Well, then maybe ISPs will need to take proactive measures to keep the bots of their subscribers systems. Blocking ports, sniffing for certain bot traffic, denying service to the idiots who get their computers taken over. Stuff like that.
The only way to accomplish that would be a) banning all non-approved (read: non-HTTP) protocols and b) deep packet inspection. This means no VPNs, no on-line gaming, no P2P, etc etc etc.
On balance, the average user would rather be spammed to hell then to give most of the functionality of their PC up. Never you mind that actively disconnecting "clueless" (again, read: 90%+) of customers might be somewhat frowned upon by the Sales and Accounts Receivable divisions...
Grandma doesn't need to do packet sniffing, traffic analysis and the like. She simply needs to alter her behaviour slightly. To maintain your machine(s) free of malware you simply need to be careful, maintain your anti-virus etc and be alert for odd changes in your machine.
This statement alone disqualifies you from this discussion. The methods you described merely stop low-grade, cookie-cutter, script-kiddie assailants. Pros use undisclosed vulnerabilities, that no one but them knows about, long before the vendors get around to plugging them (usually after some bot-net conquers millions of PCs)!
Sorry, but do you actually know how almost all things like root-kits etc are installed on a users machine? Solcial engineering.. It might be cooler to think that someone somewhere is attacking your machine directly and you can't prevent it, but mostly it's tricking someone into installing some software that is lying to you.
There are many, many ways to do it, social engineering being only one of the methods. Again, you have no clue. Attackers use whatever is the easiest and most effective, and all you are talking about is removing the low-grade attackers from the picture.
It is relatively rare that something is automatically installed on your machine via a zero day exploit, mostly it's down to someone click yes when they shouldn't, or a patch they should have installed a year ago.
And again, back to making Grandma into an IT professional... you are deluded.
Nope, you don't need at all to demand that a security expert is required 24x7, all you need to do is stop insulating people from their own decisions.
To which the answer is simple: ban everyone but the "licensed experts" from the Internet. As that is the only way you are going to get to remove the "insulation". You "personal responsibility" nimrods are so pathetically clueless, never capable of acknowledging that modern technology has long surpassed in complexity the capabilities of an average user to maintain it correctly. People have equally hard times with all sorts of other kinds of modern technology, which you conveniently forget, the only difference being that the consequences of the myriad of their shortcomings are localized to their own fucked-up cars and fried iPods. PC's, by virtue of being connected, simply have more potential to cause external havoc. The only way to change that is to either a) stop letting people use the stuff, or b) force them to undergo training, which in a vast majority of cases means exactly the same thing as a), in addition to being, in case of PCs, pretty much pointless when it comes to stopping spammers.
If they don't want to protect themselves, fine, connect through an ISP that is happy to protect them from themselves (and this is possible, just expensive) if you want to take responsibility then just connect to the internet.
Which again is near impossible due to the economies of scale. You are back to banning most people from the Internet.
If I was able to give my mum a few simple rules and pointers that have managed to keep her virus and trojan free for years I don't understand anyone else having an issue.
She is likely infected with multiple ones, except that her smugly incompetent son has no clue and is busy sanctimoniously preaching about his self ascertained superior immunity to common sense on Slashdot.
You appear to either be totally paranoid about attacks, or a security professional drumming up additional business because (to me at least) you appear to be seriously overstating the issue.
That is because you havn't seen crap. I've had to deal with attacks on both Windows and Linux systems that would make your head spin. There are real pros out there, with terrifying
The idea is to raise the cost of doing spam business.
But it does not! At least to the spammers. All it does is to make it more expensive for the victims of bot-nets, and all the other users of the net.... except the spammers.
While a spammer signs up for a gmail account, i dont think they send their spam through gmails servers, that would be detected quickly.
Spammers never do sign up themselves, they use stolen identities and stolen credit cards, and they use thousands of them with for each new spam campaign.
But the real point was to hit the spammers on their return addresses. I dont think spammers want to use a shared address, i think they want their own return address. And if signing up costs money, it raises the cost of spamming a little.
Again, the spammers do not give a fuck, since it is the infected PC users who unwittingly pay for spammers' activities, including the return addresses, mail from which is read and re-directed by the bot-nets. Spammers never do anything directly, because that would have led to them being caught eons ago, without any of your silly "make the net more expensive for everyone and make Bill richer yet" non-solutions.
Sigh. Which does not stop 95%+ of today's spam bot-nets which are capable of using real, password protected email accounts of the infected victims, extracted from the very PCs on which the bots reside. So all you've done is to find which PCs are infected by yet another method.... as if you did not know this already by their IP addresses now. But there are millions of them, all over the globe, getting infected with one bot as soon as another is removed.
Your "brilliant" idea is in fact quite old and a total failure at even a most cursory glance. Keep it up and I will start replying with that hilarious "anti-spam idea" form letter to you too, as you were quite covered by it.
Are you sure? Most of us on Slashdot, I imagine, are not part of a botnet.
Most. And Slashdot represents a tiny fraction of PC users, most with far higher level of expertise the the average.
No, the reason users have not done this, to date, is that they have no incentive. Billions in charges to hapless consumers would be an incentive for consumers to start locking down their machines.
Nonsense. No amount of incentive will get Grandma to start running (and understanding the output of) packet sniffers, traffic analyzers and the like. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "locking down" computers as automated countermeasures are only very superficially effective against a very adaptable enemy. There are many trojan infected PCs in large corporations that do run all sorts of automated counter-measures but do not perform periodic manual traffic analysis. That is why many very highly paid consultancies exist that specialize in detection of threats not repelled by automated defences, of which there are many. In fact, following good security regimes and (on some systems) usage of anti-virus software and the like mainly serves to remove the amateur attackers from the battle-field (and to pad pockets of anti-virus software makers).
I really don't. I run Linux.
There are many compromised Linux systems out there. Some at places that specialize in Linux. No operating system is immune, there are simply systems harder to crack then others. That is why Linux developers continuously enhance defences, introducing layers upon layers of restrictions, such as those in SELinux, and the attackers continuously come up with ways to breach them.
I don't run antivirus, but I do keep up to date. On both, I don't download software from random untrusted sources -- I stick to known-good distribution channels -- and I keep anything related to browsing up-to-date.
Again, since you do not run frequent, in-depth manual checks on your system, you do not even know if you are not already owned by a deep seated root-kit. Everything you described is insufficient do defend, or to even detect such an attack. Also you already perform things that average user is not likely to do, even with incentives, as the whole idea of choosing where not to go on the Internet is the anathema of Internet use to them. You might as well kick 80% of people off the Internet by some legislation.
And I do this simply enough that I really believe everyone could, if they put in just a little bit of effort to educate themselves.
See above. You are not defending yourself properly and yet are lecturing others, in addition to trying to get them to do things they consider to be in direct opposition to the purpose of them being on the Internet.
Right now, they don't, because they see it as not their job -- let IT worry about it. And IT can't reasonably protect users from themselves -- but when they try, they generally cause as much harm as good.
A vast majority of Internet users do not have an IT department! They are home users. You are contradicting your own assertions.
No, the reason this won't work is that it will never be implemented.
No, it is impossible to implement, without some frighteningly radical changes in home computer usage, like for example demanding that no PC is connected to the Internet that is not continuously monitored by a security expert...
No matter how much spam goes through Gmail, it's unlikely that Gmail itself will ever become a purely pay service, or be completely blocked by everyone else. If Google somehow failed, another company would fill the gap.
I have no idea how Gmail entered this conversation. It is irrelevant to the problem of compromised home PCs.
