The Chinese government is red-faced on this and it hasn't even begun to wreak its vengeance. It's already well under way. Chinese communist sympathizers have been engaging in a fair bit of historical revisionism and propaganda on the internet about these incidents. Check out the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_unrest_in_Tibet) , for instance, where CCP communist shills in the diaspora have been edit-warring in gangs to make the Tibetans look like the bad guys (compare that ridiculous piece of biased rubbish there with less unreliable sources(http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=19922&article='Beijing+orchestrating+Tibet+riots').
It continues to amaze me that a free and proletarian medium like the internet can be abused by a sufficiently determined group like the Chinese CCP and their global network of apologists and propagandists to spread misinformation and whitewash their atrocities. It's sickening.
I too have an SCSI hard drive (Seagate Cheetah ST336607LW). Revved up like a harley while running binaries. I reduced the noise substantially by using this cooler:
The rubber washers help in damping out the noise. Plus, the primary reason why it's noisy is because the metal conducts and amplifies the vibrations through resonance. So I put some thermocol pads under the cooler to remove any metal-metal contact (except for a ground wire) and the noise reduced dramatically. Now I don't have to shut down my pc while sleeping.
Because they are part of a systemic problem in backward cultures. Normal everyday crimes are just that, normal. I know it sounds harsh, but you have to look at the big picture here. Despite all the robberies, violent crimes, rapes etc going on in the US, there is a reason why millions of immigrants from third world countries are desperately clamoring to get into the US for a better life. Because their situation in their home countries is much much worse.
The U.S. actions in Vietnam alone was responsible for between one two million deaths of non-Americans
The alternative to which was this (http://www.killingfieldsmuseum.com/). Plus, I'm sure that the 2 million or so of Hoa Hao Buddhists and tribal minorities in Vietnam who were massacred by Communist thugs wouldn't complain so much about US presence there.
It should also be mentioned that several of these wars were used to create the infamous banana republics
There is some truth to this. However, that was because US foreign policy was controlled by fascist paleoconservatives like Nixon who wanted third world countries to be rules by America Friendly dictators like Muhammad Zia-ul Haq etc. This is different from the more complex foreign policies of modern day neoconservatives who base their actions on the desire to foster self-determination and democracy. The only criticism here is that they tend to goof up every now and then (like in Iraq), but still, the basic model is sound, and should be applied to Pakistan.
Do you really not understand this? Do you really think I am spending all this energy because I am seeking to somehow diminish Pakistan's tragedies?
No. I think that, consciously or not, you are trying to foster liberal (in the American sense) self-hatred and guilt to try to deflect attention from the real problems through inapposite analogies.
The U.S. hasn't experienced any genocides on American soil since the various original wars against the indigenous population
A whole other (and largely exaggerated) can of worms. Let's not go there.
Why not? Well. . , for starters, take a look at the examples you're offering; they're incompatible with the subject proposal. --Hitler was the one trying to reshape populations at sword point. The reaction of the rest of the world was of an altogether different nature. And the U.S. was not deliberately attempting to re-shape Japan in its own image when responding to Nipponese war-time aggression. Japanese cultural change after WWII would not have come about unless there had been a corresponding desire within the population. It was not forced upon them. And with respect to Taiwan, there is again a big difference between diplomatic ties formed between two willing nations, and troops-on-the-ground enforcement of cultural changes within a resentful population.
Do you see?
As alwa
To be clear, my point was this; U.S. culture foments public violence and misery and lots of it. --There are many thousands of killings, rapes and other violent crimes committed every year in the United States
Dude. How about some perspective here? The worst cases of ethnic violence in the US in the past 2 decades have been the Crown Heights riot (Blacks against Jews)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_Riot some 2-3 actually died, LA riots (Blacks against Asians mostly) with some 60 people dead, and this business with Jena Six (one dead). Add the Columbine incident and the Virginia Tech incident and lesser incidents and you have maybe a few hundred actual deaths from ethnic violence in the US in the last 20 years.
Even despite this the US enjoys 100% religious freedom. So much so that even $cientologists are allowed to practice.
Compare that with Pakistan. Millions of Bengali Hindus and moderate Muslims murdered in 1971, 17,000 Baluch murdered in 1974 alone. Rather large numbers since then. 200 Hindus and Christians murdered at Sangli Hill in 2001 alone, some 5-6 Hindus kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam per year since 1948, some 20 Christians massacred by militant Islamists every year, and a set of blasphemy laws that present among the the worst kinds of religious oppression in the world (while Saudi Islamic laws are worse, there are practically no non-Muslims in the country). Even Iran, with it's theocratic regime, is less violent than Pakistan.
