One of the great flaws of the Soviet Union is their (sometimes senseless) brutality. Of course the US has been equally brutal sometimes, for example in Vietnam and in Iraq (where they leveled Fallujah, indiscriminately killing civilians). If the Soviet Union and the US asked me how they should conduct their military operations, I would have told them to avoid killing civilians, and not to torture and kill their political enemies, but they didn't ask me.
My original point is that the Afghanis didn't want us there. The elections that we set up were a sham (illiterate peasants casting votes when they had no idea what voting was). We're justified in fighting the Taliban, who attacked us, but we're imposing ourselves on Afghanistan.
It's hard for me to find any reason why the Afghanis should prefer us to the Soviets, except that the Soviets were more effective in creating security, schools, equality for women, industry, housing, electricity, health care, and a modern infrastructure in at least the urban areas and some rural areas. The Soviets conducted those mining and mineral surveys, don't forget. (Although it's not fair to compare the Soviets to somebody as incompetent as George W. Bush.)
If I had a choice of US occupation and the government by the likes of Taliban and whoever is going to take over Iraq after we leave (Shiite extremists owned by Iran?) I would choose US occupation every time.
The US government didn't pay any attention to their desires, democratic or otherwise, or to international law.
And a lot more people were killed as a result of that US interference than Wikileaks will ever bring about. After the Soviets were defeated, the Mujahadeen went on a killing spree with brutal tortures (castration, etc.).
Nixon appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan as his secretary of Health and Human Services, and he let Moynihan promote some very progressive policies, like the guaranteed annual income, and a health policy that was better than Obama's.
Ralph Nader said that on domestic policy, Nixon was better than the Clinton Administration.
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among liberals.
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among moderates.
"Petty snark, affronted whining, thoughtless jingoism, blatant fearmongering" people can exist in any social group. Please indicate yours and I'm sure we'll find plenty of "leaders" of your political party of choice who exact these same qualities.
False equivalence. There really is something wrong with conservatives/Republicans today. There were several articles and editorials in Science magazine, about the Bush Administration policies on science. They were really worried, and unusually outspoken. They said they had problems with previous administrations before, Democratic and Republican, but nothing like this.
When the Republican Party tries to force science teachers to teach creationism on a par with Darwin, even Republican scientists started to worry.
Thanks for the rhetoric, Mr. Ayers. It's a shame you didn't set off more bombs in your heyday, eh?
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among conservatives. Petty snark, affronted whining, thoughtless jingoism, blatant fearmongering
It's not really argumentation, it's more like football hooligans trying to shout down the other team as a prelude to throwing beer bottles.
On the Wall Street Journal comments pages, there are right-wing wackos who spam the forum by repeating messages like "Obama=Nazi" and "government never works". They make no pretense of logical argument. They don't understand what a fact is. They think just because they believe it, it's true. And they make rational discussion impossible.
I really am nostalgic for the old days with conservatives like William Buckley, who would say things I disagreed with but would at least justify it with an intelligent argument.
If the system is so fragile that you're the only one who can work on it, then you're doing a bad job. What if you get hit by a bus?
So what is the good practice for this?
A technical writer told me that when he documents a system, they put the critical passwords in escrow, perhaps in a sealed envelope in a safe.
I wouldn't trust passwords sealed in a safe unless I had tested them. And I can imagine how one set of passwords in one location in a safe might not be enough. They wouldn't survive a disaster like the World Trade Center, or New Orleans floods.
I think Slashdot had an article a while back about a scholar who was complaining how frustrating it is to try to use Google scans for scholarly purposes.
That's true. Anybody can put stuff like this up on the Internet and (usually) get away with it.
It's extremely unlikely that Hitler's family is going to claim copyright.
The problem is that the people who are best able to put this stuff on the Internet -- librarians and academic researchers -- can't do it because their organization or their grant agencies requires them to clear it with their lawyers.
So we can get an amateur web site, maybe anonymous, with a bunch of early wire and tape recordings. But we can't get a well-organized, scholarly collection. I can find an old German silent movie on the Internet Archive, and it's fun to watch, but if I'm using it seriously I have to ask, "Where did this come from?" It's basically anonymous.
I went to the New York Public Library performing arts collection at Lincoln Center, which has a big multimedia collection. I wanted to do the right thing.
I asked the librarian in charge of these things, "What recordings do you have in your collection that I could legally copy and post on the Internet?"
He said, "Nothing!"
I didn't believe him. He said he had attended a copyright lecture by a lawyer and that's what the lawyer told them. I thought they were just being overcautious. But now I understand.
Similar situation -- according to the New Scientist, some German audio engineers found the first tape or wire recordings ever made (may have been Hitler speeches as I recall).
