And your goddamn humans. Fuck you all. Just fuck and die, you scum, you worthless excuses for biological meatbags. I've had it up to here with your goddamn grunting and shit flinging joined to that high and mighty additude as you all sniff deep from your own asses. Today was the last straw, with all your goddamn NINELEVENEVERFORGETFLYFLAG. Just kill each other off like you want to, because I know you all want to in your violent empty piss for brains. Because when 4 rogue actors kill three thousand people, why the hell NOT kill 80,000 unrelated people. I mean, it's only RIGHT, "A murder for an eye" and all that. And what did Jesus say? He said, if someone strikes you in the right cheek, torture a family to death and burn down their village. Any old village will do. Because violence is solved by more violence, just like two wrongs make a right.
Well I've had it up to here.
FUCK OFF AND DIE FUCK OFF AND DIE FUCK OFF AND DIE
(to infinity)
Because you made this happen. All of you shitstain pustules. And you deserve worse, with all of your petty rationalizations and moralizing. Which frankly sounds like shit frothing out a sewer, and smells just as sweet.
:banana:
Nice rant, Kai. I'm feeling it.
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 12, 2011, 01:27:46 AM
And what did Jesus say? He said, if someone strikes you in the right cheek, torture a family to death and burn down their village.
This was particularly awesome. I nominate it to the newsfeed.
Cheers.
If anything is worth the anger, it's certainly this.
I hear you.
Damn skippy!
:argh!:
Quote from: Dimocritus on September 12, 2011, 02:22:43 AM
If anything is worth the anger, it's certainly this.
I hear you.
I'm getting tired of my implicit guilt in all this idiocy. It's wearing on me. And I'm tired of all the other guilty parties rationalizing and moralizing that guilt away, so they get left with a shit stained feeling of ass sniffing superiority while I feel like, well, shit. Obviously I have no responsibility for the international happenings before I reached adulthood, but now that I am, and have been for the past 7 years, I am implicit in this because, despite me knowing how fucking WRONG it is to slaughter people outside of self defense (and this isn't just from moral doctrine; that disgust is biologically ingrained and part of being human and not a sociopath), I haven't attempted to stop it. I haven't marched on Washington, I haven't imolized myself in gasoline, I haven't made myself a public nuisance harrassing government and corporations at all levels. Which is bad, but at least I feel guilty about it, and know it's wrong for me to stand idle while murder is going on in my name. The moralizers and rationalizers don't feel any guilt at all, or if they do, they drown it with inconsequential things.
For example, it's one thing to say, I'm not going to eat any of the big tunas anymore so when they go extinct I'll feel sad but less guilty; by not eating them, I have literally ceased all my impact on their populations, despite knowing it will mean nothing. It's another thing to fool myself thinking that recycling and walking means anything in the "quest" to /SAVE/ the polar bears from extinction, and feel smug in my superiority. Those are just some of the stupid examples I witnessed during dinner this evening, and what set off this rant. They make me want to choke a bitch.
I felt like sharing what I posted on your facebook:
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-ca-aRz_DxFo/Tm4hbF6JnaI/AAAAAAAAAIY/9X7ZN5bHTvs/11%252520-%2525201.jpg)
Kai:
Do you honestly think marching on Washington or setting yourself on fire would have achieved those goals, though? As I recall, there was a massive march on Washington, and it was almost uniformly ignored by the press, these being the days before they had decided The War Is Bad. And I'm fairly sure I remember an antiwar protestor a couple of years back setting himself on fire. It didn't even make national press, I found it via links to local newspapers.
Lets not forget: the people who decided on the Iraq War have specific names. Dick Cheney, for example, or Doug Feith. Once a President is in, they have massive leverage over everyone else. The press naturally inclines towards power, and only attacks when they sense profitable weakness that they can work into a narrative. Anonymous leaks can really ramp up the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Congress was compliant, backed by an ugly nationalistic fervour whipped up by the same press too weak to challenge a popular President with a vindictive and experienced cabinet to back him up.
The only way the Iraq War wouldn't have happened would've been if Al Gore had won the election. The Afghanistan conflict was a foregone conclusion, from the very start of the Al-Qaeda operation, but it might've been more focused and more successful without the Iraq distraction (large amounts of blood can be very distracting). Apart from that, the only way to have stopped the war would've been to put a bullet in the head of every politician who was convinced it was a good idea, and every ideological hack willing to shill for it.
