He's in the top 10 of all-time mass murderers, up there with guys like Pol Pot, although falling short of Hitler and Stalin (perhaps had he killed in the tens of millions, you'd be more impressed?)
The 35,000 number (which is 38,000) is from Iraq Body Count I presume. This figure only represents "violent deaths reported in two English media publications". It doesn't count insurgents. It doesn't count "terrorists". It completely ignores deaths due to the lack of clean water, sewage, food, heathcare. It ignores collalition losses. It ignores the initial massacre of the Iraqi army during the invasion. The correct figure is nearer 100,000. Now redo your "deaths per year" maths please...
Yes, I'll take math lessons from someone who can't spell simple words. In any case, no, that number was the one that both the feds and several sources (Amnesty, IRC) have posted. Most of the Iraqi army (which numbered in the 1.5 million range) turned and fled. Thanks for stating "the correct figure" without anything to back it up. Solid argument, kid.
only the ones we hear about and when they are forced to acknowledge it and MUST be seen to be doing something about it.
Hm, then why were we the ones that broke the Haditha story?
That's no excuse, but believing that "own soldiers are genetically/culturally unable to torture" is crazy.
Huh. Well, I was really referring to the civilian killings and whatnot, but you took this in a totally fun new direction, even if you conveniently ignored my point. Who are you quoting when you say "own soldiers are genetically/culturally unable to torture"? Not me.
Emm, are we talking about the same Iran? The one that hasn't attacked another country in over a century?
The one that's building nukes? Or is that all faulty intelligence? And how do you account for the many statements that Iran's president has made in recent months, including the tone of the letter he sent Bush? (Right, I know... you haven't read it.) Are those all propaganda-laden mistranslations by liberal newspapers as well? Or perhaps it's the country that is internationally considered the most potentially destabilizing in the region. Maybe it's that their human rights record is way down there with the lowest of the low (you may count the U.S. in that tally if you wish - I concede the point.) But in the anti-Bush anti-war apologist world, Iran is a happy place full of kittens, and just happens to be building a nuclear refinery that's many times more effective than need be for power plants, at crippling cost to their economy. What a coincidence.
that attitude is present in with Bush, he'd quite happilly bring about the end of the world.
Stupidest statement you've made. An iota of evidence? Why not just send the launch orders now? We still have 6,000 nukes just sitting around. Do you ever actually think about these things before you write them, just to check if they make any sense at all? Besides which, ignorance FTW again. While evangelical Christians may believe in the Rapture etc., none in the mainstream (short of KKK/Davidian types, which he is not) desires to cause it, or for that matter, thinks that they, instead of God, are the ones who should. You clearly don't understand the subject matter on a very basic level. That's simply not what his brand (or, really, any widespread brand) of Christianity believes.
Try backing up one or two of your claims, and do some homework before getting on this particularly rickety soapbox again.
Way to show off your ignorance there, buddy. You may disagree with what Bush has done, but he's anything but apocalyptic. There's a large camp of people who will take any shot at him, no matter how little sense it makes. You're among them.
What's dumb about that is that there's plenty of material to use against Bush that makes perfect sense. I'll never understand why people have to resort to the outlandish.
Catchy, ain't it?
Actually, Bin Laden and many others have had a long-term vision for how to turn the United States into an Islamic state... but perhaps that's one of those "details" you're considering as trifling. Here, and plenty of other places if you bother to look.
And the "wipe Israel off the map" thing is deliberate disinfomation, no one in power ever said that.
O RLY?
Say Iran does get the bomb. What does that change?
Well, see, here's a word you need to look up: "apocalyptic". In this case, Iran's leadership actually has an uncommon extremist Muslim attitude that the end of the world isn't really a bad thing, and helping it along would be Allah's work. They don't mind triggering it. I know that in your little fantasy world, it's nice to think that they're just perfectly rational, Western-thinking people who just want to do what's best for their country; it's simply not the case. That's why it's relatively safer, for instance, for Israel or India to have the bomb - they truly care about self-preservation. Iran's leadership does not. Ignorance FTL.
No, thinking that invading was an improvement was lunacy.
Well, Saddam's regime killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 people, depending on which mass graves you count, over a period of around 25 years. That's 12,000 - 24,000 people a year. Right now, around 35,000 people have died over three years, the majority of whom died in the initial invasion... and that's if you ignore the lack of state-run torture chambers and the numbers of dead we simply haven't found. So actually, the death rate is lower (if you take the best-case numbers for Saddam) and, in fact, far lower (if you take a more realistic tally) than it was during Saddam's regime. That's right, the war there is killing fewer people than peace was. Learn2Count. And, if you've been paying attention, people who commit atrocities there (including some coalition soldiers) are being taken to task for crimes - this is new for Iraq, on any level. (Please spare me the "put Bush on trial" obvious inane response.)
And the history books don't have that many examples of an occupied country "making it".
Germany, Japan, the Phillipines, dozens of colonial countries thanks to England and France, some of which are doing well and others of which are not. Kuwait, however, I agree - they suffered under occupation. Good point.
Complete conjecture. Would Iran being communist be any worse than the current state of affairs? Without a time machine we cannot answer that.
Great - according to your argument here, it is impossible to discuss what would have happened if anything in the past had happened differently. So why discuss the past at all? You can dismiss anything people say like "NATO won the cold war" by saying "not necessarily - that's your interpretation" but as soon as anyone tries to discuss what would have happened had we not done what we'd done, you say "you can't prove that!" May as well just stick your fingers in your ears and scream so you don't have to hear what other people are saying; it's a toddler's conversational tactic.
If you want to sound smart, don't tell other people they're stupid when you can't spell "hypocrisy" or "sentence" (not to mention "agree", "asinine", "parallels", "aside", and a number of other grade-school words. We'll forgive your butchering of "Reichstag". That's a hard one.)
Nobody's saying that the U.S. has behaved well, either in the past or now, but at least some people are debating it with at least a decent grasp of both sides of the issue; you're just another grandstanding underinformed U.S.-hater, just as bad as the pro-America yahoos.
I'm just so glad they came up with it before anyone else did!
What, exactly, do you think patents are for?
Coulda then been zero to five times bigger, yes?
6... and 30... it's definitely five times wider. Not four.
Darwin 12, South Korea 0
Make sure that you do *not* rely on Ask Slashdot for information.
Heh.
I went to college. I've seen them. They're called rugby players.
"Gah!!! Free from these non-open-source chains that bind me so!"
I wonder what Stallman would do if, for a day, he just couldn't think of anything to complain about.
My balls run on diesel. I guess I'm doomed to a life of ball-ular pollution... Plus if I use the wrong grade, they knock.
All I've ever needed is Natalie Portman.
Learn2Acronym: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTW.
Wow, you went from not making much sense to making none at all. Your country's educational system FTL. And when does you having to use a bucket to crap in have to do with America invading Iraq?
Yeah... we don't really use outhouses anymore. Sorry.
Shouldn't you be emptying out your bucket or something?
Actually, I do, thanks. Enjoy crapping in a bucket.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Everyone knows solar power is *WAY* more available during the day!
Except for the collapse of a quantum wave function upon a measurement... there's not actually time symmetry there, nor in the (related) measure of entropy; in one direction it always increases, in the other it decreases, and it's not symmetrical in the least.
Also, only an idiot would think that any human has ever experienced anything more than a millionth of a second of time dilation, even from orbiting the earth.
Thanks for playing.