Riiiiight. So you're saying that it's okay to use ideological paramilitary forces to force your military to oppress the citizenry, provided the context is that you've already oppressed the citizenry to the point of open rebellion, and the army to the point of fracture? Sounds like a great recipe for avoiding "barbarism," all right. I saw all that stuff, in Western media. Also saw the videos of Qaddafi being tortured and killed. What bearing does it have on anything I've said? Does this stuff somehow contradict the point that national armies don't like to be used against their own citizenries, and typically have to be forced to do so by "regime vanguard" forces? Also, how about you try to come up with a responsive, respectful way to address people? It does you no good to lapse into generic defenses of craven dictators, nor to rely on implications that anyone who disagrees with you about anything is some mindless puppet of the rapacious Western media conspiracy. You should probably stop the apologetics for murderous dictators entirely, if you want to cultivate any credibility as a high-minded moralists who can go around call people "barbarians" for eschewing the "rule of law."
In the first place, if you're going to over-rely on naked accusations of "barbarism," you're soon going to reach the point of needing to expound on its meaning. It's becoming a shibboleth. In the second place - the object of your criticism here is exactly a law codifying this stuff. If the issue were an absence of the rule of law, this stuff wouldn't matter because the laws would be irrelevant. So the assertion that this law is very important and objectionable implies that the rule of law is alive and well in the USA. What you seem to be objected to would be something like "disregard for due process" or something along those lines.
No, what I am saying is that the "vanguard" forces of Qaddafi as you put it, were up against armed insurrectionists, not passive civilians apart from limited incidents. Against their own armed citizens. Armed by you know who. No, again, no defense of anyone, I am merely straightening out stereotypical distortions that feed the Western worldview.
Come now. (shibboleth...) The USA does absolutely not embrace the rule of law. This epitah to civilization, has clearly been shaped and distorted to fit FP. You have self confessed and known torturers and war criminals running free and yet you have un-indicted, uncharged prisoners indeterminably languishing in dungeons.
Come now. (shibboleth...) The USA does absolutely not embrace the rule of law. Universal law and repsect for human rights, an achievement of civilized society, has clearly been shaped and distorted to fit FP. Barbarism is just a drone away. Ask the numerous innocent victims of such. You have self confessed and known torturers and war criminals running free and yet you have un-indicted, uncharged prisoners indeterminably languishing in dungeons. That is barbarism.
No, you misunderstand. The vanguard forces are not the loyalist portions of the armed forces. They aren't part of the regular military at all. They're an extension of the regime, exactly for the purpose of keeping the military in line. Professional militaries tend to do thing like stage coups when the governments they serve lose legitimacy, so they're your main threat if you're a dictator. The purpose of a vanguard force is to kill any troops who display disloyalty or hesitate to follow orders to repress the citizenry. So, that's who the vanguard is always "up against:" the regular military, which will tend to resist illegitimate regimes who issue orders for repression. And, again, the fact that the resistance was repressed to the point of pursuing armed insurrection is no excuse for Qadaffi's depravities. Rather the opposite. The right to bear arms is a fundamental human right, motivated exactly by their necessity in overthrowing tyrants who refuse to go peacefully. The fact that a citizenry is armed is no excuse for repression or dictatorship. The question of whether an armed uprising is just or not has everything to do with the nature of the regime facing revolt. There is no blanket illegitimacy to armed insurrection. Armed insurrection against a legitimate, law-abiding government is wrong. Armed insurrection against an illegitimate, repressive regime - like that of Qaddafi - is just and glorious. Indeed, it's very strange that you are harping on this point, since I never said anything about "unarmed civilians" (although Qaddafi and Assad have killed plenty of those as well). And the whole point that spawned this tangent had to do exactly with the question of armed civilian militias/individuals resisting domestic military repression. My input on such being that national militaries typically do not want to do such things, and that consequently paramilitary vanguard force are required to force them to do so. The main exception to this would be cases where the military is in charge in the first place, in which case the repression is about defending its own power, and the vanguard force will be located inside the military chain of command. You can say that as many times as you want - but as long as you keep producing unprompted apologies for murderous dictators, nobody is going to buy it. No you aren't. In the first place, you're projecting all of the distortions at the outset (literally responding to things I haven't said, and don't think, on the basis of wrong assumptions about what I did or did not see in the media). In the second place, you're doing nothing particularly to dispell any of them, because you keep reliably falling right into propagandizing for dictators. This annihilates your credibility as any sort of credible, neutral media critic in possession of some elevated perspective. Instead, you are revealed as intensely ideological, to the point of inability to discern blatant dictator propaganda from relevant facts and framings. To the extent that this program has any effect on attitudes towards hegemonic discourses in Western society, it is to reinforce them. So, for about the millionth time, I strongly suggest that you drop all of the apologetics for dictatorship and repression. As it is, you have no credibility on these subjects whatsoever. Why would anyone listen to a sneering lecture on repression in the USA from somebody who goes to bat for every nasty, murderous dictator that he comes across? You're going to call America "barbaric" and then turn around and stump for Qaddafi and Assad, of all people?