So, unless you have a sniper rifle and some mad skillz, or 10,000 votes for Al Gore in Florida hidden in some University basement, unfortunately any action you could've undertaken wouldn't have made much of a difference. The culpability lies with those who chose to make the decision, with a good dose of culpability by association for those who shilled for it (I'm thinking not just of the conservative propagandists here, but the liberal blogger types who also decided to shill for the war because it helped their employment prospects within the US political media). Everyone else gets a pass.
I'd also like to point out, in support of the above, Dick Cheney's response to being told polls indicated a majority of Americans had turned against the Iraq War:
"So what?"
Quote from: Cain on September 12, 2011, 04:55:17 PM
Everyone else gets a pass.
I have to disagree. ~ 82% of the American public positively
bayed for the war in Iraq, which is somewhere around 20% more than the amount of people who believed the lies told to justify the war.
Also, who is responsible for a corrupt republic?
And if they hadn't? The American public's input on the Iraq War was minimal: if they'd been against it, it would've happened anyway (polls in March showed massive American opposition to pretty much everything except sanctions against Libya, for example, yet there was an intervention). Iraq was going to happen, regardless of what people wanted or didn't want: they're as relevant as a crowd at a football game, they can cheer on or boo one side or another, and get involved in the post-match dustup, but they're not going to affect anything that actually happens on the pitch.
And how did it get corrupted? Well, the Cold War can take most of the blame for that.
Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 12, 2011, 05:04:07 PM
Quote from: Cain on September 12, 2011, 04:55:17 PM
Everyone else gets a pass.
I have to disagree. ~ 82% of the American public positively bayed for the war in Iraq, which is somewhere around 20% more than the amount of people who believed the lies told to justify the war.
Also, who is responsible for a corrupt republic?
I might take issue with the assertion that the USA is still a republic in anything more than name.
To respond to both posts, if we the people didn't like it, we wouldn't pay for it.
Republics take too much thinking. It's easier to let oligarchs tell us what to think.
Agreed, ECH. The US is more a plutonomic corporatist state* than a representative democracy.
The top 1% hold the majority of political power. The role of government, usually made up of or paid for by them, is to balance relations between different interest groups, of which the voting public is but one. This is the true, actual meaning of corporatism, as opposed to the retarded liberal interpretation of it meaning "rule by corporations". Other interest groups do involve corporations, but also investment banks, hedge funds, the media, the military and really any other large power centre within the modern state and society.
The public has numbers, but little else. And with a long term decline in US educational standards, it is an easily misled and fooled interest group. And lots of those other interest groups, the military, intelligence services, banks, big oil, religious groups etc stood to gain from such a conflict, and actively lobbied for it based on those narrow interests.
*(Most other western states are also corporatist. Not perhaps so overtly plutonomic, with the exceptions of the UK, France and Germany, but just as corporatist).
Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 12, 2011, 05:25:49 PM
To respond to both posts, if we the people didn't like it, we wouldn't pay for it.
Republics take too much thinking. It's easier to let oligarchs tell us what to think.
That doesn't match with the evidence I have to hand.
There is a consistent pattern of US public opinion being ignored in cases where it goes against what government wants to do, and government getting its own way. Most Americans are in favour of single-payer healthcare. Most American oppose cuts to Medicare or Medicaid, I forget which (and maybe even both) and to Social Security. Most Americans favour tax rises on the top earners.
In those cases, as in Libya, the US government's chosen response has won out over the express preferences of the public. Why? Because the US is not a democracy, and democratic expressions are only allowed within carefully controlled circumstances, namely the keeping or changing of one faction of the elite for another (which can accurately be seen as a release-valve for pressure built-up due to political incompetence). Once that process is over, the public is purposefully shut out of discussions, especially those involving financial policy and foreign policy. The system has been structured in such a way that only interest groups and bureaucratic interests get a real say.
American voters are not
entirely powerless, but mostly functionally irrelevant. There are rare occasions where public opinion can and does overcome government preferences, but they are in very unusual and rare circumstances, which frequently involve some kind of elite defection from government policy.
It also needs to be remembered that much of "government" lies outside of voter control, anyway. Booz Allen, for example, are a "private" intelligence firm - who subsist almost entirely off of government contracts. Yet they do not have to put up with democratic accountability, because they are a "private" firm. Same for Blackwater. Same for many of the financial services companies such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. A large amount of government exists outside of any sort of democratic oversight whatsoever.
Quote from: Cain on September 12, 2011, 05:50:38 PM
That doesn't match with the evidence I have to hand.