They carefully recovered them and converted them to digital form, but because they couldn't establish copyright permission, they couldn't release the reconstructions.
Thanks for the clarification. I couldn't find the story of the German obstetrician after 5 minutes of searching the NEJM, so I recounted it from memory. As I recall, she didn't want to leave her patients (and she may have refused at first), but her supervisor ordered her to leave because of the danger, and she did.
On what fucking planet do you blame the actions of the Taliban on anyone other than the Taliban? On Planet Republican, where Thiessen blames it on Assange.
If Assange is responsible for killings of informants by the Taliban, then the Bush Administration is equally responsible for the killings of MSF workers by the Taliban.
I think the killing of medical workers is even worse than the killing of informants. The informants are informing to advance their own personal situation (even their safety), whereas the MSF workers are motivated by non-political humanitarian goals. You are free to disagree.
If you give a machine gun to a soldier and tell him to massacre everybody in a village, I think that soldier is criminally responsible and should be prosecuted. But the people who gave the orders, and the people who were responsible for the policy, were even more responsible and should also be prosecuted.
I don't expect Bush, Powell, Thiessen, etc. to be prosecuted, because the law has been hijacked by the interests of the powerful. But the people who are most responsible for needless killings are the people at the top.
It doesn't look like you've spent much time thinking the matter out. The Taliban aren't "psychopaths." It's their country, and they're fighting the invaders. You can't understand what's going on if you don't make an effort to understand your enemy. So I'll excuse you from any further discussion of this matter.
The term "psychopath" might better be applied to those American soldiers who gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and killed her along with her family. Or the American soldiers who hung Dilawar from the ceiling and kicked him until he died. Or any of the other torturers, up the chain of command.
During the great days of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Languages Printing House translated it into every major language, and sold copies at third-world prices. Those devious Communists -- promoting socialism by distributing cheap science books! Many scientists, engineers and mathematicians working today were inspired to go into their careers by this book.
The most notable was Grigory Perelman (no relation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Perelman who solved the last step of the Poincaré conjecture and was eccentric even by Slashdot standards. Grigory's father gave him Physics for Entertainment.
It used to sell for $3.99. Then it went out of print, and I tried to buy it, but it was going for $200. Now somebody reprinted it in a (probably) unauthorized edition, and it's also in the Internet Archive.
The Soviet publishing house had an army of editors translating Russian books into all the world's languages, and they probably did Fichtenholz if it's that good.
Dover Publications got started reprinting out-of-print and out-of-copyright science books, and as I recall, a lot of their trade list was Soviet books translated into English. At that time, the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they were happy to see their work reprinted. One thing the Soviets did well was science education. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin)
You might check out the old Dover catalog to see if there are any out-of-copyright English translations. Scan them and put them on the Internet.
That is exactly what they said. The Coalition forces dropped pamphlets saying, “In order to continue the humanitarian aid, pass over any information related to Taliban or Al-Qaida to the coalition forces.”
(It's amazing how right wingers just make up facts without knowing anything about the subject at all. Then they accuse others of making things up. I can never figure out whether they're lying or stupid.)
We sent doctors. We said we'd compensate those who helped us, including by getting them medical care. DWB's resources are limited. Giving people more medical care is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Doctors have an ethical obligation to give medical care without conditions.
Giving medical care on the condition that patients inform on the Taliban (and get killed if the Taliban find out) is a bad thing. It's a violation of medical ethics.
Doctors Without Borders is one of the largest medical charities in the world (they've actually told contributors that they didn't need more money). They're far more effective than other organizations because they work closely with local doctors and patients, over decades, and know their needs, rather than parachuting in for a month's third-world charity vacation like some of the U.S. medical charities. The Journal of the American Medical Association had an article about medical crises telling doctors to stay home if they're not part of an experienced program. They get in the way.
This kind of help does more harm than good. Specifically, the Coalition forces' medical "relief" teams took sides among the combatants and turned medical workers into military targets. The Taliban couldn't tell the difference between them and they were getting killed.
The only bad thing here is your bogus characterization of this as politicization of doctors by America. The people who politicized doctors are the Taliban. The people who drove DWB out are the Taliban.
And your source of information is?
(I'll answer for you. Your source is, you made it up.)
The U.S. forces clearly politicized the delivery of medical care. They were open about it.
Here's the NEJM article about it. I'm not sure whether it's available free on line so I'll quote substantially:
Perspective
International Medical Aid Collateral Damage — Médecins sans Frontières Leaves Afghanistan and Iraq
Ingrid T. Katz, M.D., M.H.S. and Alexi A. Wright, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 351:2571-2573 December 16, 2004
MSF worked in Iraq for a total of four years over two separate periods but spent more than two decades in Afghanistan — throughout the Soviet occupation, the Taliban regime, and the military action led by the United States....