Is the Pakistan-US comparison really apposite? If you want to compare the US with a better system then maybe some of the Scandinavian countries are better. But to say that the US is "as bad as Pakistan" is laughable.
feeling you were going to jump on that, though I had also hoped you might be socially evolved enough to be less mean-spirited about it given my efforts to treat you with the basic respect due to any stranger I've chosen to spend some time communicating with.
Many South Asian cultures produce aggressive argumentativeness. Don't take it personally.
To be clear, my point was this; U.S. culture foments public violence and misery and lots of it.
..and yet there is very little actual violence in the country compared to the third world, especially countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Fiji, Sudan, Somalia and other equivalent disasters. Same with Japan (a culture of violence, with very little actual violence). Big deal. You say "thousands of deaths every year due to violence"? really? Where are your statistics for the "thousands" figure? I've been in the US for a decade now and keep up with the news and stuff, and out-and-out homicidal crimes are very rare compared to Muslim countries. Lots of robberies and rapes and stuff, but very few actual murders. Show me some reliable facts and figures about violent deaths, individual or en-masse, in the US.
But gang violence in LA resulting from deliberate economic warfare waged against Black and Hispanic Americans is no less vile.
..er typically it's Blacks and Hispanics fighting each other (it's called inter-minority racism), and that violence is more due to economics than culture or ritual (unlike in Pakistan). Therefore, what the US needs is economic reform, not cultural or political reform. There is no need nor desire to segregate the US along racial lines (nobody in mainstream society wants that, whites or nonwhites). Such a need is clear in Pakistan, where millions of people are denied their right to self-determination becaus eo ftheir race or religion and actually '''want''' to secede from the country.
Far fewer Blacks and Hispanics die in the US per year than women and minorities do in Pakistan. If Hispanic immigrants were truly dying in droves in the US they'd never bother to jump the border in the first place. Hell, the US was a '''haven''' for Cuban Hispanics fleeing Castro's vile Communist thuggery. The US was '''haven'' for t
However. . , is this a reason to condemn Pakistan and perhaps even levy Western military pressure upon the region?
Yes, because unlike the US, Pakistan has no realistic system of checks and balances to address their problems. There are far more tribalized than any culture in the US, and tribal violence and massacres are embedded in savage ritualism (Google for the term "Pukhtunwali" and ignore the Pakistani Fundamentalist hate sites you get and see for yourself), and is
completely out of control (given that large sections of the Pakistani Army and their Secret Police subscribe to such chauvinistic views).
So I looked up some figures, and I'll be blowed if the first item I came across wasn't this comparative chart, which actually places Pakistan as being the least violent place with regard to homicide rates by country, with the U.S. and Poland coming in the middle immediately after all the most screwed up countries on the world map.
Which is very politically correct, but factually bogus. There are much more reliable sources you can find about the complete lawlessness of the NWFP regions in Pakistan. Honor killings and such are quite rampant in the country, and the homicide rates are exponential. It's just that their government tries to suppress what really goes on in their country And women aren't murdered for marrying the wrong tribe in the US.(at least not since desegregation and the repealing of Jim Crow laws) The US doesn;t have state laws like the Hudood Ordinance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudood_Ordinance) and Hasba Bills (http://www.khyber.org/articles/2005/TheProposedHasbaBillataGlance.shtml) that persecute people institutionally and maintain backwardness like Pakistan does.
With all due respect, your arguments reek of sophistry, false comparisons and an infamous logical fallacy touted by Soviet Communists during the cold war called "..and you are lynching Negroes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes)
Bad Places Which Need Western Guidance.
Western guidance has helped many countries achieve prosperity, from Taiwan, South Korea and (some) Japan to Urban India, Turkey, Israel, and others. It is okay to protest western imperialism, but there is nothing fundamentally objectionable to western guidance, even if it is imposed by the sword at first.
Disclaimer: I am not a westerner. I am a hesperophile, however.
I want to stress that I only offer these comparisons to shake people up and stop them from thinking of the Middle Eastern countries as, "Bad Places Which Need Western Guidance."
Pakistan is not in the Middle East. Learn some geography. Middle Eastern countries are generally paradise compared to Pakistan, which is why millions of Pakistanis are swarming out of their country to Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain etc.
There is an Urdu meme among some Pakistani bloggers that you should look up, "1947 mein bola Pakistan Zindabad, 2007 mein bolo Pakistan se zinda bhaag" (In 1947 they said Long Live Pakistan, in 2007 they are saying flee Pakistan alive).
And finally, I think that military intervention is the LAST thing which should be considered in any situation. --Indeed, I'm not convinced that it should be considered at all, but nobody has invited me to offer my opinion at the U.N.
Well I am two minds about that. Historially, Pakistani "democracies" have degenerated into absolute chaos and were easily taken over by Muslim fanatics (like during the Kargil War under the Islamist Nawaz Sharif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). However, the same is true for Pakistani dictatorships as well (see Zia Ul Haq's Islamization
How many documented civilian deaths since 2003 is Pakistan responsible for Try 3 million in 1971 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_atrocities), and 500-3000 women a year (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south/12/11/pakistan.women/), and numerous religious minorities.
