You're still pretending like it's actually possible to know anything.
Ah yes, yet another disciple of Nihilism. You do realize that Nihilism can be controlled with anti-depression medications, don't you?
No, it's not the dreaded Zionists who are spreading bullshit, it's everyone. Both sides claim to have hard evidence and objective facts on their side.
The difference being, of course, that one side has orders of magnitude more communication capabilities and access to the Western information channels, as well as lobbying power. The other has only trifles such as geography, census data, verifiable historical records and the like on its side...
As far as I'm concerned Israel fell from the sky and the Palestinians emerged from the ocean.
Actually the modern state of Israel did fall onto the Middle East from... the old British Colonial maps!
As to the Palestinian Arabs being some recently-evolved ex-aquatic life-form, I am intrigued by your idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Wrong entirely. The actual hatred was of Jews generally from the beginning.
Right. That is why scores of Jews lived unmolested all over the Middle East prior to Israel appearing on the scene, significant numbers still remaining, in places like Iran.
The first Zionists met a warm welcome from the Arabs/Muslims, because they terraformed the land (ex: draining malarial swamps) and brought their money with them from Europe.
Ain't the Zionist Exceptionalism and Supremacism grand? Those damn Neandearhal Arabs, who lived in mud huts and ate dirt and little pebbles, exchanging unintelligible grunts, until the Enlightened, Glorious, Inteligent Zionists on a Mission From God arrived with cartloads of Money to bring Civilization to the poor wretches... and a bit of administrative "resettlement" along with it.
Then 1947 happens, the Jews get a state by accepting the partition plan that the Arabs rejected,
... and of which the dirt-eating Arabs were not consulted, nor whose approval of the plan was deemed even remotely necessary, them being pebble-collecting swamp dwellers... and which, surprise, shock, horror, they "rejected"! And only because it made most of them into either Zionist subjects or into peoples disposessed -- So how dare they! And over such a small "trifle" too! Ungrateful savages!
... and suddenly nobody likes the comparatively-wealthy Zionists any longer.
If that genius Zionist-White-Colonialist "plan" came down anywhere else in the world, on any other unsuspecting local population, the reaction would have been even more violent.
Then, over decades, the older prejudice against Jews mixed with the newer despising for the State of Israel to form the ammonia-smelling poison broth some have called "the new anti-Semitism".
The Zionists do no Jew any favours by trying to conflate Jewry with Zionism. It is one thing to unjsutly persecute Jews for mere membership in their religion, quite another to resist the supremacist machinations of Zionists. Of course your attempt to tie the two together into an inseparable knot makes your true stripes show through quite clearly.
Perhaps you might understand the seeming antagonism from both sides a bit better if you understood their cultural
backgrounds.
Yes, the relevant "cultural" background is that of a bunch ex-Europeans who arrived to kick the shit out of a bunch of locals in order to confiscate their land and lord over the disposessed, on an apparent mission of Manifest Destiny pre-ordained by their God who, according to them, designated the area in question as "theirs". The other side responded in kind, by attempting to get rid of the belligerent conquerors via any-and-all violent means, from all-out military conflict involving tanks and airplanes, to, as the desperation grew, all the way to strapping bombs to their asses and blowing themselves up.
Since 50% of Israeli Jewry comes from Arab nations in the Middle East (the Arabs booted them out after Israel's birth and the fledging state had to integrate them)...
Yes, how dared these Arab countries to do to the Jews what the Zionists did to the Arabs! I mean how totally unfair and dishonourable of them! Don't they understand the Glorious Concept of the Double Standard!? Savages!
... their own culture contains a strong infusion of its source that combines with the no-nonsense pioneering spirit of earlier Israeli days to make the heady broth we call Zionist antagonism.
Ah yes, the dirty Arabs infusing their... dirtiness into pure, upstanding, innocent Zionists! Particularly the likes of Ben Gurion who was born in the well known Arab Emirate of Poland.
It's not surprising Swiss crime rates are low. They are a regimented society that value order among all else. Swiss citizens do not have civil liberties. Crime is usually low in police states.
LOL! Switzerland - the land of the opressed....
... which just so happens to be rated the 4th most free country in the world, on combined political and economic scales!
Dude, did they have maps with white areas labelled "There be Dragons" surrounding the navel-of-the-world USofA on all your maps in that shack where you were "schooled"?
I'd say the fundies on the right and the welfare queens on the left pretty well cancel each other out in the "brainless voter" count.
This statement alone is proof positive that the fascists already ate your brains out.
"Welfare queens" are a wholesale fabrication of greedy millionaires who loath to pay taxes, and when forced to, to see a red cent of them go to someone who they consider sub-human. Curiously they have no compunctions about asking for other people's taxes to be used to bail them out after losing millions by stupidly gambling on risky investments or to be handed to them in "patriotic" no-bid military contracts.
Fundies on the other hand are quite real, thank you very much.
I hold your equivocation of the two as a demonstration of how your would-be Lords and Masters are successful at brainwashing the American public and shifting the "center" so far to the rigt that even any mention of moderate social reforms, which virtually every industrialized country in the world, and even some of the former Soviet Block ones, takes for granted labels you an instant "left-wing extemist loon" in America.
That is a rather weak attempt at making a pun, given that Poland is also a near-bankrupt, failed example of the insane fiscal policies of the "supply-side", "free-market-cures-all" "economists" and that country is presently run by a duo of rabid right-wingers, Holland (which is the nearest possibility for a trans-literation from Poland) was mentioned as an example upthread, and on top of that, there is no "coalition" of any kind involved, thus destroying any possible reference to the original context of that Poland meme. If that is all you have left to offer, you might as well give it up.
Trying to sort through the information, disinformation, propaganda, half-truths and bullshit is a fool's errand. You think you know what's going on, but you don't.
This, of course, is what Zionists desperately want you to think. Having a rather impressive array of hard empirical evidence arrayed against them, their only recourse is to try drown you in bullshit, while at the same time discouraging factual research, thus trying to somehow impugn all information. It is the quintessential equivalent of the "Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!".