I agree with what you're saying. I just wanted to point out that, prior to hotmail, etc., e-mail was largely not free. Often came with your ISP, but in the early-to-mid 90's, we just didn't have the sort of internet we have today.
Sending of email (which is really the only thing that counts in spam) was completely free as the SMTP protocol had no widely used authentication mechanism and there were thousands of ungarded open-relays. All of these silly anti-spam proposals have evolved around finding some new way of restricting of sending of email ever since.
Europe could change the situation in Africa and the Middle East, but in order to do that Europe would need to spend the wealth that was gained by exploiting those countries. Belgium could pour back in
the wealth stolen by King Leopold from the Congo; Britain could pour money into the Middle East and South Asia.
Well, by that token the denizens of the USA should promptly get out and restore all of the land ownership to the Apache, the Cherokee etc. Then Canadians out of Canada, all those Spaniards and Portuguese out of South America back to Europe, then of course a wee bit of re-shuffling there... and by the time we restore the "status quo" to, say, 6000 BC, you might be finally satisfied... no?
Actually, wait, the Europeans did get out of (or at least restored the nominal control to the natives) Africa and Middle East...
You view the US as this pathetically underdeveloped, emotionally stunted child who would do so much better if it just listened to and copied it's elders. Well, Dad, you better listen to more Harry Chapin - we really have grown up just like you.
I never said that no one else but the US has these sins... but then no one else has these day the amazing hubris to call themselves the "leaders of the Free World" and trumpet themselves as the "liberators of the oppressed"... and then proceed to invade, murder, maim, bully, dispossess, and generally oppress their victims for self-serving purposes, chief amongst them profit of some politically connected kleptocrats. The silly old Europe and even the likes of Russia and China are rank amateurs compared to what USA (and its side-kick Israel) has been pulling off in these last 4 decades.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack (x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I can see that you did not understood my intention. Probably because it was not clear enough. Sorry about that. What i wanted to do was close all the gratis email accounts and start charging for
signup to get an email account.
Which does not change the dynamics one bit. The bot net operators will simply direct their bots to steal the pay-to-play site passwords that the victims go to and the game is over. Worse, because now you no longer guard against spammers for these pay-to-play accounts, you've now made it significantly easier to exploit the sites themselves by use of thousands of stolen logins. So back to CAPTCHA... and pay-to-play?!
The whole thing is pointless and the only side-effect is that now people get to charge for no improvement at all. But then again, that was the point all along.
If it costs money to get an email account we do not need CAPTCHA because the payment is the CAPTCHA. If spammers sign up using their own credit card we know who they are. If they sign up using someone elses credit card it is fraud which is investigated much better.
Where the heck does this utterly naive and completely silly assumption that the bot operators will sign up using their credit cards comes from?! They will wait until millions of doofuses sign up, with their individual credit cards, PayPal accounts and what-not, and then use the bot-infected PC's belonging to the hapless victims to log in and spam away. No change in spam volume but a major change in economics for the PC users. Now they are not only charged for things that used to be free, but also get to be charged for the privilege of being spam vectors, particularly (which is always somewhere in these "proposals") when per-post or per-message "micropayments" get involved. And again, the scammers proposing these "solutions" are quite aware of this, after all that is the point of the whole pay-to-play and "micropayment" scams, the increase of revenue for no extra service.
To make the juristiction even more easy, then you can only sign up for email from local companies, or companies in countries that has similar laws against spamming. If this means that people from some countries can not get a free gmail account, tough luck.
Again, you comprehend nothing. The millions of infected PCs are all over the world, and mostly in places that have a lot of PCs... i.e. the USA. So you've gained nothing again. You keep forgetting that spammers are criminals, and criminals never use their own stuff!!! They use their victim's equipment, credit cards and PCs.
I have no intention of charging for each and every email people send. Only for the account.
See above. You've "solved" nothing whatsoever, other then to create revenue stream where none existed before, which again is why these kinds of "anti spam" proposals are so loved by the likes of Gates.
The next thing to do is to close the services that needs (CAPTCHA) spam projection. This means no more free email. Get used to paying.
Why is this bullshit non-solution always brought up by some greed-monkeys who salivate at the idea of charging billions in "micro-payments"... oh wait.
I will make it as simple as possible to you: pay-to-play-posting + bot-net = spam unabated + billions in charges to hapless consumers. And no, securing PCs air-tight is not a practical solution in a situation where average user will never attain sufficient know-how to defend himself/herself against a determined, resourceful and very knowledgeable attacker. The pros have hard time defending themselves, never you mind the grandma. You are more likely to succeed getting rid of bot-nets by banning all personal computers in the possession of amateurs or the Internet wholesale...
But then again, stopping spam was never the objective in these "proposals", raking-in extortion fees from everyone though was the goal all along. Little surprise then that the chief promoters of all the pay-per-email, post, web-page etc schemes are the likes of... Bill Gates. Go figure.
1. You sent us there. If you don't like the government of the country then do something about it, but don't complain that the soldiers who swear to go wherever your government sends them are "glorified mercenaries". Verbally attacking the soldiers themselves is just childish.
See above. Also, if I were a German in 1939, even though my "government" and even the majority of citizenry supported the Führer's little adventure, I would still expect men of conscience to scoot (along with me) away from the Wehrmacht (preferably with their guns). If there were enough of us, that little mess called the WWII wouldn't have happened, no? Isn't this how the Reds put the brakes on the Czar's fun with his toy-soldiers in the WWI?
Note that the penalty for desertion from Wehrmacht (as well as Czar's army) was death, along with a high chance of the whole family of the deserter landing in some concentration camp... and they still did it. The penalty for deserting from the US Army is jail time measured in few years. So the excuse "Moooooom! They... they... made me do it! Waaaaah!" rings rather hollow... or should I send you some spare diapers?
2. Moral absolutism is comforting, especially when you're sitting in a comfortable chair in your favorite free-trade coffee shop talking to people who think just like you do.
Bullshit. "Moral absolutism" is supposed to be the foundation of our whole civilization. And one of the "absolute" rules, as old as the first tribe that formed somewhere on the steppes of Africa is "if one group attacks another the villain is always the attacker". You cannot change this now, when it becomes inconvenient to you. Neither could the Nazis.
It doesn't work when people are trying to kill you. Try it some time on a dirt street with an open air sewer running through the middle and bullets cracking around you.It doesn't work when people are trying to kill you. Try it some time on a dirt street with an open air sewer running through the middle and bullets cracking around you.
More bullshit. If people are shooting at you because you invaded their country, it is their right to do so. And you have exactly zero moral authority to whine about it. If they are shooting at you because they invaded your country, then you are in the right and are entitled to shoot back for all its worth. So the whizzing bullets themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with the shooters being "right" or "wrong", it is the determination of who attacked whom. Your whining is akin to some gang-banger who shot up the neighbourhood, killing innocent bystanders and is now squealing in front of a jury about how the cops were shooting at him too and so the jury has no idea how it is when people are shooting at you...
Umm, yeah, now people want to listen to you. Does it really seem highly likely to you that this practice *ever* took place?
For the sake of argument say there was one person sick enough to do this.
Far more then one. The "bad apples" crap is starting to wear real thin. Try more like "cultural problem". If you keep pounding into the heads of the mercenaries that they are the "good guys" no matter what they do, sooner or later they start believing that crap and the enemy becomes "ragheads" instead of "people".
Do you really think it's likely that the practice is common enough to justify accusing a poster in an online forum of such a thing? Or do you think that what you said amounts to a fallacious (and ridiculous) ad-hominem/appe
Forgive me if I missed something, but I don't remember an apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union.
