Pastor Terry Jones as a representative of American actions and values

Americans differ from one another as much as any people. Jones is one face of America.

This is a phenomenon that's come under study lately. People (not just Americans, but Homo sapiens) are more capable of emotional involvement with a single person or a small number, to which they can give names and faces, than to a large group, which fades into anonymity and statistics. I suspect this all goes back to our species's pack-social nature, on which I have spoken often. We're programmed to relate to a small clan of extended family members, not to a city full or a country full or a continent full of people who are nothing more than abstractions.

This came up a year or so ago because of a news story about one dog who had been left behind on a burning ship when the crew was evacuated. They simply couldn't find the captain's dog and it was too dangerous to leave anyone on the ship much longer. This dog became America's Waif. They wouldn't let the story die. (Fortunately Mrs. Fraggle and I were among the thirteen or fourteen people who missed the story or we would have been out there in a rented helicopter too.) This went all the way to the Department of Defense and they deployed a huge volume of resources, starting with simply trying to find the bloody ship because no one really kept track of it and they were just going to let it sink. A fleet of warships and a squadron of aircraft crisscrossed a gigantic region of the Pacific Ocean--at no small expense--until they finally found the ship, miraculously still afloat. Then they had to get someone onto the ship and then that person had to find the dog. Needless to say they did and he did, and the entire country gave each other high fives before heaving a sigh of relief and going back to their sitcoms.

When hundreds or thousands or millions of people are dying, it exceeds the parameters of our programming. We can't see those faces, feel their individual pain, weep for their individual losses. They literally become mere statistics.

So it's easier for us to focus on Terry Jones, one single asshole, than to zoom our lens back to take in a large number of people. I promise you (whoever I'm addressing) that your people would not behave much differently if presented with a similar dichotomy.

Excuse me, but you apparently are not receiving accurately reported news from America over there. Our media virtually ignored the book burning. There was a huge outcry last year when he said he was going to do it, for the precise reason that 99.999 percent of our population thought that was a really shitty idea. After he gave in to the public, media and government pressure and agreed not to do it, he was forgotten. This time he made no announcement, but simply lit the fire. It didn't make the national news, just some local coverage. It was only when the Afghanis got wind of it and retaliated by killing some of their occupying troops and other foreigners, that the American press belatedly began covering the story. But please understand that to us this is one story. One asshole burned a book, and a bunch of other assholes overreacted by committing murder. I wish there was a way to put all the assholes together so they could just shoot each other.

Apparently you guys find him more newsworthy than we do. The only reason he is of any interest to us at all is that he was of interest to the Afghanis.

And this is precisely why I hold the monotheistic religions of Abraham in the utmost contempt. The traditional polytheistic religions with their 23 gods were a great model of the human spirit. One day we have to let our Healer take charge, the next day the Warrior, on Thursday the Hunter, and finally on Friday night the Reveler. As long as you get the right spirit for the right event everything is fine. But Abraham, obviously a retard, did away with that complexity and squashed that rich, complex spirit, born of the largest forebrain in the Animal Kingdom, down into a pathetic one-dimensional model in which everything falls on a linear scale between Good and Evil. Since the universe isn't really like that, we've been shooting each other at random ever since, not having any idea who's really good and who's really evil on any given day.

"Something"???? A country that has been on the verge of disintegration since the Americans and the Soviets were using the Middle East as their chessboard in the silly game we called the Cold War? We bombed Afghanistan "back to the Stone Age" without actually dropping any bombs on them; it was a triumph of the politics of duality! It's a miracle that anything functions at all in that country, not that one day a group of people killed a bunch of occupying foreigners because the one thing they have in common, their Holy Book, had been desecrated.

That's an exaggeration. But it's true that the military personnel were A) Losing their grip on their civilized nature from being isolated in a surreal environment for too long, and B) Able to get away with it in the "fog of war." It's important to note that even Hitler understood the F of W phenomenon. Memos were found stressing the need to complete the Holocaust while the war was still raging, because even a victorious Third Reich could not expect to get away with gassing civilians in peacetime.

The Abu Ghraib incident is stark evidence that the minuscule portion of our population who volunteered to fight the War on Islam contains a lot of crazy, uncivilized, bloodthirsty perverts. This is not WWII, when ordinary good-hearted men were drafted into combat, serving as a reference standard of behavior for the one-percenters as well as statistically preventing them from all serving in the same unit and goading each other into committing war crimes.