True, some "data" is pure hearsay, on both sides of this, but a significant portion is not. The trick to estabilishing the overall picture of the Zionist machinations is rather simple: use of scientifically authenticated data originating at neutral (to the Zionist or anti-Zionist cause) sources. One method of establishing the neutrality is the one which I mentioned: data gathered prior to Zionism becoming a major factor. Another is inderect statistical data, cross-referenced with other, global, far removed from Middle East and the conflict therein, processes, such as global financial markets or industries. These alone paint a coarse, but quite sufficient image of the state of affairs, pointing the finger of responsiblity for all nearly all of the devastation and sufferring in the Middle East, complete with the responsibilty for the rise of violent radical Moslem extremism, squarely at the Zionists and their US backers.
It's absolutely impossible to know anything about the subject with an acceptable level of certainty.
Some things are quite possible, primarily because at the time of the records being made there was no Israel, and thus no reason to cook the data with the purpose of justifying some Zionist lunacy or anti-Zionist blowback. As, for example, at the time of the British mandate of Palestine, routine bureaucratic records of which were safely in Britain by the time the modern state of Israel was inflicted on the world, and are still in the British archives, written on paper which can be authenticated via well understood scientific means. Naturally, Zionists truly hate that sort of thing.
Also, the insane hatred of Israel and Jews exhibited by Muslims does not exactly create an atmosphere of friendliness.
Tha actual hatred was primarily directed at Zionists, and from there spilled onto other Jews. Even then however, reasonably large populations of Jews exist unpersecuted in Moslem countries, notably Iran. Zionist's policies, as that of any supremacist cult before them, are to antagonize the whole world (minus the US) against every Jew via Zionist excesses, with the express goal of making sure that all Jews become violent Zionists and live either in the permanently besieged us-vs-them fortress Israel, constantly at war with everybody, and thus "justified" in taking any-and-all extreme measures against all of its neighbors, or the USA, the place from which Israel is financed.
They even managed to conjure up the imaginary "ethnic cleansing" that's supposedly occuring in Palestine.
There is a simle test, you know, to determine if this is true: compare the Arab population of what is now Israel, as of today, with what that population figure was in, say, 1945. Then examine the means by which it was changed. Then lookup the definition of "ethnic clensing".
That is rather funny coming from someone who exclaims:
yeah you keep thinking the cash is endless.
.. when faced with a rather impressive track record of fiscal responsibility by the so-called "socialist utopias" such as Holland, in contrast to, say, the corporate-run USA, where nearly all the social programs are bankrupt and the unborn children of the yet to be born grand-children are already in debt, based purely on his hate of everything which is somehow not based upon hate-filled greed, never you mind "slippery slope" arguments.
A shadow can travel faster than light, but no information is transmitted at that speed.
That would be incorrect. Absence of energy is just as good a medium for transmission as the presence of energy. One for example could trigger a device by an absence of light (i.e. when the lit surface of a sensor falls into shadow) and thus beat the system if what you said were true. Of course, the "leading edge" of shadow is simply composed of the "trailing edge" of a light beam, photons of which travel at the speed of c. Thus it is unlikely that what you said could be true as the speed of shadow is simply the speed of retreating light.
Again, the "superluminal" only comes in when we chose to define the entity in question as "pulse envelope" instead of "constituent photons." Since it's the photons actually carrying the energy (hence information), the fact that the envelope can travel faster than light (or slower than light, or even backwards) doesn't matter.
From your reply, I understand that you mean to indicate that these "superluminal" effects occur only within an already "established" pulse, i.e. of which the leading edge already arrived at the speed of c at the destination, and that they are based on purely arbitrary definitions of the "measurement" point. However, the researchers in question appear to indicate that individual photons arrived at their respective, physically distant, detectors at the same time, thus the ones having to travel much further doing so at the speed greater then c. How does this fit into your explanation?
1. Group velocity versus speed-of-light. Basically, relativity states that no individual photon can travel faster than c. However a collection of photons interfere to form a beam or a pulse with some kind of shape. You can arrange your experiment so that the envelope of the pulse travels at some velocity (faster than light, slower than light, etc.) but the individual photons are still always traveling at exactly c.
... and....
... but no information, and no energy, was transmitted faster than light-speed.
Well, if the "envelope" of the pulse travels faster then light, in some way, then the information carried by the very existence of that pulse does too, does it not? That is, since the "envelope" is somehow detectable, we assume, lest the experiment would be unsuccessful, then the very arrival of the edge of that faster-then-light envelope could be used to trigger some other process, therefore effectively allowing for faster-then-light communication. Please clarify if this is not so.
And so it seems that mere empirical economic facts, plain as day, are no match for the greed-fueled, self-centered, hateful dogma burning like a fire in your belly...
I think you are being extremely unrealistic if you think western europe had a snowball's chance without the financial, material, and military assistance of the United States.
This of course can never be "proven", given that what we are discussing are various "what if" scenarios. But the statistics are rather tilted towards the view common amongst unbiased historians, that the USA's involvement in WWII in Europe, while important and responsible for shortening of the duration of the conflict as well as likely reduction of potential casualties, was ultimately not a decisive one. If it makes you feel better, and you are looking for a place where it was most effective, the lend-lease program was instumental in maintaining the ability of the British to repel the German aerial assaults.
I think you need to separate your justified dislike of america and american policies today from the events of world war 2. I think you are doing a great injustice a lot of heroic young americans who died to save people they didn't know and to fight real evil.
I keep pointing out that this has nothing whatsoever to do with heroism of US soldiers on the Western front. One can be a bona-fide hero and still end up contributing a small part to an overall war effort, amongst many, many other heros.
Does it reflect badly on the British that they did not play any major part at, say, the battle of Iwo Jima? Where does this equivocation of heroism with American supremacy come from? Are you seriously implying that just because the Soviets did the bulk of the fighting in Europe against the Nazis, the Western allies were somehow cowardly or dishonorable? Do clarify.
What I object to are attempts to abuse the American contribution to WWII in Europe, attempts made in order to shape that contribution into a large piece in an overall narrative of American Exceptionalism and Supremacy. There are areas where the USA was a titanic force in the WWII, but Europe was not one of those. But efforts are continuously made by some questionable nationalits to spin it as such, with the explicit purpose of painting the USA as single-handedly winning the WWII in all of its theatres, and all of the other Allies, particularly the Soviets, as some sort of pathetic, incompetent fools, whom the all-mighty, all-knowing America had to teach how to put one foot in front of the other, so the hapless fools could be led by Square-jawed American Supermen out of the fire. The situation is not helped by many, many years of uncritical self-aggrandisment, centered around Hollywood productions, where the Eastern front, with its mere pittance of 80-90% of all combat in Europe, simply did not exist, either.