At the same time, many NGOs argued that the work of humanitarian-aid groups was being coopted by the coalition forces to serve as part of its campaign to win “hearts and minds” in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout the reconstruction period in Afghanistan, MSF objected to the blurring of boundaries between the military and humanitarian-aid communities, criticizing the coalition government's strategy of deploying provincial reconstruction teams that placed soldiers and civilians side by side when delivering food, medical care, and economic assistance to the Afghanis. They argued that nationals were unable to distinguish between MSF clinics and clinics built by the military.
The Pentagon repeatedly denied allegations that the provincial reconstruction teams endangered aid workers, but the U.S. government continued to refer to NGOs as partners in the war effort. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to them as “force multipliers” and members of the
One could argue that the reason why leaders like Fidel Castor and Kim Song Il aren't assassinated or gotten rid of in some way is because they help, indirectly, to give the Military Industrial Complex a reason to exist.
But that would be just crazy, and I certainly wouldn't try and espouse it.
I thought the reason we stopped trying to assassinate leaders like Fidel Castro was that the last time we tried it, John F. Kennedy got assassinated first.
Some guy got to rant his opinion on a popular newspaper. So what does that mean... Not much... That is a neat thing about our government people have the rights to express their opinion
The problem is that people like this, who believe that you should torture people, ignore international law and the U.S. constitution, and kidnap anyone you feel like anywhere around the world, are working in the White House, and writing speeches for the President of the U.S., and people in command take him seriously.
Read this review of Thiessen's Courting Disaster. You'll learn to doubt everything he says.
You mean like:
Thiessen’s book, whose subtitle is “How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit. In addition, Thiessen attacks the Obama Administration for having banned techniques such as waterboarding. “Americans could die as a result,” he writes.
Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”
All this review does is list Thiessen's claims and show how he's completely wrong on every one.
Let's keep it straight just who has blood on their hands.
Doctors Without Borders was in Afghanistan for 30 years, running rural health clinics and supporting and teaching Afghani doctors and nurses. They treated everyone without regard to who they were affiliated with or which side they were on. Their medical clinics were one of the few neutral areas in Afghanistan, respected by everyone, where guns were not permitted.
After the U.S. invasion, Colin Powell moved in a lot of U.S. medical charity workers, and referred to medical workers as "force extenders." The U.S. passed out fliers telling villagers that if they joined the American side and turned in the Taliban, they would get all kinds of benefits, including medical services.
That politicized medical services in Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders was no longer safe, and had to leave the country. I read an account in which a German obstetrician was crying and refused to leave her patients -- Afghanistan has one of the highest infant and maternal death rates in the world -- and her supervisor had to order her to leave. It was too dangerous.
The other problems like checkpoints manned by soldiers who didn't speak the local language, and killed civilian families who didin't understand their orders, is too much to get into here.
The Bush Administration has blood on its hands. Thiessen was George W. Bush's speechwriter. Thiessen has blood on his hands.
Thiessen is arguing that we should ignore international law. He's using the logic of terrorists.
In the late 90s I was in a PoliSci class with a refugee from Afghanistan, she was NOT happy about the Soviets (she was not a Muslim extremist, I don't even think she was Muslim).
I did say we're dealing with lesser evils. The Communist regime that took over Afghanistan was pretty brutal, in the way they treated dissidents and prisoners, for example. But the Mujahadeen was just as brutal. The Soviets were actually a moderating, Westernizing influence, and they improved peoples' lives. They sent Afghani women to Soviet universities. I used to read countrywide statistics on infant mortality and literacy. The communist countries were (and are) up to Western levels.
I'd like to know what that woman's complaint was about the Soviets. She might well have had a good reason. But I'd like to ask her if she preferred the U.S.-supported Mujahadin.
While I'm sure they did a bit (forced) improvements, they also dropped exploding toys around villages to hurt the natives moral.
The exploding toys turned out to be a false propaganda story. One of the Afghan anti-Soviet groups took out a full-page ad in the New York Times showing a doll that had exploded. People checked it out. It turned out the doll was a fake -- the ad agency admitted creating it for the ad. The truth turned out to be that the Soviets were dropping "butterfly mines", which were kind of like a mousetrap, and children weren't sophisticated enough to avoid them and would pick them up and be crippled or killed. Outrageous. The human rights organizations oppose all landmines. Unfortunately, the U.S. military also uses them, and also kills a lot of children. Vietnamese children and other civilians were being crippled and killed for years afterwards. When you drop 100,000 landmines from planes on peasant fields, it's almost impossible to get them out.