I am not sure what your objection is, I merely pointed out that direct warfare (which would indeed be apocalyptic in the case of USSR) is not the only way to achieve victory.
Were they among the estimated one in seven East Germans that worked as informants for the Stasi?
Did it cross your mind that thinly-veiled politically-motivated witch-hunts are also possible in post-Soviet times, not just during? You are probably not familiar with all the crass opportunistic finger-pointing and mutual accusations of past "collaboration" that are going on in places like Poland and Ukraine for years now. And if one were to believe all the hoopla, every one in the... err.. other political party was a snitch! In contrast, naturally, with the snow-white moral purity of our party officials! Etc and so on.
Erm... You do know that, even though the US wasn't actively fighting Iraq, the two countries were technically at war, right? I mean, the US went to war on behalf of Kuwait, and entered into a cease fire agreement (which is not a peace accord - a cease fire is only a lull in the fighting) which the Iraquis broke. Now, that wasn't the argument used for going into Iraq (at least, not the argument presented by the mass media) and it wasn't the only good reason for going into Iraq, but the two countries were *already* at war.
No. The "ceasefire" was between the UN coalition which conducted Gulf War I and Iraq, not the US (admittedly the chief member of that coalition) and Iraq. That is why the US so desperately sought a UN resolution authorizing the second war, complete with that famous dog-and-pony show performed by Powell at the Security Council. The UN declined to authorize.
Sure, our grand-fathers responsible for much of the mess the world is today. And their grand-fathers, and on and on.
But there is a major difference between having some historical culpability, which none of us can change, and determinedly continuing to perpetuate idiocy, despite of all that history teaches us. Most of the old empires have learnt, usually the hard way, all about the fallacies of empires. Why is it that in the age of nearly universally available information you do insist on repeating all of the bloody fuckups? And more importantly, why do you try to pose as "liberators" while doing so? Do you really think no one will notice?!
Wow, another brilliant analysis by you! Too bad, um... GERMANY apparently didn't know as much about the strength of the German Army in 1941 as well as you did. Because, um... they still were thinking they'd WIN the war in '41. Too bad they didn't hire you
Since you do not comprehend the difference between a rather straightforward analysis of readily available post facto historical data and predicting the future there is little point talking to you.
Oh, and since you can make sweeping predictions, what stats do you need about the strength of the Pakistani, Tainwanese, Israeli armies do you need to better make your prediction? I see you cleverly dodged that question by simply stating "apples and oranges." Please - make a 25 year prediction about all of those countries, since you're so good at (snicker) backdating past historical events and then predicting that they were inevitable.
Again, you show total and complete lack of comprehension of a difference between filling in a year or so of blanks in a well established trend, all major variables of which have been known in detail for over 60 years now and predicting the future 25 (no less) years in advance based upon not even a comparatively fractional amount of such data.
Perhaps you should ask someone who lived under the influence of the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall fell. You would probably find that it wasn't much fun.
But then again the USSR got progressively less despotic, until it eventually crumbled from its internal inefficiencies. There was no need for an apocalyptic war to achieve its destruction. Also, you will probably be surprised, but some former East Germans are quite nostalgic about their old ways, many not having adjusted to the dog-eat-dog economic realities of the West and having found most of the cunningly implied innuendos and outright false promises of prosperity that were made to them during the Soviet times to be just that, the prosperity never having materialized after the unification.
Wow. That's quite the talent you have there for speculation! So you can accurately describe the events of WWII had the USA not come in? You seem extremely sure that Hitler would have broken his peace agreement with the USSR?
You do understand that the US did not enter the war with Germany (December 1941) until months after the plan "Barbarossa" was executed (June 1941), and as such your "question" is utter nonsense, don't you?
Wow, can you please tell me what will happen in next 25 years of Pakistan, Venezuela, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Taiwan and all the forver Soviet blocs
The question is entirely different. We know the historical strength of the German army in 1941-1945, the state of its industry etc, the respective strength of the USSR and its industry, and there were no possibilities of any miraculous reversals. In this I do not "predict" anything, simply observe the inevitable outcomes based on long established historical data. The Germans simply did not have the sufficient military strength, nor the personnel to achieve victory, which was plainly apparent even long before the landings in Normandy. Your comparison is that of apples to oranges.
Maybe if we hadn't destroyed the oppressor of 70% of the populace (angering the other 30% who were at least comfortable),
If that was truly the case, which is not transparent at all - the argument you parrot having been made by long discredited ex-Iraqi stooges employed by the likes of CIA, it was an Iraqi problem to be solved by the Iraqis, not the USA. You could have provided material assistance to pro-democracy groups, but there are lines that cannot be crossed, lest your true intentions become apparent. You did cross them.
rebuilt the country after removing said oppressor (undoing some of the damage of war),
Except you did not. Instead you spent a vast majority of the "reconstruction" funds in pointless projects designed to syphon funds back into US-aligned corporations, built an Imperial Embassy complex converting a good chunk of Baghdad to do it, divided Iraq into ghettos, complete with concrete walls around them, all the while failing to restore basic services like water and electricity.... not to mention that a large chunk of the money simply went missing. In the process nearly all national heritage of Iraq, which has survived millennia, was destroyed or allowed to be stolen.
and established a time-line to leave (which is coming along swimmingly)
Your "leaving" is designed to be very much like your "leaving" of Korea. A set of permanent bases housing tens of thousands of troops, and the said Imperial Embassy complex meant for controlling the Iraqi affairs for indefinite future.
Flawed intelligence (no false charges of lies, now people) or no
Bullshit, lies they were. This is confirmed by people like Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, one the chief of UN inspections, the other senior member of UNSCOM. Then there is of course the PNAC, with its "regime change" plans published as far back as 1997, and its crew of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney etc. So you can stop with the smoke and mirrors bit. We know what happened, there is no hiding it.
Saddam played chicken with a populace in no mood to be f-ed with
You mean "with a bunch of blood-thirsty fuckwads determined to conquer and rule Iraq no matter what Saddam did"...
A remarkable 6 years later, the violence has ebbed.
After millions are refugees in places like Syria and Jordan and the whole of Iraq is ethnically cleansed ghettos separated by concrete walls and checkpoints, women can no longer attend school or walk around while not wearing burkas and one set of thugs was replaced with another... some fucking progress, that.
You may see a thug but honestly each small little war staves off another global war as dictators are allowed to amass power, ignore the UN, and rattle their sword anytime they want something.
Which is yet another self-serving "justification". Saddam was not in a position to "amass power", he was isolated and neutered. His days were numbered. If democracy in Iraq was truly a concern, promotion of home-grown dissidents would be much more effective in the long term. The invasion was motivated however by quite different concerns, most of them having nothing whatsoever to do with the lofty claims being made.
I did not support the war even though a large part of me thought it was needed.
No war, other then the purely defencive kind, is ever needed. War is the absolute last resource, an acknowledgement of a complete failure of civilization and return to a barbaric, animalistic method of "solving" things. War is only justifiable if you are a defender, having been assailed on your own soil by a military foe. Like the Iraqis were. Or like the Kuwaitis were, or the Iranians before them. If the US had chosen, as a part of a true multi-national coalition, with true UN mandate, which it had in Gulf War I, to pursue Saddam, provided that Kuwait was the leader in the assault, then the moral high-ground would have been on their side, as Saddam's Iraq was the aggressor, provided of course that the coalition adhered to the Geneva Conventions to the letter. The attribution of responsibility for a war is not a very complicated issue.
... while nations have poisoned the minds of their children to hate the US and the western world...