Just read some of the replies to these posts of mine to see what I mean by this.
At the very least, US forces shortened the war by five years. If you don't think that's significant, well, I don't know what to tell you.
That is, of course, pure conjecture. Given the relative scales of warfare on the Eastern and Western fronts, I sincerely doubt that assesment. 1-2 months? Very likely. 1/2 a year? Possibly. 5 years? Not a chance. For some reason I am made to bring this to your attention over and over: 9 out of 10 German military casualties occured on the Eastern front. If you were to remove the 10% of support provided by the West, given the Soviet-German war lasting from 1941-1945, that gets you 10% of 4 years, i.e. 4.8 months (if such things could be so simply translated, which of course they are not - but this gives you some perspective).
Even if Russia were to have invaded Berlin, they wouldn't have bothered to liberate France. If anything, they'd have decided that Germany is a fine buffer zone, thank you, and stopped right there.
You mean to insinuate that the Soviets would have let the Nazis continue in the West, allowing them to re-group and re-arm for a counter-offensive? This is a jest, right? The most likely scenario is for the Soviets to force the surrender of the remaining Nazi forces after Berlin fell, which would immediately result in the fall of the Vichy government and the French and their neighbours liberating themselves. The only possible concern would be for the Soviets to try to advance further West, something which most historians see as exceedingly unlikely and impractical given the state the Soviets were in at that time.
Our grandfather's were heroes in WWII in the finest sense of the word.
Their heroics do not preclude them from being minor players in one theatre of war or another. The main contribution by the USA to the WWII was in its fight against Japan, while its assistance in Europe against the Nazis was pretty much a side-show, when measured against the scale of the German-Soviet warfare. None of which, in any way, diminishes the heroism of individual soldiers, regardless of the battlefield.
But Up until later part of vietnam we came to help ppl.
Most Americans in WWII did indeed do that, although some of the American elites were already deeply engaged in hegemonist machinations at that time.
Keep in mind, we didn't start the vietnam war, the french did.
Ah, yes, the damn French, who by that time have been long gone from Vietnam, excercising their influence via their Telepathic Cheese to get the US to stage the Tonkin Bay incident...
The russians helped europe up til the point they decided to take
over most of eastern europe.
I think if you ask the Ukraine people who suffered under them,
and newly free Georgia, you will not get a rosey picture of russia
from them.
Or most of the eastern BLOC for that matter...
The main point of the original poster was bragging about how the USA single-handedly defeated the Nazis in Europe, to which I responded. The activities of the Soviets post-WWII are another discussion.
But suffice to say that the USA was not exactly saintly in this endeavour either. Do ask the Greeks how do they feel about the CIA-sponsored fascist military hunta which governed them until the 1970s, or the Spanish who suffered under a fascist dictator named Francisco Franco (who shrewdly changed allegiances from Hitler to the USA just in the nick of time) until he died of old age in 1975.
As late as the 1990's the ppl
in Kosovo and the majority of the UN begged us to stop the genocide.
I am not sure what your point is supposed to be, but the "genocide" in Kosovo turned out to be, for the most part, a figment of imagination of Albenians, aided gleefuly by various NATO warmongers. Yes, there was ethnic cleansing and mass executions, but on the scale far, far below of that of "genocide". The Serb (and incidently Albenian) casualties from the NATO bombardment greatly exceed the number of dead in that "genocide", prior to the NATO attack. The whole campaign will remain one of the prime examples of triumph of warmongering propaganda and media maniupulation in the West, with an express purpose to further enrich the already engorged military-industrial complex.
Most ppl in the US are sick of War, and thus why we now have a Socialist
House and Senate. Some call them democrats, but I call them what they really are.
You wouldn't know a Socialist if he hit you on the head with a 50-pound clue bat.
2008 will see a Socialist president that is really a she-wolf in sheep's guise,
no idea what she will do.
No, Hillary is a prominent member of your Elite Aristocracy. A dynastical affair, composed of mildly antagonistic royal lineages of Bushes and Clintons. She is as much of a Socialist as the Queen of England.
I think that Europe should have take care of its own backyard in Albania
and Kosovo, but Europe really didn't care about millions being slaughtered.
Note the "millions". Let this masterpiece of propaganda ripe some more in the mouldy basements of the war profiteering warmongers and the 1990's Kosovo "genocide" will be into "billions" by, oh, somewhere around 2020.
ow very European....
Yes, I know, failing to raise to the bait of the Albenians bashing the skulls of Serbs, and vice versa, in order to take sides in this inane confrontation, on the side which is more likely to stick it to the Russians and to expand the control of various Western miltaristic elites... it is almost like they did not think this was a really useful thing to do. And, suprisingly, the Kosovo affair is pretty much where it was before the whole thing started. Except more people are dead. Fancy that!
I sincerely doubt that Winston Churchill would agree with you.
I am not sure if having a man who sent ammunition onboard of passenger liners with the hopes of them getting torpedoed by the Germans, and thus luring the USA into the WWI, disagree with me would be necessarily a bad thing. Uncritical Personality Worship is one of the great pitfalls of humanity, leading to excesses such as Hitler or Stalin.
Keep in mind also that Hitler took the fight to the Russians, not vice versa. I think Russia would have happily stayed out of WW2 had Hitler not broken the non-aggression treaty.
True. But let's be honest: if Japan had not attacked USA, it too would have been unlikely to engage, given the rather firm prospects of losing. At the height of the USA's intervention, the US Army, combined with all the Western Allies, struggled to combat up to 20 German divisions, while the Soviets entertained around 400 of them. Now let's imagine that the whole 420 of them were directed at the Western Front. The only thing capable to turn the tide would have been large scale deployment of nuclear weapons by the USA... and so the Europe would not have been "saved" after all, being radio-active and all that.
But, somehow, it's important for you to disparage America's contributions to WW2. If that makes you feel better, far be it from me to dissuade you.
I disagree with American supremacism and exceptionalism cloaked by revisionist history. The USA had a massive contribution to WWII... in the Pacific Theatre. But its role in Europe was moderate to very modest, something which seems to escape most Americans amongst all that chest beating and indignant cries about "ingrateful Europeans" who dare to disobey rightful dictums of their "saviors".