This girl claimed (I have no reason to think she lied) that she personally knew at least 5 people who were mauled and killed by mines, and she was in a rather rural area that was not directly involved in combat.
That's a good reason to hate the Soviets. She was caught in the war. If they were treating her the way the Americans are treating the Iraqis right now, she had good reason to hate them. However, the war went on for so long because the U.S. was supplying the Mujihadeen with weapons, supplies and money. When Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to start a war with the Soviets in Afghanistan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski#Afghanistan he knew very well that most of the casualties in war are civilians and children. I'd like to condemn the Soviets for their brutal excesses and landmines, but we just did the same in Iraq.
But on the other side of the balance, the Soviets came into third-world countries in medieval poverty, and built modern factories, industry, infrastructure -- and schools for boys and girls. Just read that NYT article. That's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did here. The Bush Administration paid contractors hundreds of millions of dollars to do far more modest projects, and they couldn't build a rickety schoolhouse, even when (as they realized) soldiers' lives and American policy depended on it.
So back to my original point: We (and the Afghanis) would have been better off if we left the Soviets alone in Afghanistan.
I do miss my intercity community college, half the people there were refugees and exiles from the east, the other half was normal immigrants from Russia and Mexico.
Yes, those college classes when you meet diverse people for the first time who are completely different from you are a great experience. It's hard to find again. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, calculated that we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war.
Sometimes I think of what America would be like if we had spent $3 trillion on education instead.
1. Paid huge amounts of money to the taliban, allowing them to do what they are currently doing
It's worse. The U.S. *created* the Taliban, when it supported the Mujahadeen against the Soviets in the 1980s, by supplying them with anti-helicopter missiles.
The Soviets were doing a pretty good job. They created collective farms, with modern machinery and agricultural technology, build housing, medical clinics -- and schools that educated boys *and* girls with a secular education. The Soviets successfully encouraged equality of the sexes, which everyone is so worried about. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html
We're dealing with lesser evils here.
The worst consequence of our actions was that we destroyed a secular universal education system and replaced it with an extremist Islamist education system. The Soviets taught kids that Communism was better than U.S. capitalism (a proposition easily subject to verification). The Taliban taught kids -- boys -- to destroy the U.S.
If the Communists had managed to keep control of Afghanistan, they would have thrown Osama bin Laden in jail (yes, they would have violated his rights) and we wouldn't be having this problem.
Spitzer resigned, true. He had lots of powerful enemies on Wall Street, he was seriously weakened by "Troopergate" and was under investigation for financial misdeeds surrounding the prostitutes (bribery, misuse of campaign funds) he was procuring that it's hardly surprising that he had to go.
Spitzer's escorts had nothing to do with bribery or misuse of campaign funds. He used his own money on his own credit card.
He was investigated by a Republican attorney general. Republicans have an extensive history of using their investigative and prosecutorial powers for political purposes. Which is what this was. After they achieved their real goal, Spitzer's resignation, they dropped the prosecution -- because it wouldn't have succeeded. Nobody has been convicted on charges like that.
I couldn't understand why Spitzer resigned. His own wife (a lawyer) didn't want him to resign. I wish he had fought back, like Bill Clinton did. I guess he figured that with all his money, he didn't have to put up with this.
Now we have a governor, David Patterson, who was good when his job was to get along with everybody but now in the face of Republican obstruction can't get anything done, and who replaced a liberal Senator with a Blue Dog Democrat who used to work for the tobacco companies.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything in that Wikipedia link about 1-2 million being killed. It says thousands were killed. The US invasion was responsible for 10,000-20,000 deaths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)
One of the great flaws of the Soviet Union is their (sometimes senseless) brutality. Of course the US has been equally brutal sometimes, for example in Vietnam and in Iraq (where they leveled Fallujah, indiscriminately killing civilians). If the Soviet Union and the US asked me how they should conduct their military operations, I would have told them to avoid killing civilians, and not to torture and kill their political enemies, but they didn't ask me.
My original point is that the Afghanis didn't want us there. The elections that we set up were a sham (illiterate peasants casting votes when they had no idea what voting was). We're justified in fighting the Taliban, who attacked us, but we're imposing ourselves on Afghanistan.
It's hard for me to find any reason why the Afghanis should prefer us to the Soviets, except that the Soviets were more effective in creating security, schools, equality for women, industry, housing, electricity, health care, and a modern infrastructure in at least the urban areas and some rural areas. The Soviets conducted those mining and mineral surveys, don't forget. (Although it's not fair to compare the Soviets to somebody as incompetent as George W. Bush.)