Give us half credit for electing a president who promised to put an end to all this. Unfortunately he's an outsider to Washington who has no idea how to get anything done (Jimmy Carter's ghost), and he's more interested in bankrupting the country with his Soviet-style medical plan than in understanding anything outside our borders. He hasn't even shut down Guantanamo, the one promise that seemed absurdly easy to keep. But he's black (well half anyway) and we still love him because we hope that when we meet Saint Peter he'll finally forgive us for slavery, Jim Crow and all those lynchings.

No, that was orchestrated by Backward Baby Bush--or by his handlers anyway, since he already was already slipping into pre-senile dementia before the election. Americans had no idea where Afghanistan even was. 9/11 was 90% financed by Saudi Arabians, 95% organized by Saudi Arabians, and something like 75% performed by Saudi Arabians. Osama is, after all, a member by marriage of the House of Saud. But the Bush family are blood brothers of King Abdullah because they're all moguls in the energy industry, and corporate bonds are more important than patriotism. So they had to distract us by saying, "Hey look over here! Osama has taken refuge in this anarchic, dysfunctional little tribal backwater called 'Afghanistan'! Let's bomb the crap out of it!"

Please support Greg Mortenson's Central Asia Project. He's been building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan for twenty years, with the only condition being that they must admit girls. He has done a much better job of making peace with the local leaders than any of our government people, perhaps because he doesn't carry a gun.

What the fuck did the Afghanis ever do to us??? You talking about the heroin business? The only reason they're making all that money and using it to fund anti-American terrorism ($18B per year directly into the Taliban treasury) is that our shit-for-brains government didn't learn anything from Prohibition and thinks it can push a popular commodity onto the black market without causing any second-order effects.

Isn't it just maximum irony that we've pushed so hard on Al Qaeda that they finally moved their headquarters into a country that doesn't like us very much, is poorly governed, and has nuclear weapons?

* * * * NOTE FROM A MODERATOR * * * *

Please don't do this again. It causes immense problems. By the time a thread is five pages long there's an extremely good chance that the clever thing you're about to write has already been written.

That, for example!

But the answer is, yes and no. YES, we do treasure our freedoms, and one of them is to burn books--and even our own flag--as a symbol of our disgust with whatever ideas they contain. We do not punish people for burning books even if they're books we love. We'll just go and burn a book they love in retaliation. But also NO, most Americans are Christians and they do not believe in burning somebody else's holy book. Even though it's not illegal it's still a shitty thing to do.

Jones has a very small congregation, and he's a tyrant. He doesn't allow his parishioners to communicate with any family members who do not belong to the church, he makes them live on the property where he can brainwash them more effectively, and he even makes them work for him. It's very sad that many people around the world now think that he represents us. His background story has not been widely published (I just read it in the Washington Post), but every American who's read it hates him. We'd probably look the other way if someone kidnapped him and delivered him to Taliban headquarters.

I find it fascinating that they haven't actually done that. Why respond to burning the Koran by killing people, instead of by burning a Bible?

They don't have to. By lobbying state legislatures to impose various onerous conditions, they've come very close to making abortions unavailable outside of our largest cities.

To be fair it must be noted that there was overwhelming anger among the Afghan people when that happened. They considered those statues beloved parts of their cultural heritage. The Swiss and the Japanese, bless their hearts, are spearheading the effort to restore them.

 

We didn't need an ammendment :LOL:.

From the New Zealand Bill of Rights:

Legislation elsewhere explicitly applies this allowance to the government as well, including any legislation the government might attempt to pass.

 

Another reason to move to New Zealand. Abortions are pretty much freely avaiable in NZ, you can get them at the public hospital with referral from a Dr, but it's pretty much a technicality - something to do with a specific requirement of the wording of the legislation, but generally something AFAIK most Dr's will grant automatically. There's been talk of changing the legislation to remove this clause and fine tune a couple of points, but I'm not sure where that got to (been there once with a foreign partner, neither of us were remotely ready for a kid, and it only happened because we mis-timed things by one day).

Addendum:
Here we go:

Here's a good summary of NZ law on the matter:
http://www.abortion.gen.nz/legal/index.html

 

LOL You don't say.
So it could be as simple as the majority of one ethnic group support the international forces, or the majority of city dwellers who aren't being directly affected by the war who support the international forces (I don't know how urbanized Afghanistan is).

This is why I would have expected a competant statistician to present the data in three ways:
Results broken down by Region.
Results broken down by Ethnicity.
Results broken down by Gender, because as it stands, as that report is worded it has the potential to miss, or conceal some very deep seated malcontent.

Also, can we have something that isn't six years old. Would you try and predict the outcome of a US election based on the results of a six year old exit poll? No, I don't think so (that's what, two terms?).