The correct counter-move to this is to un-poison these minds by leading by example, demonstrating the moral superiority of your ways, the rule of law, the respect for democratic principles etc. What you have done instead is to furnish these poisoners with more ammunition. This is not a winning long-term strategy.
The real question is if we would have been forced to take such actions if you did not allow such a dictator into power in the first place...see you on the battlefield.
Well, the belligerent, villainous, corrupt and self-serving party is recently not these dictators but... you. Until one of these nations assails another, you have no grounds whatsoever to intervene militarily, and even if they do, you must make sure that your actions do not reek of underhanded selfish ulterior motives, lest you be just another villain in the fray.
That is an understandable attitude and that is why no one would have accused the US soldiers of utter lack of conscience if that is what they were doing. But they were not, instead, they were the villainous party in this war, attacking other peoples' homes, as the aggressors, not as the defenders.
What really gets my goat is that the very Americans who, like you, would have done their patriotic duty, fail to recognize in their victims the very actions they, themselves, would be proudly undertaking in their place. The cognitive dissonance is frightening.
Can you really blame a man like that for demand that it means he did his job, and made the world a safer place? That he holds the belief that he isn't evil?
I keep pointing out that "doing one's job" is an insufficient criteria for being a "good guy". The soldiers of Werhmacht also "did their job", so did those of the Imperial Japan. Amongst them many believed that they were "making the world a better place" as their respective ideologies assured them of "manifest destinies" and the like. And still, they were in the end nothing but villains.
The criteria is not "doing one's job" or "believing in one's goodness", but objective, external benchmarks, chief amongst them this: who attacked whom. This one test alone determines a majority of the "moral capital" of one's party in the war. Note that both Germany and Japan were the unambiguous military aggressors... as was the US in Iraq.
And so the answer is yes, I can, and I do blame you for not standing up for some basic, fundamental principles and instead "pragmatically" choosing to murder and maim others, all so that you can save your job. You gave up any claim to "not being evil" the moment you chose the far easier, self-serving path.
This NATION, the nation you, and I live in decided to invade another nation. We, the military, did the job our civilian masters asked of us. We didn't go out seeking to kill innocents, but yes we did. War is a horrible thing for that reason, and so many others. Drag your political leaders over the coals for it. Drag those civilians who support it over the coals.
So was the case with both Germany and Japan. And in both there were those who refused, deserted and were in many cases executed for it. They were the true heroes of their nations, men of conscience and courage. It is them we should remember and honour.
In light of this, a mercenary who whines that he is not culpable for his actions, that "he did not choose or want this", in the face of much lighter punishment for disobeying, all so that he can continue to earn money while killing and maiming, does not deserve any sympathy whatsoever. He is in fact fully responsible for the bloody outcome, along with his paymasters.
Also, I am not an American. My nation did not participate in that clusterfuck.
Please though, don't drag the men, and women who was doing the duty this nation asked of him over the coals. It's only natural for someone so heavily invested in something to support it. Yes obviously there are exceptions to this, but just don't hate. There's plenty of that all ready.
Hate is a wrong word. Disgust is more like it. Your whiny, dishonest attempts to evade responsibility are truly pathetic, and are unlikely to change any of your victims' opinion of you.
There are VERY clear ties that the Afghan gov harbored the Taliban (which I think you seem to forget, attacked not a military target but a civilian target directly and killed almost 3000 civilians. Now thats a direct attack on civilians. The american army spends billions of dollars on systems to stratigiaclly target the "bad guys" But what are we supposed to do when taliban uses women as shields?
If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. So in the case of Afghanistan, true, the Taliban (a band of blood-thirsty medieval religious wackos) had indeed sheltered Osama Bin Laden amongst all the general havoc they wrought in there, but that does not mean that brute, large-scale military force was the only, never you mind the best, option.
If the plight of the Afghanis and the justice for the victims of 9/11 were truly the objectives, Bin Laden would have been captured by special forces in the middle of the night, while still in Khandahar, and the Taliban would have been undermined (slowly, as these things take a long time) by carefully orchestrated cultural and economic warfare centred on good works and exemplary conduct of the Western democracies, led by the US. There is simply no military way to "defeat" the Taliban, as they are not a military force but ideological one. Ideologies can only be shown false by real-life examples of the effects of superior ideologies. And on this front, as far as the average Afghani is concerned, the US and NATO military efforts are not only a total fiasco, but utterly counter-productive as they lead to the spread and reinforcement of Taliban-like ideologies throughout the region.
The internet, where common sense, etiquette, and respect for fellow posters goes right out the window.
I am sorry, should I reply to a murderous thug, who used the "F" word himself first, with a great deal of respect and decorum? I think not.
You know what's funny? You wouldn't DARE say this directly to his face because you know you'd get your ass kicked. But on the internet, it's ok to be an asshole.
Yes, I agree. It is a well know practise not to say things to the faces of murderous asshole thugs, because they will, well... murder you. This one even boasts that he did precisely that to people who dared to stand up to him.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that this whole quaint "democracy" and "freedom of speech" stuff was precisely to avoid having thugs end up always running the place based solely on the amount of their murderous inclinations coupled with firepower... no?
Oh, two "C"s...guess in your zeal to lay into the guy you couldn't hit the D key huh? Figures.
Yes, I had committed the unforgivable crime of a single-letter typo, which apparently wholly invalidates my argument, or some such... or maybe you could elaborate on the terrible negating influence of the letter "c" on my stating the rather self-obvious.
Here's a tip for you, you ignorant elitist prick, 99% of the citizens of the US don't give two flying fucks about you, your country, or any other country out there.
Which would be the very definition of them being... ignorant elitist pricks. You apparently do not even see the black irony overflowing from your own lines.
However, since we're (unfortunately)) the last remaining "Super Power" at least for the time being, we're the ones getting screwed over time and time again by being backed into a corner by the governments of the world who DEMAND that the US lend support to whatever country is currently blowing themselves to hell and back.
Which, I say, which country exactly, demanded that you invade Iraq?!! Or more to the point, what pills are you on?!
Do you think we wanted to go to fucking Somalia? Do you think we wanted to run around in the fucking sand in the Middle East?
Short answer: yes. There are factions in the USA who see every war as a profit centre, which it is for them. Those same people continuously advocate the use of the military force, as opposed to a myriad of other ways of exacting influence, precisely because it makes them money, lots of money, and empowers them politically. There are also powerful factions in the USA who are really foreign agents subverting the USA for the benefit of their own supremacist efforts in their own country, i.e. the Israeli Zionists.
Do you HONESTLY think we're a nation of cowboys who get off on killing people and blowing shit up?
No, your whole nation is not made up from idiot cowboys. Unfortunately you have way too many of them and they seem to have the uncanny ability to climb into positions of power. And you all reap the results of their belligerent ways. Perhaps you should pay more attention to the affairs of cleaning your own house before trying to "help" others at a point of a gun. But then "do what we say, don't do what we do" was always a popular attitude.
I swear to God, people like you make me absolutely SICK.
Trust me, the feeling is mutual.
The US is damned if we do, damned if we don't.
No, you are only "damned" if you do hypocritical, self-serving, vile things dressed up as "help" and "liberation".
I am pretty certain that you're posting from a country that would have been speak
Americans are the best at war because we have to be. We are the liberators of the oppressed,
Looks like you've been eating your own propaganda dog-food. It is rather curious that the only people who seem to see themselves as the "liberators of the oppressed" are American Supremacist idiots like you. Neither the "oppressed" nor the "liberated" somehow do feel the same way. A fucking surprise too, that. I am sure that you are still awaiting your "flowers and sweets" mass welcome by the Iraqis, all these years after their "liberation". Just make sure you wear your combat gear while you attend.
