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Thread: OT: the evils of socialism vs. the evils of capitalism

  1. #46
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    Note - I'm not a big supporter of the wr in Iraq - but what lies? The rationale used by the Bush admin was the common conclusions by the world's intel associations for a good decade. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Chirac... all said the same things.

    The UN was extra reluctant because so many of it's leaders were lining thier pockets from the suffering of the Iraqi people. Shameful. France & Germany especially. You can expect this from the Russians and the French, but the Germans?

    The UN is a massive corrupt dictators club that was built on the best of intentions. We know how the human rights commision chaired by the worst abusers in the world. Decisions are made based on who gets paid off.

    It doesn't seem like a bad idea to force some accountability.

    Ice cream is good. You mix it with sh!t, and you get sh!t. Unfortunately, the UN as it is today is sh!t. There needs to be some acountability. Many Americans have felt this for a long time. It's about time someone is standing up to the lies, deception, and thievery.

    Or maybe you have other explanations for the oil for food or other scandals?
    "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake."
    --- Napoleon

    "MonkeySlap is a brutal b@stard." -- SevenStar
    "Forgive them Lord, they know not what MS2 can do." -- MasterKiller
    "You're not gonna win a debate (or a fight) with MST. Resistance is futile." - Seven Star

  2. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by David Jamieson
    YOu know DS, back in the day when my finger was on the button, all these types of threads were generally tossed straight to the waist basket.

    It's always the same guys one side of the issue and the same guys on the other and most of it is venting and then it degrades into name calling and what not as observed here.

    Perhaps it would be good policy to just delete it before it grows. For instance, delete this thread now. Of course you'll have some making noise about their freedom of speech and you may have to rebut with 'this forum is not a democracy' etc etc. and so on. Eventually, as these guys realize their political threads go nowhere, they will stop posting them.

    And don't feel bad about it. It's not like any of them are your personal buddies and it's not like losing an irrelevant thread is going to have any meaning in teh grand scheme of things.

    Just saying.

    Yeah, but you know, I try and indulge our guests.... especailly those who DO THE RIGHT THING. Beyond that my interest is prettymuch keeping threds on topic (relatively) and Civil. I tend to avoid deleting threds unless indicated by the powers above or if it's SPAM. However even the "political" threds have something to offer... info wise, or a glimpse into who thinks like what.

    I'm often amazed and amused by who gets worked up by what. BUT yah all your points are still prettymuch there; just don't raise your voice at the dinner table and chew with your mouth closed.

  3. #48
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    "but what lies?

    The top 10 and there are more....but...


    "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."
    -- George Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati.

    LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

    LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

    LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."

    LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

    LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

    LIE #6: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

    LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

    LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

    LIE #9: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

    LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." -- President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.

    Now, the source IS below. It IS a site that would be known for being anti-Bush...but the information is verifiable. You can spin it anyway you wish.

    You could, for example, say that the person making each quote did NOT know it was untrue at the time. Then you have things like Wilson/Plame, the Downing Street memos that tend to imply that they DID know they were untrue....

    But you can't really argue with the idea that the statements were not, in the long run, true.

    http://www.alternet.org/story/16274/

  4. #49
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    The problem here is that EVERYONE - left/right/Europe - beleived these things to be true. We had no idea that Saddam feared Iran more than the U.S.

    Being wrong is not the same as lieing. And if the Bush Admin was wrong, so was the Clinton Admin, so was John Kerry, and so was almost every European spy agency.

    FWIW - it took us so long to actually take action - whatever was there is long gone.

    More fun reading:

    Army Deserter Recalls Abuse in N. Korea
    By Associated Press

    1 hour ago

    RALEIGH, N.C. - A U.S. Army deserter who spent decades in North Korea says his communist keepers abused him and controlled every aspect of his life, down to telling him how often to have sex.

    "It was the worst mistake anyone ever made," Charles Jenkins said. "In words, I cannot express the feelings I have towards North Korea, the harassment I got, the hard life."

    In an interview airing Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes, Jenkins said he was given no painkillers when a tattoo on his forearm that read "U.S. Army" was cut off with a scalpel and scissors.

    "They told me the anesthetic was for the battlefield," said Jenkins, a North Carolina native. "It was hell."

    Jenkins was a 24-year-old sergeant when he crossed the border into North Korea. He stayed for 39 years, appearing in propaganda films and teaching English.

    In 1980, he married a Japanese woman who had been kidnapped and taken to North Korea to train spies in Japanese language and culture. She was released in 2002 and Jenkins followed two years later, surrendering to U.S. authorities and serving a month in jail for desertion.

    The couple now live in Japan.