If you're not able to understand that a Europe controlled by Stalin would have been in just as much trouble as a Europe controlled by Hitler, you're not qualified to tell anyone to ponder anything. If you're not able to understand that the US is the reason that neither of these alternatives occurred, you're certainly not entitled to the snooty attitude you're packing.
That of course assumes that the Soviets had an appetite for further, immediate advance West, of which most historians are very doubtful, given the shape the Soviets were in at the conclusion of WWII. And in a longer time-frame, what I keep pointing out is that a nuclearly armed UK and France were already a sufficient deterrent to the over-stretched Soviets, USA's "protection" notwithstanding.
Was the USA helpful to Europe during and after WWII? Sure. I never dusputed this fact. But the dimensions of that help are completely out of proportion with the swagger and the domineering attitude which is somehow supposedly "justified" by it. If you lend your neighbour a bucket when his house is on fire, you might earn his gratitude. Brag about it endlessly, demand that the neighbour votes in the elections as you desire, insist that you are entitled to bang his daughter whenever you like because you "saved her", and sooner or later his opinion of you is bound to, shall we say, become somewhat negative. So then top it off with injured cries of indignation about "snooty, ingrateful neighbours" and how "they hate you for your freedoms".
No. The US produced basically 100% of Russian armor during WW2, from various companies such as the U.S. Wheel Track Layer Corp. They were either manufactured here or, in Russia at US plants.
Yes, the Armored vehicles that *were* produced in Russia were from the Stalingrad, Kharkov and Chelyabinsk "Tractor" plants that were financed and built by... Americans!
The Soviet T-34 tank, the most well known of WW2, were based on a US design by Christie and built in these same plants.
The US almost singlehandedly financed the allied powers during WW2, and our manufacturing ability is probably the one single thing that defeated the axis powers.
You are mad. Simply a raving lunatic. American exceptionalism and supremacism gone rabid.
I could refute this foaming lunacy point by point... pointing out thing such as that the Cristie's designs influenced the "BT" series of 1930s Soviet tanks, of which th T34 was a very remote descendant and the design of which had as much to do with Walter Christie as the Mitsubish Zero had with the Wright's brothers biplane... or that the Soviets, being a nominal Communist dictatorship in trouble, effectively suspended the concept of money during the war, replacing it with strict rationing and central planning and thus the idea of "financing" anything witin the war-time Soviet Union is rather comical... or the truly barking-at-the-moon idea that Americans actually "built" anything in Soviet Union, presumably wth the slack-jawed Soviets standing in a circle looking on at the oh-soo-clever and industious Americans in their hard-hats hammering all them factories into place... or the fact that the Lend-Lease program amounted to something like a mere 5% of the Soviet war materiel (although some of it was of strategic importance)... or... but what is the point?
Yes, Henry Ford was a socialist...that doesn't mean he supported Hitler. He supported Socialism.
Err, Hitler's "Socialist" National Worker's Party had as much to do with Socialism as Bush's "Blue Skies" initiatives have to do, well, with skies staying blue. The last remaining vestiges of the socialist component of Hitler's movement were disposed of in the famous "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934. That was the end of the "Socialism" in the NSDAP. All that remained was the letter "S". Even prior to that event, virtually all prominent German Socialists, as well as Communists, were already in the concentration camps.
It is quite amusing (and sad) to see that so many people after so relatively short time are so ignorantly eager to latch onto false labels and belive that these labels represent the truth. The fact that this information originated with the Nazis, rather famous for bold lies, propaganda and mass deception, somehow does not seem to enter their minds.
As to Henry Ford, he was a promoter of something called "welfare capitalism" which has very little in common with Socialism and a lot in common with what the Nazis did. In Ford's model, it is the capitalists who have all the control of the "welfare" system and any organized effort by the workers is to be very discouraged. That is why Ford and Hitler both were famous union busters. Google for "Battle of the Overpass" to see an example of Ford's "socialist" leanings. Ford was finally forced to recognize the UAW after it became apparent that he cannot win the confrontation. And Ford was a raving anti-semite, which further endearded one Adolf to him.
But of course Henry Ford was but one of many of his contemporaries who drooled over the "efficiency" and "fresh new ideas" of Herr Hitler. Amongst them operations such as Standard Oil, which supplied the Nazis during the war and wee little US companies such as IBM which supplied machinery to efficiently tabulate all those Jews in their box-cars. The list goes on and on.
As for your claim that our involvement was far behind the Soviets, you're living in a dream world with cotton candy clouds and smurfs dancing around.
Yes, I am dancing a cha-cha with itsy-bitsy little facts such as who actually run over Berlin and which front the 80-90% (depending on historian) of the German losses occured on.
Ponder that for a minute: up to 90%. Every 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed: Eastern front. The USA was at best a little side-kick to the Soviets in that affair called WWII in Europe.
The US went from the United States to Britain to France and Africa up through just about everything else. I should say, the US Army did this.
And the British, Canadians, New Zealanders, Austalians, Poles, Chechs, Slovaks, French, Greeks etc etc and so on, all combined to face the 15-20 German divisions set against them, with the remaining 400 or so German divisions tied up you-know-where.
The US Marines went from the US to Australia (twice) and then up through the Solomon's and could have taken Japan. As for that, most US generals wanted to roll right on through to Moscow.
Oh yes, the Japanese just waited to roll-over and let them. They clearly showed their propensity for rolling over in places like Iwo Jima.
And then of course is your American idea of "helping" the Soviets, as in, "we could have murdered you, but didn't, see how helpful we are?". And then you wonder why you are so disliked abroad.
Did I mention the fact that we supplied a shitload of the war material?
Not before I pointed out how inconsequential the Lend-lease program was in the big picture of the Soviet-German warfare.
See, I can make statements with out facts also except mine are more believable.
No they aren't. You see, there is this thing called Google. This might come as a shock to you, but some people around here actually know how to use it and are not baffled by a lack of a direct link to supporting evidence.
I would think that the solution is to not have a kid if you can't afford a kid, not raise everyone's tax rates.
So you advocate mass infertility, since such unaffordability of basic medical services is now affecting something like 60%+ of American families.