But then again it was always the view of supremacists that their Glorious Way of Life, is the Only Way, and everyone else better conform. If they did not, they were to be "liberated" and "civilization brought to them" by fire and sword, and of course the "noble and heroic" bringers of "civilization" had to be compensated by the "barbarians" in slaves and gold and general boot-licking. Nothing has much changed apparently since the time of Rome, except that the asshat Centurions now ride in APCs.
The list of countries who owe their independence to the fighting spirit of the American soldier is staggering.
And the list of those whose governments were "regime changed" for the benefit of the USA is even longer...
Kuait
A former province of various pan-Arab empires, arbitrarily made property of a sycophantic Kuwaiti familiy by the British (the one before yours) Empire.
Israel
A European Jew religious-supremacist colony in the center of what was formerly Arab majority neighbourhood, violently expanding ever since. Note that it is not a democracy, as only Jews (a religiously selected sub-set of the population) enjoy the full citizenship rights there. Arab residents (those who remain after being cleansed out) only have some of the rights. Of course the US has supported financially and militarily all the conquests Israel embarked on, with no questions asked. Which is one of the issues at the core of all the "anti-americanism" in the Middle East.
France, Poland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Belgum, Netherlands, Greece, Egypt, Italy,
To burst your America-centered bubble, in WWII in Europe, 9 out of 10 German soldiers died on the eastern front. In the days after the invasion of Normandy, all the combined America-led military effort faced around of 40 German divisions in 1944, while the Eastern front had over 200. Also, I do wonder how did the USA get to liberate Poland, it having been on the side somewhat facing the wrong front.
Tripolli,
Tripoli is a city in Libya, asshat.
Panama,
You "liberated" Panama? Your self-delusion has no limits apparently.
Spain,
This is ridiculous. Spain's General Franco, a Hitler-sponsored dictator, remained in power well into 1970s, fully supported by the USA. Same is by the way true of Greece, where US-sponsored military junta ruled also into 1970s.
South Korea,
The only post WWII case that has any resemblance to "liberation". Of course ruled by a succession of US-sponsored dictators.
and now Iraq and Afhganastan.
That would be Afghanistan, you dolt. Most of citizens of whom see you as thieving invaders. A wee bit removed from "liberators".
You also forgot the "we destroyed the village in order to save it" Vietnam "liberation".
We could also add the soviet countries who fell out after the US broke the soviet republic during the cold war.
No you could not. If you could, they would be blood-soaked, crater-filled ruins still, having been beneficiaries o
As someone who was there, F you man. It's easy to sit here at home and call us murderers and bastards for what we did, but the fact remains that the people we put down were bad people.
No, fuck you, seriously. You seem to have forgotten that a) you were in their country, b) they were defending their stuff, c) you went in there based on lies and fabrications, c) you went in there as a glorified mercenary (very much like a Roman Centurion) in order to pave way for the rulers of your Empire to dictate to your victims your Imperial Way Of Life, which they must accept or die, including which of their stuff is to be stolen by your country's top thieves.
You had absolutely zero fucking moral high ground, no matter what tactics they used to oppose you.
Sure, There are bound to be a few innocent people killed in any war.
Blame for all of whom is always assigned to the instigator of the war. Always, with no exception. That would be you.
This war has been great in that we have greatly reduced the number of innocent people killed as compared to historical numbers.
Irrelevant. In a war of Imperial Conquest you are still a suck-ass villain, even if you somehow managed to kill "only" the soldiers defending their homeland.
But when you take a town of 25,000 where the vast majority are violently anti-american and put lots of american soldiers in the center of town, you're going to have lots of people die.
You shouldn't have been there in the first place, remember? It was you who were the invading assholes, not them. Their being "anti-american" is qualitatively no different then being "anti-invader". Sort of like the French Resistance, Polish Partisans etc. I am sure that to a Wehrmaht conscript (who at least had an excuse of being a conscript instead of a mercenary) they all looked rather "anti-german" too.
You choose who you would rather have die.
In this case, in accordance with all the historical evaluation of "right" and "wrong" in war, that would be you, the fucking invader.
Your neighbors and countrymen, or some terrorist raghead who is hell-bent on destroying america and is practicing building bombs in his kitchen.
Yes, the residents of Fallujah were born only so that they could become "ragheads" to some supremacist asshat, so that they, and their whole families, could be mowed down by that very supremacist swine who invaded their country for fun and profit. And yes, I do know that you are a supremacist swine with certainty, because of your use of the term "ragheads". So how many of these "sand niggers" (another term I am sure is dear to your oh-so-noble heart) did you "put down" and then took pictures of so that you can masturbate to them later?
And to all of you "America Right or Wrong" types, before you start modding this down, remember that it is your own words, like this killer-for-hire who I am responding to, which condemn you as American Supremacist Asshole Uber-menschen. No amount of censorship will change that what you are. I am sick and tired of your whining moral relativism and duplicity. This one issue was always black-and-white, and it will remain so no matter what mental gymnastics you try to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to accomplish that would be a) banning all non-approved (read: non-HTTP) protocols and b) deep packet inspection. This means no VPNs, no on-line gaming, no P2P, etc etc etc.
On balance, the average user would rather be spammed to hell then to give most of the functionality of their PC up. Never you mind that actively disconnecting "clueless" (again, read: 90%+) of customers might be somewhat frowned upon by the Sales and Accounts Receivable divisions ...
This statement alone disqualifies you from this discussion. The methods you described merely stop low-grade, cookie-cutter, script-kiddie assailants. Pros use undisclosed vulnerabilities, that no one but them knows about, long before the vendors get around to plugging them (usually after some bot-net conquers millions of PCs)!
There are many, many ways to do it, social engineering being only one of the methods. Again, you have no clue. Attackers use whatever is the easiest and most effective, and all you are talking about is removing the low-grade attackers from the picture.
And again, back to making Grandma into an IT professional ... you are deluded.
To which the answer is simple: ban everyone but the "licensed experts" from the Internet. As that is the only way you are going to get to remove the "insulation". You "personal responsibility" nimrods are so pathetically clueless, never capable of acknowledging that modern technology has long surpassed in complexity the capabilities of an average user to maintain it correctly. People have equally hard times with all sorts of other kinds of modern technology, which you conveniently forget, the only difference being that the consequences of the myriad of their shortcomings are localized to their own fucked-up cars and fried iPods. PC's, by virtue of being connected, simply have more potential to cause external havoc. The only way to change that is to either a) stop letting people use the stuff, or b) force them to undergo training, which in a vast majority of cases means exactly the same thing as a), in addition to being, in case of PCs, pretty much pointless when it comes to stopping spammers.
Which again is near impossible due to the economies of scale. You are back to banning most people from the Internet.
She is likely infected with multiple ones, except that her smugly incompetent son has no clue and is busy sanctimoniously preaching about his self ascertained superior immunity to common sense on Slashdot.
That is because you havn't seen crap. I've had to deal with attacks on both Windows and Linux systems that would make your head spin. There are real pros out there, with terrifying
But it does not! At least to the spammers. All it does is to make it more expensive for the victims of bot-nets, and all the other users of the net .... except the spammers.
Spammers never do sign up themselves, they use stolen identities and stolen credit cards, and they use thousands of them with for each new spam campaign.
Again, the spammers do not give a fuck, since it is the infected PC users who unwittingly pay for spammers' activities, including the return addresses, mail from which is read and re-directed by the bot-nets. Spammers never do anything directly, because that would have led to them being caught eons ago, without any of your silly "make the net more expensive for everyone and make Bill richer yet" non-solutions.