There is a difference between people killed in the exigencies of war (as in US involvement in Iraq), a transient phenomenon, and the pervasive intolerance and violence all across Pakistan, which lasts for decades.
Glass houses eh I don't think that this jawahar guy is American ("jawahar"?). His history of racist posts (and the language of his bigotry) against Indians on slashdot seems to indicate that he's a Sinhalese Fundamentalist or worse, a Periyarite-DMK cult member (and his chanting "God and religion are distinct" gave it away, a classic Periyarite doublespeak mantra).
Even at the peak of anti-American sentiments after the invasion of Afghanistan, the hard-liner Islamic political parties never got more than 11% of the popular vote. The Muttahida Majilis-i-Amal and their Islamic brownshirts, Jamaat-e-Islami, control enough arms, ammunition and al-Qaeda/Hizb-ut-Tahrir/Tablighi-whatever-whatever-glorious-Fidayeen-Lashkar-Hizbul support to stage a nationwide coup very soon. Even 11% supporters is enough for a sufficiently fanatic bunch to gain power by force.
Most political parties in Pakistan are moderate, and the nukes are buried deep in the military chain of command, which is secular. No, large sections of Pakistan army, as well as the ISI (Pakistani secret police) are controlled by generals covertly sympathetic to Islamic fanatics. Pakistan is an Islamist ticking time bomb. Add to that serious grievances raised by Pakistan's Muhajir Urdu and Baluch minorities being discriminated against and systematically marginalized by the Punjabi majority, full blown sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia Muslims (the Shilpa-e-Shahaba is not dead), as well as full blown civil war from independence activists in Balochistan and Waziristan (so what really happened to Nawab Akbar Bugti?) , and we have a dangerously volatile situation there.
And not everyone has forgotten 1971 Bangladesh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_atrocities ).
Iran seems an extremely unlikely partner as well. India is an open democracy, with a far freer society, and are not predominately Muslim. I also don't see much that Iran could offer India to begin with, as India is technologically much further along.
India's greatest strength over Iran is it's liberal education, particularly in colleges and universities. That is why the technocrat generation in India is much larger and better trained than the ones in Iran.
Interestingly, a lot of Iranian students are now interested in pursuing higher education in India, particularly after Ahmadinejad expelled liberal professors from Iranian Universities, and Iranians have a harder time getting into western universities because of political problems. I spent a summer in the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India and there were several Iranian students with very progressive and liberal outlook , unlike the Ayatollahs (they got me hooked on Dariush Mehrjui http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/iranian_cinema_2595.jsp films) who were all cursing the Islamic theocracy in Iran.
Why not simply have another wikia site/mediawiki installation called "Wikiproofs" and put them there, and add a link from the wikipedia article?
That way, i can just look at that website and not have to bother with a lot of the cruft and garbage seen on wikipedia because of it's visibility and susceptibility to trolls and agenda-pushers. It continues to bother me that it's difficult to study/edit some of the excellently written technical/scientific articles on wikipedia without getting roped in to the cabalistic claptrap on non-technical subjects (often, editors agenda-pushing editors spam talk pages of technical-article editors to "call them to arms" for an edit war in a politics/religion/history article and fill it with ethnocruft or systemic bias).
It seems to me that a wikiproofs (or mathwiki) fork could be a peaceful place where pointy-haired academics could graze free of wiki-nonsense...
I believe this historical revisionism is a result of the West's suicidal self-hatred. I disagree. I don't think it's "self-hatred" so much as appeasement politics. Most of the historical revisionists you talk about tend to be anti-social leftists and, while the anarchist left in South Asia, Europe and the fringes of the United States have practically nothing in common with the fanatic Muslims wrt ideology, the common tenets to both groups ie anti-Establishment chaos, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, Hesperophobia, Indophobia and anti-National subversion in general trump all else.
And yes, I absolutely agree that all the historical advances that came from Muslims (mostly Persians and Kurds) were due to the enlightened nature of other aspects of their cultures, not their religion, which was always very backward and has steadily caused the decline of enlightenment in these societies and brought about backwardness.
At what point does anybody's race enter into this? Not so much "race" as racism. Specifally, racist Han Chauvinism, which is the belief (held by the ethnic Han dominated CCP) that any part of the world that has a Mongoloid ethnic stain rightfully belongs to the CCP (incl. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, Northeastern India, and, of course, Tibet).