Furthermore, to take your reasoning to its logical conclusion, since the elderly cannot afford medical care either, they should simply off themselves so that you do not have to part with a red cent of your all-important, all-encompassing money.
Then, of course, since a very large number of working adults can no longer afford medical insurance for themselves, never you mind for their kids, your solution, naturally, would be to ask them to digest rat poison, because their continuing existence threatens your wallet, and might result in your having to part with some of those precious, oh so precioussss wittle green pieces of paper in it.
But they are soooo lovely, those green things, and you talk to them and love them and wrap your whole life and being and whatever remains of your reptile mind around them.... how could these people be so cruel to aks you to give up the essence of your very existence... the only tangible pieces of your Deity, the Mammon... how could they be so nasssty?! Nasssty peoplesss!! Nassssty!! But we will not let them preciousssss, no we won't....
One day these countries will be so strapped for cash, and they'll go to bump the tax rate up just one more percent and realize that taxing ppl at 100% is not gonna work.
That must be why Holland and Canada (both mentioned in this discussion as examples of "socialist utopias") are awash in cash with massive budget surpluses and the USA, boasting the lowest taxation of all of the industrialized countries combined with the lowest levels of public services amongst those countries by far, is drowning in red ink, complete with gargantuan debts which will not likely to be paid off even by the next generation... oh wait...
We saved their asses as well. No chance they would have survived without western equipment. The Russian winter alone would not have been enough.
The Soviets fought by using their population (more correctly their subject nations population) as cannon fodder. Claiming they did most of the fighting because they lost the most people isn't accurate. They did most of the losing early, that's true.
Let me add revisionist history to the list of sins of American supremacists. The Lend-Lease program had a miniscule impact on the Soviet war effort. A truly vast majority of the Soviet war equipment was manufactured by the Soviets, that including nearly 100% of their armor, something like 90+% of their small arms, and a similar proportion of their airforce. Nearly 100% of their ammunition too. The reason for their "losing early" was of course Stalin's mis-managment of the situation and his trust in his deals with Hitler, which backfired at him. But the Soviets did manage to move nearly all of their war production capabilities East, and the delay which was inherent in getting them back up to speed producing effective weaponry was the main reason for the continuing German advance. It was not winter which stopped the Wehrmacht, it was the T34 tanks and PPSh-41 sub-machine guns made in the Ural mountains. Once the Soviet manufacturing juggernaut got going, the tables have turned on the Germans, highlighted by engagement such as the battle of Kursk where the soviet fielded 3,600 tanks, none of them from the Lend-Lease program.
Stalin was worse then Hitler. If America and England hadn't built nukes you can bet western Europe would have been the next battlefield.
Comparative evils of wacko dictators aside, once UK and France had nukes, the American "protection" became a moot point. Stalin wanted to enlarge his empire and nuclear arsenals of these countries presented a show stopper to his plans. Furthermore, once he died, the whole Soviet leadership went into a bunker mode and remained so to the end. Papers which were recovered from the vaults of the Soviet Union after the collapse clearly indicate that the Soviets were always seeing themselves as on the verge of being attacked by the belligerent and aggressive USA and did everything in their power to forestall such attack, much of it by posturing.
1) We really did pull Europe's bacon out of the fire.
No, you merely assisted the Soviets in doing so. Patently false and self-aggrandizing claims, accompanied by swagger and "my way or the high-way" attitude, spiced up by an unshakeable conviction of general superiority, play a rather major role in building up the antipathy towards the US in Europe, as well as globally.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, yet another disciple of Nihilism. You do realize that Nihilism can be controlled with anti-depression medications, don't you?
The difference being, of course, that one side has orders of magnitude more communication capabilities and access to the Western information channels, as well as lobbying power. The other has only trifles such as geography, census data, verifiable historical records and the like on its side...
Actually the modern state of Israel did fall onto the Middle East from ... the old British Colonial maps!
As to the Palestinian Arabs being some recently-evolved ex-aquatic life-form, I am intrigued by your idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Right. That is why scores of Jews lived unmolested all over the Middle East prior to Israel appearing on the scene, significant numbers still remaining, in places like Iran.
Ain't the Zionist Exceptionalism and Supremacism grand? Those damn Neandearhal Arabs, who lived in mud huts and ate dirt and little pebbles, exchanging unintelligible grunts, until the Enlightened, Glorious, Inteligent Zionists on a Mission From God arrived with cartloads of Money to bring Civilization to the poor wretches ... and a bit of administrative "resettlement" along with it.
... and of which the dirt-eating Arabs were not consulted, nor whose approval of the plan was deemed even remotely necessary, them being pebble-collecting swamp dwellers ... and which, surprise, shock, horror, they "rejected"! And only because it made most of them into either Zionist subjects or into peoples disposessed -- So how dare they! And over such a small "trifle" too! Ungrateful savages!
If that genius Zionist-White-Colonialist "plan" came down anywhere else in the world, on any other unsuspecting local population, the reaction would have been even more violent.
The Zionists do no Jew any favours by trying to conflate Jewry with Zionism. It is one thing to unjsutly persecute Jews for mere membership in their religion, quite another to resist the supremacist machinations of Zionists. Of course your attempt to tie the two together into an inseparable knot makes your true stripes show through quite clearly.
Yes, the relevant "cultural" background is that of a bunch ex-Europeans who arrived to kick the shit out of a bunch of locals in order to confiscate their land and lord over the disposessed, on an apparent mission of Manifest Destiny pre-ordained by their God who, according to them, designated the area in question as "theirs". The other side responded in kind, by attempting to get rid of the belligerent conquerors via any-and-all violent means, from all-out military conflict involving tanks and airplanes, to, as the desperation grew, all the way to strapping bombs to their asses and blowing themselves up.
Yes, how dared these Arab countries to do to the Jews what the Zionists did to the Arabs! I mean how totally unfair and dishonourable of them! Don't they understand the Glorious Concept of the Double Standard!? Savages!
Ah yes, the dirty Arabs infusing their ... dirtiness into pure, upstanding, innocent Zionists! Particularly the likes of Ben Gurion who was born in the well known Arab Emirate of Poland.
LOL! Switzerland - the land of the opressed ....
... which just so happens to be rated the 4th most free country in the world, on combined political and economic scales!
Dude, did they have maps with white areas labelled "There be Dragons" surrounding the navel-of-the-world USofA on all your maps in that shack where you were "schooled"?