Sigh. Which does not stop 95%+ of today's spam bot-nets which are capable of using real, password protected email accounts of the infected victims, extracted from the very PCs on which the bots reside. So all you've done is to find which PCs are infected by yet another method .... as if you did not know this already by their IP addresses now. But there are millions of them, all over the globe, getting infected with one bot as soon as another is removed.
Your "brilliant" idea is in fact quite old and a total failure at even a most cursory glance. Keep it up and I will start replying with that hilarious "anti-spam idea" form letter to you too, as you were quite covered by it.
Most. And Slashdot represents a tiny fraction of PC users, most with far higher level of expertise the the average.
Nonsense. No amount of incentive will get Grandma to start running (and understanding the output of) packet sniffers, traffic analyzers and the like. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "locking down" computers as automated countermeasures are only very superficially effective against a very adaptable enemy. There are many trojan infected PCs in large corporations that do run all sorts of automated counter-measures but do not perform periodic manual traffic analysis. That is why many very highly paid consultancies exist that specialize in detection of threats not repelled by automated defences, of which there are many. In fact, following good security regimes and (on some systems) usage of anti-virus software and the like mainly serves to remove the amateur attackers from the battle-field (and to pad pockets of anti-virus software makers).
There are many compromised Linux systems out there. Some at places that specialize in Linux. No operating system is immune, there are simply systems harder to crack then others. That is why Linux developers continuously enhance defences, introducing layers upon layers of restrictions, such as those in SELinux, and the attackers continuously come up with ways to breach them.
Again, since you do not run frequent, in-depth manual checks on your system, you do not even know if you are not already owned by a deep seated root-kit. Everything you described is insufficient do defend, or to even detect such an attack. Also you already perform things that average user is not likely to do, even with incentives, as the whole idea of choosing where not to go on the Internet is the anathema of Internet use to them. You might as well kick 80% of people off the Internet by some legislation.
See above. You are not defending yourself properly and yet are lecturing others, in addition to trying to get them to do things they consider to be in direct opposition to the purpose of them being on the Internet.
A vast majority of Internet users do not have an IT department! They are home users. You are contradicting your own assertions.
No, it is impossible to implement, without some frighteningly radical changes in home computer usage, like for example demanding that no PC is connected to the Internet that is not continuously monitored by a security expert ...
I have no idea how Gmail entered this conversation. It is irrelevant to the problem of compromised home PCs.
Sending of email (which is really the only thing that counts in spam) was completely free as the SMTP protocol had no widely used authentication mechanism and there were thousands of ungarded open-relays. All of these silly anti-spam proposals have evolved around finding some new way of restricting of sending of email ever since.
Well, by that token the denizens of the USA should promptly get out and restore all of the land ownership to the Apache, the Cherokee etc. Then Canadians out of Canada, all those Spaniards and Portuguese out of South America back to Europe, then of course a wee bit of re-shuffling there ... and by the time we restore the "status quo" to, say, 6000 BC, you might be finally satisfied ... no?
Actually, wait, the Europeans did get out of (or at least restored the nominal control to the natives) Africa and Middle East ...
I never said that no one else but the US has these sins ... but then no one else has these day the amazing hubris to call themselves the "leaders of the Free World" and trumpet themselves as the "liberators of the oppressed" ... and then proceed to invade, murder, maim, bully, dispossess, and generally oppress their victims for self-serving purposes, chief amongst them profit of some politically connected kleptocrats. The silly old Europe and even the likes of Russia and China are rank amateurs compared to what USA (and its side-kick Israel) has been pulling off in these last 4 decades.
Actually I should have just responded with this time-less classic:
Which does not change the dynamics one bit. The bot net operators will simply direct their bots to steal the pay-to-play site passwords that the victims go to and the game is over. Worse, because now you no longer guard against spammers for these pay-to-play accounts, you've now made it significantly easier to exploit the sites themselves by use of thousands of stolen logins. So back to CAPTCHA ... and pay-to-play?!
The whole thing is pointless and the only side-effect is that now people get to charge for no improvement at all. But then again, that was the point all along.
Where the heck does this utterly naive and completely silly assumption that the bot operators will sign up using their credit cards comes from?! They will wait until millions of doofuses sign up, with their individual credit cards, PayPal accounts and what-not, and then use the bot-infected PC's belonging to the hapless victims to log in and spam away. No change in spam volume but a major change in economics for the PC users. Now they are not only charged for things that used to be free, but also get to be charged for the privilege of being spam vectors, particularly (which is always somewhere in these "proposals") when per-post or per-message "micropayments" get involved. And again, the scammers proposing these "solutions" are quite aware of this, after all that is the point of the whole pay-to-play and "micropayment" scams, the increase of revenue for no extra service.
Again, you comprehend nothing. The millions of infected PCs are all over the world, and mostly in places that have a lot of PCs ... i.e. the USA. So you've gained nothing again. You keep forgetting that spammers are criminals, and criminals never use their own stuff!!! They use their victim's equipment, credit cards and PCs.
See above. You've "solved" nothing whatsoever, other then to create revenue stream where none existed before, which again is why these kinds of "anti spam" proposals are so loved by the likes of Gates.
Why is this bullshit non-solution always brought up by some greed-monkeys who salivate at the idea of charging billions in "micro-payments" ... oh wait.
I will make it as simple as possible to you: pay-to-play-posting + bot-net = spam unabated + billions in charges to hapless consumers. And no, securing PCs air-tight is not a practical solution in a situation where average user will never attain sufficient know-how to defend himself/herself against a determined, resourceful and very knowledgeable attacker. The pros have hard time defending themselves, never you mind the grandma. You are more likely to succeed getting rid of bot-nets by banning all personal computers in the possession of amateurs or the Internet wholesale ...
But then again, stopping spam was never the objective in these "proposals", raking-in extortion fees from everyone though was the goal all along. Little surprise then that the chief promoters of all the pay-per-email, post, web-page etc schemes are the likes of ... Bill Gates. Go figure.
Canada. Close, but no cigar.
See above. Also, if I were a German in 1939, even though my "government" and even the majority of citizenry supported the Führer's little adventure, I would still expect men of conscience to scoot (along with me) away from the Wehrmacht (preferably with their guns). If there were enough of us, that little mess called the WWII wouldn't have happened, no? Isn't this how the Reds put the brakes on the Czar's fun with his toy-soldiers in the WWI?
Note that the penalty for desertion from Wehrmacht (as well as Czar's army) was death, along with a high chance of the whole family of the deserter landing in some concentration camp ... and they still did it. The penalty for deserting from the US Army is jail time measured in few years. So the excuse "Moooooom! They ... they ... made me do it! Waaaaah!" rings rather hollow ... or should I send you some spare diapers?
Bullshit. "Moral absolutism" is supposed to be the foundation of our whole civilization. And one of the "absolute" rules, as old as the first tribe that formed somewhere on the steppes of Africa is "if one group attacks another the villain is always the attacker". You cannot change this now, when it becomes inconvenient to you. Neither could the Nazis.
More bullshit. If people are shooting at you because you invaded their country, it is their right to do so. And you have exactly zero moral authority to whine about it. If they are shooting at you because they invaded your country, then you are in the right and are entitled to shoot back for all its worth. So the whizzing bullets themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with the shooters being "right" or "wrong", it is the determination of who attacked whom. Your whining is akin to some gang-banger who shot up the neighbourhood, killing innocent bystanders and is now squealing in front of a jury about how the cops were shooting at him too and so the jury has no idea how it is when people are shooting at you ...
It has been widely reported, example here.