Exactly. Nixon produced some very progressive policy. Too bad he was such a paranoid asshole in other respects.
Nobody's perfect. Not even Ralph Nader.
If I had a choice of US occupation and the government by the likes of Taliban and whoever is going to take over Iraq after we leave (Shiite extremists owned by Iran?) I would choose US occupation every time.
A lot of Afghans felt that if they had a choice between Soviet occupation and the forces that the US was imposing in their place, they would prefer the Soviets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html
The US government didn't pay any attention to their desires, democratic or otherwise, or to international law.
And a lot more people were killed as a result of that US interference than Wikileaks will ever bring about. After the Soviets were defeated, the Mujahadeen went on a killing spree with brutal tortures (castration, etc.).
Heck, these guys make me nostalgic for Nixon.
Nixon appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan as his secretary of Health and Human Services, and he let Moynihan promote some very progressive policies, like the guaranteed annual income, and a health policy that was better than Obama's.
Ralph Nader said that on domestic policy, Nixon was better than the Clinton Administration.
Actually a minority of people are liberal and as of 2009 40% stated they are conservative in the US.
Depends on what you mean by "conservative."
Conservatives are the guys who say, "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare."
If you were to look at the polls on the issues, you'd find that majorities of Americans consistently say that they want Medicare for all, for example.
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among liberals.
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among moderates.
"Petty snark, affronted whining, thoughtless jingoism, blatant fearmongering" people can exist in any social group. Please indicate yours and I'm sure we'll find plenty of "leaders" of your political party of choice who exact these same qualities.
False equivalence. There really is something wrong with conservatives/Republicans today. There were several articles and editorials in Science magazine, about the Bush Administration policies on science. They were really worried, and unusually outspoken. They said they had problems with previous administrations before, Democratic and Republican, but nothing like this.
When the Republican Party tries to force science teachers to teach creationism on a par with Darwin, even Republican scientists started to worry.
If you want the details, Google "Chris Mooney".
Thanks for the rhetoric, Mr. Ayers. It's a shame you didn't set off more bombs in your heyday, eh?
I'm continually surprised by what passes for argumentation among conservatives. Petty snark, affronted whining, thoughtless jingoism, blatant fearmongering
It's not really argumentation, it's more like football hooligans trying to shout down the other team as a prelude to throwing beer bottles.
On the Wall Street Journal comments pages, there are right-wing wackos who spam the forum by repeating messages like "Obama=Nazi" and "government never works". They make no pretense of logical argument. They don't understand what a fact is. They think just because they believe it, it's true. And they make rational discussion impossible.
I really am nostalgic for the old days with conservatives like William Buckley, who would say things I disagreed with but would at least justify it with an intelligent argument.
If the system is so fragile that you're the only one who can work on it, then you're doing a bad job. What if you get hit by a bus?
So what is the good practice for this?
A technical writer told me that when he documents a system, they put the critical passwords in escrow, perhaps in a sealed envelope in a safe.
I wouldn't trust passwords sealed in a safe unless I had tested them. And I can imagine how one set of passwords in one location in a safe might not be enough. They wouldn't survive a disaster like the World Trade Center, or New Orleans floods.
I think Slashdot had an article a while back about a scholar who was complaining how frustrating it is to try to use Google scans for scholarly purposes.
That's true. Anybody can put stuff like this up on the Internet and (usually) get away with it.
It's extremely unlikely that Hitler's family is going to claim copyright.
The problem is that the people who are best able to put this stuff on the Internet -- librarians and academic researchers -- can't do it because their organization or their grant agencies requires them to clear it with their lawyers.
So we can get an amateur web site, maybe anonymous, with a bunch of early wire and tape recordings. But we can't get a well-organized, scholarly collection. I can find an old German silent movie on the Internet Archive, and it's fun to watch, but if I'm using it seriously I have to ask, "Where did this come from?" It's basically anonymous.
I went to the New York Public Library performing arts collection at Lincoln Center, which has a big multimedia collection. I wanted to do the right thing.
I asked the librarian in charge of these things, "What recordings do you have in your collection that I could legally copy and post on the Internet?"
He said, "Nothing!"
I didn't believe him. He said he had attended a copyright lecture by a lawyer and that's what the lawyer told them. I thought they were just being overcautious. But now I understand.
Similar situation -- according to the New Scientist, some German audio engineers found the first tape or wire recordings ever made (may have been Hitler speeches as I recall).
They carefully recovered them and converted them to digital form, but because they couldn't establish copyright permission, they couldn't release the reconstructions.
This illustrates the difference between lawyers and scientists.