All of this talk about Ashoka "evangelizing by the sword" is hot air that members of the Hindu nationalist movement started spewing in the 20th century Well not all Hindu Nationalists believe in this stuff. I don't for instance, and I'm pretty much a solid neoconservative Hindu nationalist. Keep in mind that there is a lot of historical falsification in Buddhism though. Take the Ashokavandana for instance. It blames the decline of Buddhism in India on "militant Hindu king" Pusyamitra Sunga who "relentlessly burned shrines and beheaded monks", even though leading historians such as Romila Thapar and E. Lamonte dismissed most of the Ashokavandana as a total fabrication, like the Protocols of Zion, meant primarily as a proselytizing technique among Buddhists, a long time ago. Read Thapar's "Ashoka and the decline of the Mauryas" (which is THE definitive text on the subject). A lot of the politically correct Marxist/Communists have embraced the Pusyamitra nonsense in recent years, though Thapar (herself a Marxist) tries to debunk them whenever she can...
Such pseudoihistorical propaganda has become the foundation for the violent and radical Ambedkarite Neo-Buddhists in India (basically a cult of personality who send death threats to Lamont for her work and have been known to behead scholars who criticize Ambedkar:for a source, read J. Kulkarni: Historical Truths & Untruths Exposed, ipp 1991 and Shalini Ramachandran,Poisoned Bread' Race & Class, Vol. 45, No. 4, 27-44 (2004)). These assertions and fringe groups create a very bad image of Buddhism in India, which is extremely unfortunate, since Buddhists and Hindus are cousins in faith really. So some of the victims hit back with equal amounts of pseudohistory as happened with this guy up above.
Also, the REAL reason why Buddhism declined in India was due to the philosophical divergence with Adi Shankara in the latter half of the first millenium.
I remember some pretty exhaustive news coverage in India about the repressive Burmese junta when I was a kid. Particularly jarring were the military junta's artificial smiley-happy demeanour betraying their desperate attempts to placate the Doordarshan journalists who were asking hard questions regarding the activism of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (they obviously did not have good PR guys unlike their counterparts in Iran/former Iraq), then cutting over to their "official broadcasts" where they calmly did an Orwellian "boot over a human face" type of deal by throwing Suu Kyi in jail. Needless to say, the footage was very popular. I guess the Burma problem matters more to people in that region of the world than it does to westerners...
I find it quite interesting that while Iran gets lots of flak these days for their Sharia-based legislature and lack of democracy and liberty, Saudi Arabia, where conditions are actually quite similar, is almost never mentioned. I wonder why... Because of these fine
folks and their nectar of the
Gods^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hone God
and their ability to do this
Unfortunately, poor Iranians don't have such a thing, so they're the "baddies" (their leaders are, the Iranian people are generally cool; most secular Iranianists and Shia Muslims are pretty cool, unlike the fanatic Sunni Islamist anti-Shia propaganda machine spewing out of Arab countries and Pakistan would have you believe)
It's sorta like why, when Kennedy declared "Ich bin ein Berliner", he was actually telling the audience that he was a jelly-filled doughnut. Er, that's an urban
legend
Just how much do you know about the Indian Media to use words like "borderline third-world paranoid anarchist actually". After the shameful way by which they handled the Mohammad Afzal case, or the Marad riots, or Nandigram? Enough.
Er, virtually ALL mainstream scholars agree that Afrocentrism is hokum and nonsense, laced with ethnocentrism, nationalist pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology. It's dangerous nonsense to boot, as it has, hidden behind it, a racist, anti-Semitic and extremist Black Supremacist agenda a-la Al Sharpton and the Nation of "Islam" (by "Black" here I'm generally referring to African-Americans; this movement is virtually unheard of in Sub-Saharan Africa or among Black communities in Latin America). It is essentially the same as extremist racist and anti-Semitic White Supremacists and/or radical Islamists really when you think about it.
It is no more than the same kind of Scientific Racism that was concocted by Europeans against Africans and other perceived "non-whites" in the 19th century, just with the "good guys" and "bad guys" flipped over. The wikipedia article is a whitewash, with fringe literature (undue weight to which is supposed to be against WP:FRINGE policy and WP:RS partiasan and extremist sites policy on wikipedia:look it up) given same credence as mainstream literature. A simple glance at the talk page of the article will show fanatical Black Nationalist nutjobs "monitoring" the article and bullying away legitimate editors. This severely crimps the credibility of wikipedia to any scholarly pair of eyes.
Same with this mythical "Islamophobia" nonsense (which is different from the real problem of anti-Muslim prejudice, a completely different thing which has no article on wikipedia, strangely)."Islamophobia" is an Orwellian propaganda term created by Islamic extremists to stifle criticism of a religion and conflate it with bigotry against a particular group of people, and no non-partisan group will say otherwise (again, when bigotry against Muslims as an identifiable people is expressed, it is termed "anti-Muslim", not this nonsensical "Islamophobia"). Also, a simple glance at the history page of that article, together with the contribs of some of the editors will show a pretty well-coordinated militant wiki-activism by radical Islamists here.