This statement alone is proof positive that the fascists already ate your brains out.
"Welfare queens" are a wholesale fabrication of greedy millionaires who loath to pay taxes, and when forced to, to see a red cent of them go to someone who they consider sub-human. Curiously they have no compunctions about asking for other people's taxes to be used to bail them out after losing millions by stupidly gambling on risky investments or to be handed to them in "patriotic" no-bid military contracts.
Fundies on the other hand are quite real, thank you very much.
I hold your equivocation of the two as a demonstration of how your would-be Lords and Masters are successful at brainwashing the American public and shifting the "center" so far to the rigt that even any mention of moderate social reforms, which virtually every industrialized country in the world, and even some of the former Soviet Block ones, takes for granted labels you an instant "left-wing extemist loon" in America.
You are truly lost.
This, of course, is what Zionists desperately want you to think. Having a rather impressive array of hard empirical evidence arrayed against them, their only recourse is to try drown you in bullshit, while at the same time discouraging factual research, thus trying to somehow impugn all information. It is the quintessential equivalent of the "Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!".
True, some "data" is pure hearsay, on both sides of this, but a significant portion is not. The trick to estabilishing the overall picture of the Zionist machinations is rather simple: use of scientifically authenticated data originating at neutral (to the Zionist or anti-Zionist cause) sources. One method of establishing the neutrality is the one which I mentioned: data gathered prior to Zionism becoming a major factor. Another is inderect statistical data, cross-referenced with other, global, far removed from Middle East and the conflict therein, processes, such as global financial markets or industries. These alone paint a coarse, but quite sufficient image of the state of affairs, pointing the finger of responsiblity for all nearly all of the devastation and sufferring in the Middle East, complete with the responsibilty for the rise of violent radical Moslem extremism, squarely at the Zionists and their US backers.
Some things are quite possible, primarily because at the time of the records being made there was no Israel, and thus no reason to cook the data with the purpose of justifying some Zionist lunacy or anti-Zionist blowback. As, for example, at the time of the British mandate of Palestine, routine bureaucratic records of which were safely in Britain by the time the modern state of Israel was inflicted on the world, and are still in the British archives, written on paper which can be authenticated via well understood scientific means. Naturally, Zionists truly hate that sort of thing.
Tha actual hatred was primarily directed at Zionists, and from there spilled onto other Jews. Even then however, reasonably large populations of Jews exist unpersecuted in Moslem countries, notably Iran. Zionist's policies, as that of any supremacist cult before them, are to antagonize the whole world (minus the US) against every Jew via Zionist excesses, with the express goal of making sure that all Jews become violent Zionists and live either in the permanently besieged us-vs-them fortress Israel, constantly at war with everybody, and thus "justified" in taking any-and-all extreme measures against all of its neighbors, or the USA, the place from which Israel is financed.
There is a simle test, you know, to determine if this is true: compare the Arab population of what is now Israel, as of today, with what that population figure was in, say, 1945. Then examine the means by which it was changed. Then lookup the definition of "ethnic clensing".
That is rather funny coming from someone who exclaims:
.. when faced with a rather impressive track record of fiscal responsibility by the so-called "socialist utopias" such as Holland, in contrast to, say, the corporate-run USA, where nearly all the social programs are bankrupt and the unborn children of the yet to be born grand-children are already in debt, based purely on his hate of everything which is somehow not based upon hate-filled greed, never you mind "slippery slope" arguments.
That would be incorrect. Absence of energy is just as good a medium for transmission as the presence of energy. One for example could trigger a device by an absence of light (i.e. when the lit surface of a sensor falls into shadow) and thus beat the system if what you said were true. Of course, the "leading edge" of shadow is simply composed of the "trailing edge" of a light beam, photons of which travel at the speed of c. Thus it is unlikely that what you said could be true as the speed of shadow is simply the speed of retreating light.
From your reply, I understand that you mean to indicate that these "superluminal" effects occur only within an already "established" pulse, i.e. of which the leading edge already arrived at the speed of c at the destination, and that they are based on purely arbitrary definitions of the "measurement" point. However, the researchers in question appear to indicate that individual photons arrived at their respective, physically distant, detectors at the same time, thus the ones having to travel much further doing so at the speed greater then c. How does this fit into your explanation?
It seesm we have a contradiction here:
... and ....
Well, if the "envelope" of the pulse travels faster then light, in some way, then the information carried by the very existence of that pulse does too, does it not? That is, since the "envelope" is somehow detectable, we assume, lest the experiment would be unsuccessful, then the very arrival of the edge of that faster-then-light envelope could be used to trigger some other process, therefore effectively allowing for faster-then-light communication. Please clarify if this is not so.
And so it seems that mere empirical economic facts, plain as day, are no match for the greed-fueled, self-centered, hateful dogma burning like a fire in your belly...
This of course can never be "proven", given that what we are discussing are various "what if" scenarios. But the statistics are rather tilted towards the view common amongst unbiased historians, that the USA's involvement in WWII in Europe, while important and responsible for shortening of the duration of the conflict as well as likely reduction of potential casualties, was ultimately not a decisive one. If it makes you feel better, and you are looking for a place where it was most effective, the lend-lease program was instumental in maintaining the ability of the British to repel the German aerial assaults.
I keep pointing out that this has nothing whatsoever to do with heroism of US soldiers on the Western front. One can be a bona-fide hero and still end up contributing a small part to an overall war effort, amongst many, many other heros.
Does it reflect badly on the British that they did not play any major part at, say, the battle of Iwo Jima? Where does this equivocation of heroism with American supremacy come from? Are you seriously implying that just because the Soviets did the bulk of the fighting in Europe against the Nazis, the Western allies were somehow cowardly or dishonorable? Do clarify.
What I object to are attempts to abuse the American contribution to WWII in Europe, attempts made in order to shape that contribution into a large piece in an overall narrative of American Exceptionalism and Supremacy. There are areas where the USA was a titanic force in the WWII, but Europe was not one of those. But efforts are continuously made by some questionable nationalits to spin it as such, with the explicit purpose of painting the USA as single-handedly winning the WWII in all of its theatres, and all of the other Allies, particularly the Soviets, as some sort of pathetic, incompetent fools, whom the all-mighty, all-knowing America had to teach how to put one foot in front of the other, so the hapless fools could be led by Square-jawed American Supermen out of the fire. The situation is not helped by many, many years of uncritical self-aggrandisment, centered around Hollywood productions, where the Eastern front, with its mere pittance of 80-90% of all combat in Europe, simply did not exist, either.