There is a consistent pattern of US public opinion being ignored in cases where it goes against what government wants to do, and government getting its own way.
Oh, no argument
there. It's just that - only a couple of hundred years ago - we had a method of dealing with that. Obviously, though, this isn't the same population that went haring off after Sam Adams and Thomas Paine.
The current population of the United States isn't actually capable of that sort of business, so I have to conclude that the situation is basically hopeless.
The population at large had significant advantages, back then.
For one, the disparity in power between a military and a militia was alot smaller, closer to nil, in fact. So long as you had access to fairly modern weaponry, an irregular unit could hold its own against a professional military force. Nowadays, you have idiots like the Hutaree (sp?) who think their light infantry training, Kalashnikovs and camo outfits will let them take down Washington D.C.
They also didn't have an entire economy devoted to spying on people back then, a system whereby most malcontents are either fucked with continually or thrown in prison from the moment they fail to adjust to societal standards.
I also suspect the disparity in wealth was not quite as wide, which is a depressing thought in and of itself. Modern wars are decided by economics as much as they are by military skill and weapons, and you cannot fight a war with an army who is mostly in debt or with under $1000 in savings (ie most of the US population).
The systems of propaganda were also less developed. I suspect most Americans were well aware the British were their enemies, the bodies of people killed by them being a significant tip-off. Nowadays, the population is so large and dispersed, people have to rely on the media for their information. And the media, as I mentioned before, incline to power unless they can sense real weakness. They're also increasingly recruited from the ranks of the plutonomy, or those with plutonomic aspirations (reporters back in the 60s and 70s mostly came from working or lower middle class backgrounds. Now, they have Harvard and Princeton degrees. They are also more trusting of government and more dismissive of those outside of their social class. This is not a coincidence).
Agarian societies have actually a lot to recommend to themselves, when it comes to representative democracy and decision making, in comparison with modern industrial society.
I maintain that the only way to beat them is at their own game. Accumulate as much power and wealth as you can then field a bigger, better equipped, better trained military force and blow the bastards to kingdom come. To do that you'd have to become them. Fuck that shit! Aside from the fact that you don't stand a chance in hell, even if you did manage to pull it off, all you'd ever accomplish is to create the exact same situation, via a fuckton of death and destruction. Much easier to just stay out the way and let the death and destruction take care of itself. I'd rather spend my life having the kind of fun that'd cause most people irreparable psychological damage and waving my middle fingers in their disapproving faces. It might not be the most noble goal but then I tend to leave nobility to the wankers with the funny hats.
Quote from: Cain on September 12, 2011, 04:55:17 PM
Kai:
Do you honestly think marching on Washington or setting yourself on fire would have achieved those goals, though? As I recall, there was a massive march on Washington, and it was almost uniformly ignored by the press, these being the days before they had decided The War Is Bad. And I'm fairly sure I remember an antiwar protestor a couple of years back setting himself on fire. It didn't even make national press, I found it via links to local newspapers.
Lets not forget: the people who decided on the Iraq War have specific names. Dick Cheney, for example, or Doug Feith. Once a President is in, they have massive leverage over everyone else. The press naturally inclines towards power, and only attacks when they sense profitable weakness that they can work into a narrative. Anonymous leaks can really ramp up the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Congress was compliant, backed by an ugly nationalistic fervour whipped up by the same press too weak to challenge a popular President with a vindictive and experienced cabinet to back him up.
The only way the Iraq War wouldn't have happened would've been if Al Gore had won the election. The Afghanistan conflict was a foregone conclusion, from the very start of the Al-Qaeda operation, but it might've been more focused and more successful without the Iraq distraction (large amounts of blood can be very distracting). Apart from that, the only way to have stopped the war would've been to put a bullet in the head of every politician who was convinced it was a good idea, and every ideological hack willing to shill for it.
So, unless you have a sniper rifle and some mad skillz, or 10,000 votes for Al Gore in Florida hidden in some University basement, unfortunately any action you could've undertaken wouldn't have made much of a difference. The culpability lies with those who chose to make the decision, with a good dose of culpability by association for those who shilled for it (I'm thinking not just of the conservative propagandists here, but the liberal blogger types who also decided to shill for the war because it helped their employment prospects within the US political media). Everyone else gets a pass.
Okay. I yield that I, as part of the public interest group, have little power compared to the many other, often plutocratic interests out there, and that the public interest group don't have enough influence to sway government policy. I do not yield to the former rant, as I still feel guilty, and still want the shitstains to fuck off and die with their moralizing and rationalizing.