    Jenkins told "60 Minutes" that his government handlers assigned him a Korean woman with whom he was supposed to have sex twice a month, and they beat him severely when he balked.
    "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake."
    --- Napoleon

    "MonkeySlap is a brutal b@stard." -- SevenStar
    "Forgive them Lord, they know not what MS2 can do." -- MasterKiller
    "You're not gonna win a debate (or a fight) with MST. Resistance is futile." - Seven Star

  5. #50
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    The problem here is that EVERYONE - left/right/Europe - beleived these things to be true. We had no idea that Saddam feared Iran more than the U.S.
    Not everyone believed it MS2 as is indicated by the lack of support for the aggression against Iraq by pretty much every member nation there with the exception of the players who did the aggression IE: USA/Britain/Australia.

    Russia, Canada, France, Germany...Other industrialized and so called 'first world nations' did not believe the spiel coming out of the white house and did not extend their support for Bush's attack on Iraq. NOt to mention the millions and millions of people in the US and around the world that rallied against the war.

    Italy and Spain came on board after back room deals with who knows what sort of conditions attached, as well as poland. Many in Bush's so called "coallition of the willing" have since seen the error in their actions and have in fact withdrawn their troops from that cluster f*ck.

    you can't expect a people who have been steamrolled by such a transparently gluttoness, greedy and self serving group as is the Bush admin to even consider the thought of continued nonsense from the neo cons.

    The support grows less and less. Bush has once again demonstrated his inability to properly be a man of the people, which he never was and as far as being a statesman goes, well as soon as he can grasp how to read a map and how to answer queries unscripted and unstaged, maybe he can progress forward with his political career which is mostly a taint stain to anyone with a breadcrumbs worth of intelligence.

    But you go ahead and support that stuff if you want. I mean, it's a free country right? Isn't it? Is it?
    Kung Fu is good for you.

  6. #51
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    Actually, outside of the US, not that many believed that those things were true.

    Personally, I was in Singapore when some of these things were being said and the drumbeats to war were getting kicked into gear. I dealt with people from Asia Europe, and the UK while there.

    The common question and disbelief I encountered :

    (1) How could the people in the US have elected Bush...and SURELY they will vote him out of office.

    (2) SURELY the people in the US don't believe all of this rubbish about WMDs, the Al Qaeda link, the 9/11 link...etc...

    (3) SURELY the people in the US realize that OIL is the bottom line reason for this...

    (4) SURELY the UN inspections will complete and the UN will prevent this from being a war with Iraq.

    They were ALL incredulous when I said that the people in the US, for the most part, believed all of it.

    I was in China in 2002 as well. I dealt with nationals as well as some people from places other than China then. None of them could fathom how Bush could have been elected in 2000.

    So... the world does NOT listen to Fox news nor did they believe much of what has since been proven to be a lie.

    Of course, the US media painted them all as cowards, money motivated, US Haters, and so on.... While SOME of that may be true....it doesn't explain how the US and GB were the only ones of size going in....

    Nope...the rest of the world does NOT believe this stuff.

  7. #52
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    I refer you to the testimony of Scott Ritter (a republican and gulf war veteran) who as a member of the UN weapons inspection team said that they had verifiably destroyed 90-95% of Iraqs WMD's.

    To try and discredit his testimony prior to the invasion there was a smear campaign alledging that he was a peadophile. The Sun (murdoch paper in UK - biggest selling tabloid) had the headline 'a traitor and now a peadophile' regarding this. Of course its much the same story with David Kelly (the weapons inspector who committed suicide ater a government smear campaign) and George Galloway (who sued the telegraph newspaper and won over allegations that he took payments from the Iraq regime- he was also re-elected despite being expelled from the labour party).
    'In the woods there is always a sound...In the city aways a reflection.'

    'What about the desert?'

    'You dont want to go into the desert'

    - Spartan

  8. #53
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    Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.
    - George Orwell

  9. #54
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    ........

    I detest murder, but didn't the PRC show the world how
    the viral like spread of white collar crime could be curbed?

  10. #55
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    lol by what? murder?

    "better to reside in hell knowing the truth than to be blissfully ignorant in heaven."

    "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."- Doug Adams

    I dare you to make less sense!

    "Freeze?! You know if i drop the tooth fairy i'm only gettin' started mother****er!"

    "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - George Carlin

  11. #56
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    .

    Yep. Lined 'em Up And Shot 'em Down.

  12. #57
    Quote Originally Posted by BAI HE
    There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.
    I don't think "a planned economy" can be combined with "the freedom of the intellect." Whatever the benefits of a planned structure may be, it's directly opposed , by definition, to free structures. However, I do not think that collective markets are necessarily planned markets, and it's in this distinction that we may be able to pursue the integration Orwell is talking about. There are communal structures, like co-operatives, which are nonethless based on the principles of (classical) liberalism, most notably, the use of coercive force. Unfortunately, while they may be an ideal solution to our economic problems, a largescale use of them any time in the near future is highly unlikely: the mainstream 'capitalist' (which is to say, the corporatist in disguise) opposes them for being communal while the mainstream 'socialist' opposes them for being (classically) liberal.

    Restoring "right and wrong" to politics sounds like an excellent idea though.

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