Same with the Scientology article, with brainwashed scientologists creating real problems for wikipedia editors who want to portray the matter objectively, leading to a disastrous mess of an article.
There are more such examples, virtually any one of the tens of thousands of tagged articles (and several thousand or so untagged ones as well), all relating to politics, religion, history and other such subjects.
Of course, I know that this sort of sytemic bias towards partisan gangs can exist in many other sources. It is wikipedia's lack of accountability in these matters and it's facade of stability and fairness that I have a problem with. The actual content is normal, or, rather, no better or worse than graffitti in a public toilet.
Mid-Day is a rag. They have no accountability, or any credible team of journalists, or any fact-checkers or anything. It's mostly gossip columns with a little soft porn. It's not a respectable paper (then again, few Indian papers are these days...).
Vijay Mukhi, is a well-known figure in the Indian IT industry. So it's not all bunk. Er, how do I know that Vijay Mukhi said what Mid-Day claims? There are no realistically enforcable libel laws in India, and any rag like Mid-Day that has no legal accountability for it's claims can pretty much say anything.
Interesting that till now, there are absolutely ZERO sources (other than mid-day) that verify this claim of keylogging cops,and nobody has been able to cite me any. I still call bullshit here, and chalk it up to slashdot paranoia, served with a dollop of the low-level racism against Indians here.
Eh? I'm not the one defaming a whole nation with some simplistic
blather.You are.
<quote>
First off-I was talking about how Indians are culturally not bothered
about privacy, let alone online privacy
</quote>
I fail to see why this is a bad thing. The Americans are concerned
about privacy because they have the luxury to do so. We do not. There
are more important things.
<quote>
no one raises a word of protest
</quote>
Er, to cite the Rushdie case as an example (as you did), if the
left-wing/Communist media, intelligentsia and politicians pander to the
interests of these fundamentalists as part of the insidious politics of
the votebank then this wouldn't happen now would it? "Privacy rights"
has nothing to do with it. It's entirely offtopic and qualifies as a rant.
<quote>
What's the use of having these rights in the constitution if no one is
going to bother when they are violated??
</quote>
They DO, my dear ignoramus, or did you conveniently forget the public
interest litigation filed against that bitch Indira Gandhi
and her Congress (I) thugs when she tried to convert our country into a
police state?
<quote>
Freedom is binary-you either have it or you don't
</quote>
Wrong again, my dear self-loather. Freedom is a complex and nuanced
business, and needs to be implemented with different priorities given
to it's many aspects. What are you, Ernesto Guevara? Go live in a
jungle with your Naxalite friends.
<quote>
Freedom 'subject to the following terms and conditions' is an oxymoron
</quote>
Absurd. What you're implicitly referring to (absolute freedom) gives
rise to absolute anarchy. "Freedom" in the sense of "Democracy" DOES
mean 'subject to certain terms', like LAWS. Or would you rather our nation degenerate into riots.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine
and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
</quote>
Or Afrocentrism,
or Scientology,
or Han
Chauvinism, or Jihad,
Islamophobia,
or any article relating to politics, religion, history, personalities,
art, or any humanities subject. Most of those articles were taken over
by partisan propaganda groups and their admin backers a long time ago. Then again, after a few months, another partisan group takes over and changes the article to their propaganda, and the wars continue...
Basically the group that can bully others out efficiently wins in these
cases.
Articles relating to science and technology (and some trivia if you're
into that sort of thing) are generally okay and contain good references
and stuff. The rest is cruft.
Slashdot Mirror
It continues to amaze me that a free and proletarian medium like the internet can be abused by a sufficiently determined group like the Chinese CCP and their global network of apologists and propagandists to spread misinformation and whitewash their atrocities. It's sickening.
I too have an SCSI hard drive (Seagate Cheetah ST336607LW). Revved up like a harley while running binaries. I reduced the noise substantially by using this cooler:
http://www.quietpcusa.com/Zalman-Hard-Disk-Drive-Heatpipe-Cooler-ZM-2HC2-P27C45.aspx
The rubber washers help in damping out the noise. Plus, the primary reason why it's noisy is because the metal conducts and amplifies the vibrations through resonance. So I put some thermocol pads under the cooler to remove any metal-metal contact (except for a ground wire) and the noise reduced dramatically. Now I don't have to shut down my pc while sleeping.
I got a pic here:
http://img186.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000564no7.jpg
(the hdd/cooler system is circled in red, ground wire in purple). IT works fine
In 2004, the United States reported. . . 16,137 Murders 854,911 cases of Aggravated Assault. 94,635 cases of Forcible Rape
Yes, but you haven't established that any of these are part of a systemic cultural problem. These incidents are not ethnically or culturally related, but are largely the social equivalent of gaussian white noise. Not so in Pakistan, where a pervasive culture of hatred, propaganda (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4167260.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20031114223934/http://www.mlists.net/sindh-intl/mail/mail_abuseofhistory.htm http://www.sdpi.org/whats_new/reporton/State%20of%20Curr&TextBooks.pdf) and violence causes massive deaths, specifically targeting minorities and "dissidents".