Far more then one. The "bad apples" crap is starting to wear real thin. Try more like "cultural problem". If you keep pounding into the heads of the mercenaries that they are the "good guys" no matter what they do, sooner or later they start believing that crap and the enemy becomes "ragheads" instead of "people".
I am not sure what your objection is, I merely pointed out that direct warfare (which would indeed be apocalyptic in the case of USSR) is not the only way to achieve victory.
Did it cross your mind that thinly-veiled politically-motivated witch-hunts are also possible in post-Soviet times, not just during? You are probably not familiar with all the crass opportunistic finger-pointing and mutual accusations of past "collaboration" that are going on in places like Poland and Ukraine for years now. And if one were to believe all the hoopla, every one in the ... err .. other political party was a snitch! In contrast, naturally, with the snow-white moral purity of our party officials! Etc and so on.
No. The "ceasefire" was between the UN coalition which conducted Gulf War I and Iraq, not the US (admittedly the chief member of that coalition) and Iraq. That is why the US so desperately sought a UN resolution authorizing the second war, complete with that famous dog-and-pony show performed by Powell at the Security Council. The UN declined to authorize.
Sure, our grand-fathers responsible for much of the mess the world is today. And their grand-fathers, and on and on.
But there is a major difference between having some historical culpability, which none of us can change, and determinedly continuing to perpetuate idiocy, despite of all that history teaches us. Most of the old empires have learnt, usually the hard way, all about the fallacies of empires. Why is it that in the age of nearly universally available information you do insist on repeating all of the bloody fuckups? And more importantly, why do you try to pose as "liberators" while doing so? Do you really think no one will notice?!
Since you do not comprehend the difference between a rather straightforward analysis of readily available post facto historical data and predicting the future there is little point talking to you.
Again, you show total and complete lack of comprehension of a difference between filling in a year or so of blanks in a well established trend, all major variables of which have been known in detail for over 60 years now and predicting the future 25 (no less) years in advance based upon not even a comparatively fractional amount of such data.
But then again you are just a dishonest jerk.
But then again the USSR got progressively less despotic, until it eventually crumbled from its internal inefficiencies. There was no need for an apocalyptic war to achieve its destruction. Also, you will probably be surprised, but some former East Germans are quite nostalgic about their old ways, many not having adjusted to the dog-eat-dog economic realities of the West and having found most of the cunningly implied innuendos and outright false promises of prosperity that were made to them during the Soviet times to be just that, the prosperity never having materialized after the unification.
You do understand that the US did not enter the war with Germany (December 1941) until months after the plan "Barbarossa" was executed (June 1941), and as such your "question" is utter nonsense, don't you?
The question is entirely different. We know the historical strength of the German army in 1941-1945, the state of its industry etc, the respective strength of the USSR and its industry, and there were no possibilities of any miraculous reversals. In this I do not "predict" anything, simply observe the inevitable outcomes based on long established historical data. The Germans simply did not have the sufficient military strength, nor the personnel to achieve victory, which was plainly apparent even long before the landings in Normandy. Your comparison is that of apples to oranges.
If that was truly the case, which is not transparent at all - the argument you parrot having been made by long discredited ex-Iraqi stooges employed by the likes of CIA, it was an Iraqi problem to be solved by the Iraqis, not the USA. You could have provided material assistance to pro-democracy groups, but there are lines that cannot be crossed, lest your true intentions become apparent. You did cross them.
Except you did not. Instead you spent a vast majority of the "reconstruction" funds in pointless projects designed to syphon funds back into US-aligned corporations, built an Imperial Embassy complex converting a good chunk of Baghdad to do it, divided Iraq into ghettos, complete with concrete walls around them, all the while failing to restore basic services like water and electricity .... not to mention that a large chunk of the money simply went missing. In the process nearly all national heritage of Iraq, which has survived millennia, was destroyed or allowed to be stolen.
Your "leaving" is designed to be very much like your "leaving" of Korea. A set of permanent bases housing tens of thousands of troops, and the said Imperial Embassy complex meant for controlling the Iraqi affairs for indefinite future.
Bullshit, lies they were. This is confirmed by people like Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, one the chief of UN inspections, the other senior member of UNSCOM. Then there is of course the PNAC, with its "regime change" plans published as far back as 1997, and its crew of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney etc. So you can stop with the smoke and mirrors bit. We know what happened, there is no hiding it.
You mean "with a bunch of blood-thirsty fuckwads determined to conquer and rule Iraq no matter what Saddam did" ...
After millions are refugees in places like Syria and Jordan and the whole of Iraq is ethnically cleansed ghettos separated by concrete walls and checkpoints, women can no longer attend school or walk around while not wearing burkas and one set of thugs was replaced with another ... some fucking progress, that.
Which is yet another self-serving "justification". Saddam was not in a position to "amass power", he was isolated and neutered. His days were numbered. If democracy in Iraq was truly a concern, promotion of home-grown dissidents would be much more effective in the long term. The invasion was motivated however by quite different concerns, most of them having nothing whatsoever to do with the lofty claims being made.
No war, other then the purely defencive kind, is ever needed. War is the absolute last resource, an acknowledgement of a complete failure of civilization and return to a barbaric, animalistic method of "solving" things. War is only justifiable if you are a defender, having been assailed on your own soil by a military foe. Like the Iraqis were. Or like the Kuwaitis were, or the Iranians before them. If the US had chosen, as a part of a true multi-national coalition, with true UN mandate, which it had in Gulf War I, to pursue Saddam, provided that Kuwait was the leader in the assault, then the moral high-ground would have been on their side, as Saddam's Iraq was the aggressor, provided of course that the coalition adhered to the Geneva Conventions to the letter. The attribution of responsibility for a war is not a very complicated issue.
The correct counter-move to this is to un-poison these minds by leading by example, demonstrating the moral superiority of your ways, the rule of law, the respect for democratic principles etc. What you have done instead is to furnish these poisoners with more ammunition. This is not a winning long-term strategy.
Well, the belligerent, villainous, corrupt and self-serving party is recently not these dictators but ... you. Until one of these nations assails another, you have no grounds whatsoever to intervene militarily, and even if they do, you must make sure that your actions do not reek of underhanded selfish ulterior motives, lest you be just another villain in the fray.
That is an understandable attitude and that is why no one would have accused the US soldiers of utter lack of conscience if that is what they were doing. But they were not, instead, they were the villainous party in this war, attacking other peoples' homes, as the aggressors, not as the defenders.
What really gets my goat is that the very Americans who, like you, would have done their patriotic duty, fail to recognize in their victims the very actions they, themselves, would be proudly undertaking in their place. The cognitive dissonance is frightening.
I keep pointing out that "doing one's job" is an insufficient criteria for being a "good guy". The soldiers of Werhmacht also "did their job", so did those of the Imperial Japan. Amongst them many believed that they were "making the world a better place" as their respective ideologies assured them of "manifest destinies" and the like. And still, they were in the end nothing but villains.
The criteria is not "doing one's job" or "believing in one's goodness", but objective, external benchmarks, chief amongst them this: who attacked whom. This one test alone determines a majority of the "moral capital" of one's party in the war. Note that both Germany and Japan were the unambiguous military aggressors ... as was the US in Iraq.
And so the answer is yes, I can, and I do blame you for not standing up for some basic, fundamental principles and instead "pragmatically" choosing to murder and maim others, all so that you can save your job. You gave up any claim to "not being evil" the moment you chose the far easier, self-serving path.
So was the case with both Germany and Japan. And in both there were those who refused, deserted and were in many cases executed for it. They were the true heroes of their nations, men of conscience and courage. It is them we should remember and honour.