Just read some of the replies to these posts of mine to see what I mean by this.
That is, of course, pure conjecture. Given the relative scales of warfare on the Eastern and Western fronts, I sincerely doubt that assesment. 1-2 months? Very likely. 1/2 a year? Possibly. 5 years? Not a chance. For some reason I am made to bring this to your attention over and over: 9 out of 10 German military casualties occured on the Eastern front. If you were to remove the 10% of support provided by the West, given the Soviet-German war lasting from 1941-1945, that gets you 10% of 4 years, i.e. 4.8 months (if such things could be so simply translated, which of course they are not - but this gives you some perspective).
You mean to insinuate that the Soviets would have let the Nazis continue in the West, allowing them to re-group and re-arm for a counter-offensive? This is a jest, right? The most likely scenario is for the Soviets to force the surrender of the remaining Nazi forces after Berlin fell, which would immediately result in the fall of the Vichy government and the French and their neighbours liberating themselves. The only possible concern would be for the Soviets to try to advance further West, something which most historians see as exceedingly unlikely and impractical given the state the Soviets were in at that time.
Their heroics do not preclude them from being minor players in one theatre of war or another. The main contribution by the USA to the WWII was in its fight against Japan, while its assistance in Europe against the Nazis was pretty much a side-show, when measured against the scale of the German-Soviet warfare. None of which, in any way, diminishes the heroism of individual soldiers, regardless of the battlefield.
Most Americans in WWII did indeed do that, although some of the American elites were already deeply engaged in hegemonist machinations at that time.
Ah, yes, the damn French, who by that time have been long gone from Vietnam, excercising their influence via their Telepathic Cheese to get the US to stage the Tonkin Bay incident...
The main point of the original poster was bragging about how the USA single-handedly defeated the Nazis in Europe, to which I responded. The activities of the Soviets post-WWII are another discussion.
But suffice to say that the USA was not exactly saintly in this endeavour either. Do ask the Greeks how do they feel about the CIA-sponsored fascist military hunta which governed them until the 1970s, or the Spanish who suffered under a fascist dictator named Francisco Franco (who shrewdly changed allegiances from Hitler to the USA just in the nick of time) until he died of old age in 1975.
I am not sure what your point is supposed to be, but the "genocide" in Kosovo turned out to be, for the most part, a figment of imagination of Albenians, aided gleefuly by various NATO warmongers. Yes, there was ethnic cleansing and mass executions, but on the scale far, far below of that of "genocide". The Serb (and incidently Albenian) casualties from the NATO bombardment greatly exceed the number of dead in that "genocide", prior to the NATO attack. The whole campaign will remain one of the prime examples of triumph of warmongering propaganda and media maniupulation in the West, with an express purpose to further enrich the already engorged military-industrial complex.
You wouldn't know a Socialist if he hit you on the head with a 50-pound clue bat.
No, Hillary is a prominent member of your Elite Aristocracy. A dynastical affair, composed of mildly antagonistic royal lineages of Bushes and Clintons. She is as much of a Socialist as the Queen of England.
Note the "millions". Let this masterpiece of propaganda ripe some more in the mouldy basements of the war profiteering warmongers and the 1990's Kosovo "genocide" will be into "billions" by, oh, somewhere around 2020.
Yes, I know, failing to raise to the bait of the Albenians bashing the skulls of Serbs, and vice versa, in order to take sides in this inane confrontation, on the side which is more likely to stick it to the Russians and to expand the control of various Western miltaristic elites ... it is almost like they did not think this was a really useful thing to do. And, suprisingly, the Kosovo affair is pretty much where it was before the whole thing started. Except more people are dead. Fancy that!
I am not sure if having a man who sent ammunition onboard of passenger liners with the hopes of them getting torpedoed by the Germans, and thus luring the USA into the WWI, disagree with me would be necessarily a bad thing. Uncritical Personality Worship is one of the great pitfalls of humanity, leading to excesses such as Hitler or Stalin.
True. But let's be honest: if Japan had not attacked USA, it too would have been unlikely to engage, given the rather firm prospects of losing. At the height of the USA's intervention, the US Army, combined with all the Western Allies, struggled to combat up to 20 German divisions, while the Soviets entertained around 400 of them. Now let's imagine that the whole 420 of them were directed at the Western Front. The only thing capable to turn the tide would have been large scale deployment of nuclear weapons by the USA ... and so the Europe would not have been "saved" after all, being radio-active and all that.
I disagree with American supremacism and exceptionalism cloaked by revisionist history. The USA had a massive contribution to WWII ... in the Pacific Theatre. But its role in Europe was moderate to very modest, something which seems to escape most Americans amongst all that chest beating and indignant cries about "ingrateful Europeans" who dare to disobey rightful dictums of their "saviors".
That of course assumes that the Soviets had an appetite for further, immediate advance West, of which most historians are very doubtful, given the shape the Soviets were in at the conclusion of WWII. And in a longer time-frame, what I keep pointing out is that a nuclearly armed UK and France were already a sufficient deterrent to the over-stretched Soviets, USA's "protection" notwithstanding.
Was the USA helpful to Europe during and after WWII? Sure. I never dusputed this fact. But the dimensions of that help are completely out of proportion with the swagger and the domineering attitude which is somehow supposedly "justified" by it. If you lend your neighbour a bucket when his house is on fire, you might earn his gratitude. Brag about it endlessly, demand that the neighbour votes in the elections as you desire, insist that you are entitled to bang his daughter whenever you like because you "saved her", and sooner or later his opinion of you is bound to, shall we say, become somewhat negative. So then top it off with injured cries of indignation about "snooty, ingrateful neighbours" and how "they hate you for your freedoms".
You are mad. Simply a raving lunatic. American exceptionalism and supremacism gone rabid.