Why does only ethnic or religious violence count
Because they are part of a systemic problem in backward cultures. Normal everyday crimes are just that, normal. I know it sounds harsh, but you have to look at the big picture here. Despite all the robberies, violent crimes, rapes etc going on in the US, there is a reason why millions of immigrants from third world countries are desperately clamoring to get into the US for a better life. Because their situation in their home countries is much much worse.
The U.S. actions in Vietnam alone was responsible for between one two million deaths of non-Americans
The alternative to which was this (http://www.killingfieldsmuseum.com/). Plus, I'm sure that the 2 million or so of Hoa Hao Buddhists and tribal minorities in Vietnam who were massacred by Communist thugs wouldn't complain so much about US presence there.
It should also be mentioned that several of these wars were used to create the infamous banana republics
There is some truth to this. However, that was because US foreign policy was controlled by fascist paleoconservatives like Nixon who wanted third world countries to be rules by America Friendly dictators like Muhammad Zia-ul Haq etc. This is different from the more complex foreign policies of modern day neoconservatives who base their actions on the desire to foster self-determination and democracy. The only criticism here is that they tend to goof up every now and then (like in Iraq), but still, the basic model is sound, and should be applied to Pakistan.
Do you really not understand this? Do you really think I am spending all this energy because I am seeking to somehow diminish Pakistan's tragedies?
No. I think that, consciously or not, you are trying to foster liberal (in the American sense) self-hatred and guilt to try to deflect attention from the real problems through inapposite analogies.
The U.S. hasn't experienced any genocides on American soil since the various original wars against the indigenous population
A whole other (and largely exaggerated) can of worms. Let's not go there.
Why not? Well. . , for starters, take a look at the examples you're offering; they're incompatible with the subject proposal. --Hitler was the one trying to reshape populations at sword point. The reaction of the rest of the world was of an altogether different nature. And the U.S. was not deliberately attempting to re-shape Japan in its own image when responding to Nipponese war-time aggression. Japanese cultural change after WWII would not have come about unless there had been a corresponding desire within the population. It was not forced upon them. And with respect to Taiwan, there is again a big difference between diplomatic ties formed between two willing nations, and troops-on-the-ground enforcement of cultural changes within a resentful population. Do you see? As alwa
To be clear, my point was this; U.S. culture foments public violence and misery and lots of it. --There are many thousands of killings, rapes and other violent crimes committed every year in the United States
Dude. How about some perspective here? The worst cases of ethnic violence in the US in the past 2 decades have been the Crown Heights riot (Blacks against Jews)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_Riot some 2-3 actually died, LA riots (Blacks against Asians mostly) with some 60 people dead, and this business with Jena Six (one dead). Add the Columbine incident and the Virginia Tech incident and lesser incidents and you have maybe a few hundred actual deaths from ethnic violence in the US in the last 20 years. Even despite this the US enjoys 100% religious freedom. So much so that even $cientologists are allowed to practice. Compare that with Pakistan. Millions of Bengali Hindus and moderate Muslims murdered in 1971, 17,000 Baluch murdered in 1974 alone. Rather large numbers since then. 200 Hindus and Christians murdered at Sangli Hill in 2001 alone, some 5-6 Hindus kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam per year since 1948, some 20 Christians massacred by militant Islamists every year, and a set of blasphemy laws that present among the the worst kinds of religious oppression in the world (while Saudi Islamic laws are worse, there are practically no non-Muslims in the country). Even Iran, with it's theocratic regime, is less violent than Pakistan. Is the Pakistan-US comparison really apposite? If you want to compare the US with a better system then maybe some of the Scandinavian countries are better. But to say that the US is "as bad as Pakistan" is laughable.
feeling you were going to jump on that, though I had also hoped you might be socially evolved enough to be less mean-spirited about it given my efforts to treat you with the basic respect due to any stranger I've chosen to spend some time communicating with.
Many South Asian cultures produce aggressive argumentativeness. Don't take it personally.
To be clear, my point was this; U.S. culture foments public violence and misery and lots of it.
But gang violence in LA resulting from deliberate economic warfare waged against Black and Hispanic Americans is no less vile.
However. . , is this a reason to condemn Pakistan and perhaps even levy Western military pressure upon the region?
Yes, because unlike the US, Pakistan has no realistic system of checks and balances to address their problems. There are far more tribalized than any culture in the US, and tribal violence and massacres are embedded in savage ritualism (Google for the term "Pukhtunwali" and ignore the Pakistani Fundamentalist hate sites you get and see for yourself), and is completely out of control (given that large sections of the Pakistani Army and their Secret Police subscribe to such chauvinistic views).