In light of this, a mercenary who whines that he is not culpable for his actions, that "he did not choose or want this", in the face of much lighter punishment for disobeying, all so that he can continue to earn money while killing and maiming, does not deserve any sympathy whatsoever. He is in fact fully responsible for the bloody outcome, along with his paymasters.
Also, I am not an American. My nation did not participate in that clusterfuck.
Hate is a wrong word. Disgust is more like it. Your whiny, dishonest attempts to evade responsibility are truly pathetic, and are unlikely to change any of your victims' opinion of you.
If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. So in the case of Afghanistan, true, the Taliban (a band of blood-thirsty medieval religious wackos) had indeed sheltered Osama Bin Laden amongst all the general havoc they wrought in there, but that does not mean that brute, large-scale military force was the only, never you mind the best, option.
If the plight of the Afghanis and the justice for the victims of 9/11 were truly the objectives, Bin Laden would have been captured by special forces in the middle of the night, while still in Khandahar, and the Taliban would have been undermined (slowly, as these things take a long time) by carefully orchestrated cultural and economic warfare centred on good works and exemplary conduct of the Western democracies, led by the US. There is simply no military way to "defeat" the Taliban, as they are not a military force but ideological one. Ideologies can only be shown false by real-life examples of the effects of superior ideologies. And on this front, as far as the average Afghani is concerned, the US and NATO military efforts are not only a total fiasco, but utterly counter-productive as they lead to the spread and reinforcement of Taliban-like ideologies throughout the region.
I am sorry, should I reply to a murderous thug, who used the "F" word himself first, with a great deal of respect and decorum? I think not.
Yes, I agree. It is a well know practise not to say things to the faces of murderous asshole thugs, because they will, well ... murder you. This one even boasts that he did precisely that to people who dared to stand up to him.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that this whole quaint "democracy" and "freedom of speech" stuff was precisely to avoid having thugs end up always running the place based solely on the amount of their murderous inclinations coupled with firepower ... no?
Yes, I had committed the unforgivable crime of a single-letter typo, which apparently wholly invalidates my argument, or some such ... or maybe you could elaborate on the terrible negating influence of the letter "c" on my stating the rather self-obvious.
Which would be the very definition of them being ... ignorant elitist pricks. You apparently do not even see the black irony overflowing from your own lines.
Which, I say, which country exactly, demanded that you invade Iraq?!! Or more to the point, what pills are you on?!
Short answer: yes. There are factions in the USA who see every war as a profit centre, which it is for them. Those same people continuously advocate the use of the military force, as opposed to a myriad of other ways of exacting influence, precisely because it makes them money, lots of money, and empowers them politically. There are also powerful factions in the USA who are really foreign agents subverting the USA for the benefit of their own supremacist efforts in their own country, i.e. the Israeli Zionists.
No, your whole nation is not made up from idiot cowboys. Unfortunately you have way too many of them and they seem to have the uncanny ability to climb into positions of power. And you all reap the results of their belligerent ways. Perhaps you should pay more attention to the affairs of cleaning your own house before trying to "help" others at a point of a gun. But then "do what we say, don't do what we do" was always a popular attitude.
Trust me, the feeling is mutual.
No, you are only "damned" if you do hypocritical, self-serving, vile things dressed up as "help" and "liberation".
Looks like you've been eating your own propaganda dog-food. It is rather curious that the only people who seem to see themselves as the "liberators of the oppressed" are American Supremacist idiots like you. Neither the "oppressed" nor the "liberated" somehow do feel the same way. A fucking surprise too, that. I am sure that you are still awaiting your "flowers and sweets" mass welcome by the Iraqis, all these years after their "liberation". Just make sure you wear your combat gear while you attend.
But then again it was always the view of supremacists that their Glorious Way of Life, is the Only Way, and everyone else better conform. If they did not, they were to be "liberated" and "civilization brought to them" by fire and sword, and of course the "noble and heroic" bringers of "civilization" had to be compensated by the "barbarians" in slaves and gold and general boot-licking. Nothing has much changed apparently since the time of Rome, except that the asshat Centurions now ride in APCs.
And the list of those whose governments were "regime changed" for the benefit of the USA is even longer...
A former province of various pan-Arab empires, arbitrarily made property of a sycophantic Kuwaiti familiy by the British (the one before yours) Empire.
A European Jew religious-supremacist colony in the center of what was formerly Arab majority neighbourhood, violently expanding ever since. Note that it is not a democracy, as only Jews (a religiously selected sub-set of the population) enjoy the full citizenship rights there. Arab residents (those who remain after being cleansed out) only have some of the rights. Of course the US has supported financially and militarily all the conquests Israel embarked on, with no questions asked. Which is one of the issues at the core of all the "anti-americanism" in the Middle East.
To burst your America-centered bubble, in WWII in Europe, 9 out of 10 German soldiers died on the eastern front. In the days after the invasion of Normandy, all the combined America-led military effort faced around of 40 German divisions in 1944, while the Eastern front had over 200. Also, I do wonder how did the USA get to liberate Poland, it having been on the side somewhat facing the wrong front.
Tripoli is a city in Libya, asshat.
You "liberated" Panama? Your self-delusion has no limits apparently.
This is ridiculous. Spain's General Franco, a Hitler-sponsored dictator, remained in power well into 1970s, fully supported by the USA. Same is by the way true of Greece, where US-sponsored military junta ruled also into 1970s.
The only post WWII case that has any resemblance to "liberation". Of course ruled by a succession of US-sponsored dictators.
That would be Afghanistan, you dolt. Most of citizens of whom see you as thieving invaders. A wee bit removed from "liberators".
You also forgot the "we destroyed the village in order to save it" Vietnam "liberation".
No you could not. If you could, they would be blood-soaked, crater-filled ruins still, having been beneficiaries o
No, fuck you, seriously. You seem to have forgotten that a) you were in their country, b) they were defending their stuff, c) you went in there based on lies and fabrications, c) you went in there as a glorified mercenary (very much like a Roman Centurion) in order to pave way for the rulers of your Empire to dictate to your victims your Imperial Way Of Life, which they must accept or die, including which of their stuff is to be stolen by your country's top thieves.
You had absolutely zero fucking moral high ground, no matter what tactics they used to oppose you.
Blame for all of whom is always assigned to the instigator of the war. Always, with no exception. That would be you.
Irrelevant. In a war of Imperial Conquest you are still a suck-ass villain, even if you somehow managed to kill "only" the soldiers defending their homeland.
You shouldn't have been there in the first place, remember? It was you who were the invading assholes, not them. Their being "anti-american" is qualitatively no different then being "anti-invader". Sort of like the French Resistance, Polish Partisans etc. I am sure that to a Wehrmaht conscript (who at least had an excuse of being a conscript instead of a mercenary) they all looked rather "anti-german" too.
In this case, in accordance with all the historical evaluation of "right" and "wrong" in war, that would be you, the fucking invader.
Yes, the residents of Fallujah were born only so that they could become "ragheads" to some supremacist asshat, so that they, and their whole families, could be mowed down by that very supremacist swine who invaded their country for fun and profit. And yes, I do know that you are a supremacist swine with certainty, because of your use of the term "ragheads". So how many of these "sand niggers" (another term I am sure is dear to your oh-so-noble heart) did you "put down" and then took pictures of so that you can masturbate to them later?
And to all of you "America Right or Wrong" types, before you start modding this down, remember that it is your own words, like this killer-for-hire who I am responding to, which condemn you as American Supremacist Asshole Uber-menschen. No amount of censorship will change that what you are. I am sick and tired of your whining moral relativism and duplicity. This one issue was always black-and-white, and it will remain so no matter what mental gymnastics you try to perform.