When a scientist finds out that the facts he assumed were wrong, he changes his mind.
When a lawyer finds out that the facts he assumed were wrong, he just keeps going on and on repeating himself.
Thanks for the clarification. I couldn't find the story of the German obstetrician after 5 minutes of searching the NEJM, so I recounted it from memory. As I recall, she didn't want to leave her patients (and she may have refused at first), but her supervisor ordered her to leave because of the danger, and she did.
Some doctors are willing to risk their lives for their patients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Urbani
On what fucking planet and what fucking logic do you blame the actions of psychopaths on anyone other than the psychopaths?
Try visiting planet logic. They are both responsible.
You will recall that the original subject of this article was Marc Thiessen's Op-Ed in the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080202627_pf.html Thiessen argued that Assange had "blood on [his] hands," "moral cuplability" etc. for the Afgan informants who will be killed by the Taliban.
On what fucking planet do you blame the actions of the Taliban on anyone other than the Taliban? On Planet Republican, where Thiessen blames it on Assange.
If Assange is responsible for killings of informants by the Taliban, then the Bush Administration is equally responsible for the killings of MSF workers by the Taliban.
I think the killing of medical workers is even worse than the killing of informants. The informants are informing to advance their own personal situation (even their safety), whereas the MSF workers are motivated by non-political humanitarian goals. You are free to disagree.
If you give a machine gun to a soldier and tell him to massacre everybody in a village, I think that soldier is criminally responsible and should be prosecuted. But the people who gave the orders, and the people who were responsible for the policy, were even more responsible and should also be prosecuted.
I don't expect Bush, Powell, Thiessen, etc. to be prosecuted, because the law has been hijacked by the interests of the powerful. But the people who are most responsible for needless killings are the people at the top.
It doesn't look like you've spent much time thinking the matter out. The Taliban aren't "psychopaths." It's their country, and they're fighting the invaders. You can't understand what's going on if you don't make an effort to understand your enemy. So I'll excuse you from any further discussion of this matter.
The term "psychopath" might better be applied to those American soldiers who gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and killed her along with her family. Or the American soldiers who hung Dilawar from the ceiling and kicked him until he died. Or any of the other torturers, up the chain of command.
One of the most popular science books ever printed was Physics for Entertainment, http://www.archive.org/details/physicsforentert035428mbp by Yakov Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Perelman
During the great days of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Languages Printing House translated it into every major language, and sold copies at third-world prices. Those devious Communists -- promoting socialism by distributing cheap science books! Many scientists, engineers and mathematicians working today were inspired to go into their careers by this book.
The most notable was Grigory Perelman (no relation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Perelman who solved the last step of the Poincaré conjecture and was eccentric even by Slashdot standards. Grigory's father gave him Physics for Entertainment.
It used to sell for $3.99. Then it went out of print, and I tried to buy it, but it was going for $200. Now somebody reprinted it in a (probably) unauthorized edition, and it's also in the Internet Archive.
The Soviet publishing house had an army of editors translating Russian books into all the world's languages, and they probably did Fichtenholz if it's that good.
Dover Publications got started reprinting out-of-print and out-of-copyright science books, and as I recall, a lot of their trade list was Soviet books translated into English. At that time, the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they were happy to see their work reprinted. One thing the Soviets did well was science education. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin)
You might check out the old Dover catalog to see if there are any out-of-copyright English translations. Scan them and put them on the Internet.
"or else you won't get medical care."
You made that up. #fail
That is exactly what they said. The Coalition forces dropped pamphlets saying, “In order to continue the humanitarian aid, pass over any information related to Taliban or Al-Qaida to the coalition forces.”
(It's amazing how right wingers just make up facts without knowing anything about the subject at all. Then they accuse others of making things up. I can never figure out whether they're lying or stupid.)
We sent doctors. We said we'd compensate those who helped us, including by getting them medical care. DWB's resources are limited. Giving people more medical care is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Doctors have an ethical obligation to give medical care without conditions.
Giving medical care on the condition that patients inform on the Taliban (and get killed if the Taliban find out) is a bad thing. It's a violation of medical ethics.
Doctors Without Borders is one of the largest medical charities in the world (they've actually told contributors that they didn't need more money). They're far more effective than other organizations because they work closely with local doctors and patients, over decades, and know their needs, rather than parachuting in for a month's third-world charity vacation like some of the U.S. medical charities. The Journal of the American Medical Association had an article about medical crises telling doctors to stay home if they're not part of an experienced program. They get in the way.
This kind of help does more harm than good. Specifically, the Coalition forces' medical "relief" teams took sides among the combatants and turned medical workers into military targets. The Taliban couldn't tell the difference between them and they were getting killed.