So I looked up some figures, and I'll be blowed if the first item I came across wasn't this comparative chart, which actually places Pakistan as being the least violent place with regard to homicide rates by country, with the U.S. and Poland coming in the middle immediately after all the most screwed up countries on the world map.
Which is very politically correct, but factually bogus. There are much more reliable sources you can find about the complete lawlessness of the NWFP regions in Pakistan. Honor killings and such are quite rampant in the country, and the homicide rates are exponential. It's just that their government tries to suppress what really goes on in their country And women aren't murdered for marrying the wrong tribe in the US.(at least not since desegregation and the repealing of Jim Crow laws) The US doesn;t have state laws like the Hudood Ordinance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudood_Ordinance) and Hasba Bills (http://www.khyber.org/articles/2005/TheProposedHasbaBillataGlance.shtml) that persecute people institutionally and maintain backwardness like Pakistan does. With all due respect, your arguments reek of sophistry, false comparisons and an infamous logical fallacy touted by Soviet Communists during the cold war called "..and you are lynching Negroes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes)
Bad Places Which Need Western Guidance.
Western guidance has helped many countries achieve prosperity, from Taiwan, South Korea and (some) Japan to Urban India, Turkey, Israel, and others. It is okay to protest western imperialism, but there is nothing fundamentally objectionable to western guidance, even if it is imposed by the sword at first. Disclaimer: I am not a westerner. I am a hesperophile, however.
I want to stress that I only offer these comparisons to shake people up and stop them from thinking of the Middle Eastern countries as, "Bad Places Which Need Western Guidance."
Pakistan is not in the Middle East. Learn some geography. Middle Eastern countries are generally paradise compared to Pakistan, which is why millions of Pakistanis are swarming out of their country to Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain etc. There is an Urdu meme among some Pakistani bloggers that you should look up, "1947 mein bola Pakistan Zindabad, 2007 mein bolo Pakistan se zinda bhaag" (In 1947 they said Long Live Pakistan, in 2007 they are saying flee Pakistan alive).
And finally, I think that military intervention is the LAST thing which should be considered in any situation. --Indeed, I'm not convinced that it should be considered at all, but nobody has invited me to offer my opinion at the U.N.
Well I am two minds about that. Historially, Pakistani "democracies" have degenerated into absolute chaos and were easily taken over by Muslim fanatics (like during the Kargil War under the Islamist Nawaz Sharif http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). However, the same is true for Pakistani dictatorships as well (see Zia Ul Haq's Islamization
Statistically, Pakistan has the one of the worst records of religious tolerance in the world, and is listed as a country of particular concern by the USCIRF (http://www.uscirf.gov/countries/countriesconcerns/index.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_atrocities). Even middle-eastern countries are actually doing somewhat better.
India's greatest strength over Iran is it's liberal education, particularly in colleges and universities. That is why the technocrat generation in India is much larger and better trained than the ones in Iran.
Interestingly, a lot of Iranian students are now interested in pursuing higher education in India, particularly after Ahmadinejad expelled liberal professors from Iranian Universities, and Iranians have a harder time getting into western universities because of political problems. I spent a summer in the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India and there were several Iranian students with very progressive and liberal outlook , unlike the Ayatollahs (they got me hooked on Dariush Mehrjui http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/iranian_cinema_2595.jsp films) who were all cursing the Islamic theocracy in Iran.
Why not simply have another wikia site/mediawiki installation called "Wikiproofs" and put them there, and add a link from the wikipedia article?
That way, i can just look at that website and not have to bother with a lot of the cruft and garbage seen on wikipedia because of it's visibility and susceptibility to trolls and agenda-pushers. It continues to bother me that it's difficult to study/edit some of the excellently written technical/scientific articles on wikipedia without getting roped in to the cabalistic claptrap on non-technical subjects (often, editors agenda-pushing editors spam talk pages of technical-article editors to "call them to arms" for an edit war in a politics/religion/history article and fill it with ethnocruft or systemic bias).
It seems to me that a wikiproofs (or mathwiki) fork could be a peaceful place where pointy-haired academics could graze free of wiki-nonsense...
At least for a while.