I could refute this foaming lunacy point by point ... pointing out thing such as that the Cristie's designs influenced the "BT" series of 1930s Soviet tanks, of which th T34 was a very remote descendant and the design of which had as much to do with Walter Christie as the Mitsubish Zero had with the Wright's brothers biplane ... or that the Soviets, being a nominal Communist dictatorship in trouble, effectively suspended the concept of money during the war, replacing it with strict rationing and central planning and thus the idea of "financing" anything witin the war-time Soviet Union is rather comical ... or the truly barking-at-the-moon idea that Americans actually "built" anything in Soviet Union, presumably wth the slack-jawed Soviets standing in a circle looking on at the oh-soo-clever and industious Americans in their hard-hats hammering all them factories into place ... or the fact that the Lend-Lease program amounted to something like a mere 5% of the Soviet war materiel (although some of it was of strategic importance)... or ... but what is the point?
My pleasure.
Err, Hitler's "Socialist" National Worker's Party had as much to do with Socialism as Bush's "Blue Skies" initiatives have to do, well, with skies staying blue. The last remaining vestiges of the socialist component of Hitler's movement were disposed of in the famous "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934. That was the end of the "Socialism" in the NSDAP. All that remained was the letter "S". Even prior to that event, virtually all prominent German Socialists, as well as Communists, were already in the concentration camps.
It is quite amusing (and sad) to see that so many people after so relatively short time are so ignorantly eager to latch onto false labels and belive that these labels represent the truth. The fact that this information originated with the Nazis, rather famous for bold lies, propaganda and mass deception, somehow does not seem to enter their minds.
As to Henry Ford, he was a promoter of something called "welfare capitalism" which has very little in common with Socialism and a lot in common with what the Nazis did. In Ford's model, it is the capitalists who have all the control of the "welfare" system and any organized effort by the workers is to be very discouraged. That is why Ford and Hitler both were famous union busters. Google for "Battle of the Overpass" to see an example of Ford's "socialist" leanings. Ford was finally forced to recognize the UAW after it became apparent that he cannot win the confrontation. And Ford was a raving anti-semite, which further endearded one Adolf to him.
But of course Henry Ford was but one of many of his contemporaries who drooled over the "efficiency" and "fresh new ideas" of Herr Hitler. Amongst them operations such as Standard Oil, which supplied the Nazis during the war and wee little US companies such as IBM which supplied machinery to efficiently tabulate all those Jews in their box-cars. The list goes on and on.
Yes, I am dancing a cha-cha with itsy-bitsy little facts such as who actually run over Berlin and which front the 80-90% (depending on historian) of the German losses occured on.
Ponder that for a minute: up to 90%. Every 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed: Eastern front. The USA was at best a little side-kick to the Soviets in that affair called WWII in Europe.
And the British, Canadians, New Zealanders, Austalians, Poles, Chechs, Slovaks, French, Greeks etc etc and so on, all combined to face the 15-20 German divisions set against them, with the remaining 400 or so German divisions tied up you-know-where.
Oh yes, the Japanese just waited to roll-over and let them. They clearly showed their propensity for rolling over in places like Iwo Jima.
And then of course is your American idea of "helping" the Soviets, as in, "we could have murdered you, but didn't, see how helpful we are?". And then you wonder why you are so disliked abroad.
Not before I pointed out how inconsequential the Lend-lease program was in the big picture of the Soviet-German warfare.
No they aren't. You see, there is this thing called Google. This might come as a shock to you, but some people around here actually know how to use it and are not baffled by a lack of a direct link to supporting evidence.
So you advocate mass infertility, since such unaffordability of basic medical services is now affecting something like 60%+ of American families.
Furthermore, to take your reasoning to its logical conclusion, since the elderly cannot afford medical care either, they should simply off themselves so that you do not have to part with a red cent of your all-important, all-encompassing money.
Then, of course, since a very large number of working adults can no longer afford medical insurance for themselves, never you mind for their kids, your solution, naturally, would be to ask them to digest rat poison, because their continuing existence threatens your wallet, and might result in your having to part with some of those precious, oh so precioussss wittle green pieces of paper in it.
But they are soooo lovely, those green things, and you talk to them and love them and wrap your whole life and being and whatever remains of your reptile mind around them .... how could these people be so cruel to aks you to give up the essence of your very existence ... the only tangible pieces of your Deity, the Mammon ... how could they be so nasssty?! Nasssty peoplesss!! Nassssty!! But we will not let them preciousssss, no we won't....
That must be why Holland and Canada (both mentioned in this discussion as examples of "socialist utopias") are awash in cash with massive budget surpluses and the USA, boasting the lowest taxation of all of the industrialized countries combined with the lowest levels of public services amongst those countries by far, is drowning in red ink, complete with gargantuan debts which will not likely to be paid off even by the next generation ... oh wait ...
Let me add revisionist history to the list of sins of American supremacists. The Lend-Lease program had a miniscule impact on the Soviet war effort. A truly vast majority of the Soviet war equipment was manufactured by the Soviets, that including nearly 100% of their armor, something like 90+% of their small arms, and a similar proportion of their airforce. Nearly 100% of their ammunition too. The reason for their "losing early" was of course Stalin's mis-managment of the situation and his trust in his deals with Hitler, which backfired at him. But the Soviets did manage to move nearly all of their war production capabilities East, and the delay which was inherent in getting them back up to speed producing effective weaponry was the main reason for the continuing German advance. It was not winter which stopped the Wehrmacht, it was the T34 tanks and PPSh-41 sub-machine guns made in the Ural mountains. Once the Soviet manufacturing juggernaut got going, the tables have turned on the Germans, highlighted by engagement such as the battle of Kursk where the soviet fielded 3,600 tanks, none of them from the Lend-Lease program.
Comparative evils of wacko dictators aside, once UK and France had nukes, the American "protection" became a moot point. Stalin wanted to enlarge his empire and nuclear arsenals of these countries presented a show stopper to his plans. Furthermore, once he died, the whole Soviet leadership went into a bunker mode and remained so to the end. Papers which were recovered from the vaults of the Soviet Union after the collapse clearly indicate that the Soviets were always seeing themselves as on the verge of being attacked by the belligerent and aggressive USA and did everything in their power to forestall such attack, much of it by posturing.
No, you merely assisted the Soviets in doing so. Patently false and self-aggrandizing claims, accompanied by swagger and "my way or the high-way" attitude, spiced up by an unshakeable conviction of general superiority, play a rather major role in building up the antipathy towards the US in Europe, as well as globally.