The only bad thing here is your bogus characterization of this as politicization of doctors by America. The people who politicized doctors are the Taliban. The people who drove DWB out are the Taliban.
And your source of information is?
(I'll answer for you. Your source is, you made it up.)
The U.S. forces clearly politicized the delivery of medical care. They were open about it.
Here's the NEJM article about it. I'm not sure whether it's available free on line so I'll quote substantially:
Perspective
International Medical Aid
Collateral Damage — Médecins sans Frontières Leaves Afghanistan and Iraq
Ingrid T. Katz, M.D., M.H.S. and Alexi A. Wright, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 351:2571-2573 December 16, 2004
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048296
MSF worked in Iraq for a total of four years over two separate periods but spent more than two decades in Afghanistan — throughout the Soviet occupation, the Taliban regime, and the military action led by the United States. ...
At the same time, many NGOs argued that the work of humanitarian-aid groups was being coopted by the coalition forces to serve as part of its campaign to win “hearts and minds” in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout the reconstruction period in Afghanistan, MSF objected to the blurring of boundaries between the military and humanitarian-aid communities, criticizing the coalition government's strategy of deploying provincial reconstruction teams that placed soldiers and civilians side by side when delivering food, medical care, and economic assistance to the Afghanis. They argued that nationals were unable to distinguish between MSF clinics and clinics built by the military.
The Pentagon repeatedly denied allegations that the provincial reconstruction teams endangered aid workers, but the U.S. government continued to refer to NGOs as partners in the war effort. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to them as “force multipliers” and members of the
He he -- you're funny.
One could argue that the reason why leaders like Fidel Castor and Kim Song Il aren't assassinated or gotten rid of in some way is because they help, indirectly, to give the Military Industrial Complex a reason to exist.
But that would be just crazy, and I certainly wouldn't try and espouse it.
I thought the reason we stopped trying to assassinate leaders like Fidel Castro was that the last time we tried it, John F. Kennedy got assassinated first.
Some guy got to rant his opinion on a popular newspaper. So what does that mean... Not much... That is a neat thing about our government people have the rights to express their opinion
The problem is that people like this, who believe that you should torture people, ignore international law and the U.S. constitution, and kidnap anyone you feel like anywhere around the world, are working in the White House, and writing speeches for the President of the U.S., and people in command take him seriously.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer?currentPage=all
Read this review of Thiessen's Courting Disaster. You'll learn to doubt everything he says.
You mean like:
Thiessen’s book, whose subtitle is “How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit. In addition, Thiessen attacks the Obama Administration for having banned techniques such as waterboarding. “Americans could die as a result,” he writes.
Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”
All this review does is list Thiessen's claims and show how he's completely wrong on every one.
Let's keep it straight just who has blood on their hands.
Doctors Without Borders was in Afghanistan for 30 years, running rural health clinics and supporting and teaching Afghani doctors and nurses. They treated everyone without regard to who they were affiliated with or which side they were on. Their medical clinics were one of the few neutral areas in Afghanistan, respected by everyone, where guns were not permitted.
After the U.S. invasion, Colin Powell moved in a lot of U.S. medical charity workers, and referred to medical workers as "force extenders." The U.S. passed out fliers telling villagers that if they joined the American side and turned in the Taliban, they would get all kinds of benefits, including medical services.
That politicized medical services in Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders was no longer safe, and had to leave the country. I read an account in which a German obstetrician was crying and refused to leave her patients -- Afghanistan has one of the highest infant and maternal death rates in the world -- and her supervisor had to order her to leave. It was too dangerous.
The other problems like checkpoints manned by soldiers who didn't speak the local language, and killed civilian families who didin't understand their orders, is too much to get into here.
The Bush Administration has blood on its hands. Thiessen was George W. Bush's speechwriter. Thiessen has blood on his hands.
Thiessen is arguing that we should ignore international law. He's using the logic of terrorists.
The Soviets were doing a pretty good job.
In the late 90s I was in a PoliSci class with a refugee from Afghanistan, she was NOT happy about the Soviets (she was not a Muslim extremist, I don't even think she was Muslim).
I did say we're dealing with lesser evils. The Communist regime that took over Afghanistan was pretty brutal, in the way they treated dissidents and prisoners, for example. But the Mujahadeen was just as brutal. The Soviets were actually a moderating, Westernizing influence, and they improved peoples' lives. They sent Afghani women to Soviet universities. I used to read countrywide statistics on infant mortality and literacy. The communist countries were (and are) up to Western levels.
I'd like to know what that woman's complaint was about the Soviets. She might well have had a good reason. But I'd like to ask her if she preferred the U.S.-supported Mujahadin.