I remember some pretty exhaustive news coverage in India about the repressive Burmese junta when I was a kid. Particularly jarring were the military junta's artificial smiley-happy demeanour betraying their desperate attempts to placate the Doordarshan journalists who were asking hard questions regarding the activism of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (they obviously did not have good PR guys unlike their counterparts in Iran/former Iraq), then cutting over to their "official broadcasts" where they calmly did an Orwellian "boot over a human face" type of deal by throwing Suu Kyi in jail. Needless to say, the footage was very popular. I guess the Burma problem matters more to people in that region of the world than it does to westerners...
and their ability to do this Unfortunately, poor Iranians don't have such a thing, so they're the "baddies" (their leaders are, the Iranian people are generally cool; most secular Iranianists and Shia Muslims are pretty cool, unlike the fanatic Sunni Islamist anti-Shia propaganda machine spewing out of Arab countries and Pakistan would have you believe)
Er, virtually ALL mainstream scholars agree that Afrocentrism is hokum and nonsense, laced with ethnocentrism, nationalist pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology. It's dangerous nonsense to boot, as it has, hidden behind it, a racist, anti-Semitic and extremist Black Supremacist agenda a-la Al Sharpton and the Nation of "Islam" (by "Black" here I'm generally referring to African-Americans; this movement is virtually unheard of in Sub-Saharan Africa or among Black communities in Latin America). It is essentially the same as extremist racist and anti-Semitic White Supremacists and/or radical Islamists really when you think about it.
It is no more than the same kind of Scientific Racism that was concocted by Europeans against Africans and other perceived "non-whites" in the 19th century, just with the "good guys" and "bad guys" flipped over. The wikipedia article is a whitewash, with fringe literature (undue weight to which is supposed to be against WP:FRINGE policy and WP:RS partiasan and extremist sites policy on wikipedia:look it up) given same credence as mainstream literature. A simple glance at the talk page of the article will show fanatical Black Nationalist nutjobs "monitoring" the article and bullying away legitimate editors. This severely crimps the credibility of wikipedia to any scholarly pair of eyes.
Same with this mythical "Islamophobia" nonsense (which is different from the real problem of anti-Muslim prejudice, a completely different thing which has no article on wikipedia, strangely)."Islamophobia" is an Orwellian propaganda term created by Islamic extremists to stifle criticism of a religion and conflate it with bigotry against a particular group of people, and no non-partisan group will say otherwise (again, when bigotry against Muslims as an identifiable people is expressed, it is termed "anti-Muslim", not this nonsensical "Islamophobia"). Also, a simple glance at the history page of that article, together with the contribs of some of the editors will show a pretty well-coordinated militant wiki-activism by radical Islamists here.
Same with the Scientology article, with brainwashed scientologists creating real problems for wikipedia editors who want to portray the matter objectively, leading to a disastrous mess of an article.
There are more such examples, virtually any one of the tens of thousands of tagged articles (and several thousand or so untagged ones as well), all relating to politics, religion, history and other such subjects.
Of course, I know that this sort of sytemic bias towards partisan gangs can exist in many other sources. It is wikipedia's lack of accountability in these matters and it's facade of stability and fairness that I have a problem with. The actual content is normal, or, rather, no better or worse than graffitti in a public toilet.
As do I. But why did it take a fake article to bring about such a discussion?
Wow, bring on the xenophobes!!
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Eh? I'm not the one defaming a whole nation with some simplistic blather.You are.
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First off-I was talking about how Indians are culturally not bothered about privacy, let alone online privacy
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I fail to see why this is a bad thing. The Americans are concerned about privacy because they have the luxury to do so. We do not. There are more important things.
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no one raises a word of protest
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Er, to cite the Rushdie case as an example (as you did), if the left-wing/Communist media, intelligentsia and politicians pander to the interests of these fundamentalists as part of the insidious politics of the votebank then this wouldn't happen now would it? "Privacy rights" has nothing to do with it. It's entirely offtopic and qualifies as a rant.
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What's the use of having these rights in the constitution if no one is going to bother when they are violated??
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They DO, my dear ignoramus, or did you conveniently forget the public interest litigation filed against that bitch Indira Gandhi and her Congress (I) thugs when she tried to convert our country into a police state?
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Freedom is binary-you either have it or you don't
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Wrong again, my dear self-loather. Freedom is a complex and nuanced business, and needs to be implemented with different priorities given to it's many aspects. What are you, Ernesto Guevara? Go live in a jungle with your Naxalite friends.
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Freedom 'subject to the following terms and conditions' is an oxymoron
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Absurd. What you're implicitly referring to (absolute freedom) gives rise to absolute anarchy. "Freedom" in the sense of "Democracy" DOES mean 'subject to certain terms', like LAWS. Or would you rather our nation degenerate into riots.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
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Or Afrocentrism, or Scientology, or Han Chauvinism, or Jihad, Islamophobia, or any article relating to politics, religion, history, personalities, art, or any humanities subject. Most of those articles were taken over by partisan propaganda groups and their admin backers a long time ago. Then again, after a few months, another partisan group takes over and changes the article to their propaganda, and the wars continue... Basically the group that can bully others out efficiently wins in these cases.
Articles relating to science and technology (and some trivia if you're into that sort of thing) are generally okay and contain good references and stuff. The rest is cruft.