While I'm sure they did a bit (forced) improvements, they also dropped exploding toys around villages to hurt the natives moral.
The exploding toys turned out to be a false propaganda story. One of the Afghan anti-Soviet groups took out a full-page ad in the New York Times showing a doll that had exploded. People checked it out. It turned out the doll was a fake -- the ad agency admitted creating it for the ad. The truth turned out to be that the Soviets were dropping "butterfly mines", which were kind of like a mousetrap, and children weren't sophisticated enough to avoid them and would pick them up and be crippled or killed. Outrageous. The human rights organizations oppose all landmines. Unfortunately, the U.S. military also uses them, and also kills a lot of children. Vietnamese children and other civilians were being crippled and killed for years afterwards. When you drop 100,000 landmines from planes on peasant fields, it's almost impossible to get them out.
This girl claimed (I have no reason to think she lied) that she personally knew at least 5 people who were mauled and killed by mines, and she was in a rather rural area that was not directly involved in combat.
That's a good reason to hate the Soviets. She was caught in the war. If they were treating her the way the Americans are treating the Iraqis right now, she had good reason to hate them. However, the war went on for so long because the U.S. was supplying the Mujihadeen with weapons, supplies and money. When Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to start a war with the Soviets in Afghanistan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski#Afghanistan he knew very well that most of the casualties in war are civilians and children. I'd like to condemn the Soviets for their brutal excesses and landmines, but we just did the same in Iraq.
But on the other side of the balance, the Soviets came into third-world countries in medieval poverty, and built modern factories, industry, infrastructure -- and schools for boys and girls. Just read that NYT article. That's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did here. The Bush Administration paid contractors hundreds of millions of dollars to do far more modest projects, and they couldn't build a rickety schoolhouse, even when (as they realized) soldiers' lives and American policy depended on it.
So back to my original point: We (and the Afghanis) would have been better off if we left the Soviets alone in Afghanistan.
I do miss my intercity community college, half the people there were refugees and exiles from the east, the other half was normal immigrants from Russia and Mexico.
Yes, those college classes when you meet diverse people for the first time who are completely different from you are a great experience. It's hard to find again. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, calculated that we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war.
Sometimes I think of what America would be like if we had spent $3 trillion on education instead.
You missed some US flaws:
1. Paid huge amounts of money to the taliban, allowing them to do what they are currently doing
It's worse. The U.S. *created* the Taliban, when it supported the Mujahadeen against the Soviets in the 1980s, by supplying them with anti-helicopter missiles.
The Soviets were doing a pretty good job. They created collective farms, with modern machinery and agricultural technology, build housing, medical clinics -- and schools that educated boys *and* girls with a secular education. The Soviets successfully encouraged equality of the sexes, which everyone is so worried about.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html
We're dealing with lesser evils here.
The worst consequence of our actions was that we destroyed a secular universal education system and replaced it with an extremist Islamist education system. The Soviets taught kids that Communism was better than U.S. capitalism (a proposition easily subject to verification). The Taliban taught kids -- boys -- to destroy the U.S.
If the Communists had managed to keep control of Afghanistan, they would have thrown Osama bin Laden in jail (yes, they would have violated his rights) and we wouldn't be having this problem.
In order to have oil, you need to buy it on an open market. Exactly where do the army, navy and air force come in here?
Sometimes, when you want to buy oil on the free market, people ask for too much money.
So you have to overthrow their government, and install one that charges less money on the free market.
Spitzer resigned, true. He had lots of powerful enemies on Wall Street, he was seriously weakened by "Troopergate" and was under investigation for financial misdeeds surrounding the prostitutes (bribery, misuse of campaign funds) he was procuring that it's hardly surprising that he had to go.
Spitzer's escorts had nothing to do with bribery or misuse of campaign funds. He used his own money on his own credit card.
He was investigated by a Republican attorney general. Republicans have an extensive history of using their investigative and prosecutorial powers for political purposes. Which is what this was. After they achieved their real goal, Spitzer's resignation, they dropped the prosecution -- because it wouldn't have succeeded. Nobody has been convicted on charges like that.
I couldn't understand why Spitzer resigned. His own wife (a lawyer) didn't want him to resign. I wish he had fought back, like Bill Clinton did. I guess he figured that with all his money, he didn't have to put up with this.
Now we have a governor, David Patterson, who was good when his job was to get along with everybody but now in the face of Republican obstruction can't get anything done, and who replaced a liberal Senator with a Blue Dog Democrat who used to work for the tobacco companies.
Got any tricks to get it to back-pedal 3 seconds?