That's risible coming from someone who shows up and proceeds to call people names. If you want to have an intellectual interaction, then by all means start advancing serious arguments instead of chanting cheap slogans. And all of it done according to the law. Again, your complaint is not about the question of the rule of law, but the contents of said law. Specifically, this "embrace the rule of law" shibboleth seems to mean little more than "embrace StrawDog's preferred politics and punish those he condemns." It's very childish and self-important, to reduce "the rule of law" and "civilization" down to agreement with your particular politics. Also, the hysterical phraseology doesn't do you any good. You can tell people they're barbarians who reject the rule of law and lack civilization till you're blue in the face, but they're still going to be confronted by a society with myriad laws, police, courts, lawsuits, division of labor, heirarchical organization, etc. I.e., all of the hallmarks of the rule of law and civilization. Throw a bunch of advocacy for Qaddafi and Assad on top of that, and it's easy to see why you never get any traction with this stuff.
No, this topic is about S1867, I'm just calling you out on the basis of your double standards. Of which there are many. And you really shouldn't call me friend, I don't actually like you that much.
What do Iran's domestic policies have to do with American domestic security? From Max Blumenthal: From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security Does the Israeli connection explain why the Senate is supporting S1867- does this benefit Israel in some way?
Right. Somewhat like the CIA et all - operating outside the realm of morality and law? Understood. And when the citizenry is armed by foreign nations with an agenda for regime change, (illegal) and the resultant toll of human slaughter skyrockets, how does that fit into this equation? Ah. And who gets to appraise who is what? Ah. And once the decision makers have voted (yesterdays friend is tomorrows foe) Glorious should be achieved militarily no matter how many civilians are slaughtered in the process? And calls for ceasefires and AU and other diplomatic efforts should be ignored? The obvious implication is an agenda for regime change. Yes, disgusting, any loss of life is to be condemned. Yet we see the same perpetrated by many despicable dictators of ME US allies. Is that acceptable in line with your view? Then in the name of freedom, woman`s rights, and human rights abuses, please can you prompt USNATO to bring freedom to the people of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, asap? I disagree. The facts are the NATO mandate for Libya was illegally breached regards supplying arms and pursuing regime change, culminating in the grotesque and illegal execution of a head of State. (barbarism) Whatever the general opinion, and in the light of preventing this lawlessness from occurring again, and again, these facts should be highlighted, as well as the fact that the Rebels undertook a massive murderous revenge spree of which no one has been held accountable nor of which I have read anything substantial or critical in the Western Media. Etc. And for the fourteenth time, pointing out distortions in the narrative does not in any shape or form equate to stumping for dictators.
Not really - the CIA is a foreign intelligence service. Intelligence functions typically figure into any such vanguard force, naturally, but it isn't synonymous with a spy agency as such. Although, this kind of consideration is exactly one of the reasons for the long-standing limitation of the CIA to foreign operations. As you would define it, I suppose. But typically these forces are explicitly legalized by the regime, and justified as "moral" in terms of serving the supreme need to maintain state integrity. Disagreeing with StrawDog about what constitues morality, or what the law says, is not the same thing as "operating outside the realm of morality and law." And while aknowledging that might tamp down the sexiness of your rhetoric, it would also lead to better comprehension of the situation and increased odds of analyzing it in a salient, influential way. Every state has a legal system and moral framework that endorses its key practices. Calling that "lawlessness" or "amorality" is just a means of declining to analyze them. If you can demonstrate that the "toll of human slaughter" was worse because of the NATO intervention than if we'd stood by and watched Qaddafi turn tanks and artillery on entire cities, well, I'm all ears. As it is, you keep making this same assertion without offering any support. Indeed, you seem to be totally writing off the crimes of Qaddafi. You may recall that the armed uprising, and subsequent intervention, was motivated by the initial skyrocketing of slaughter of unarmed civilian protestors by Qaddafi's security forces. People showed up to exercise their basic human right to peaceable assembly and free speech, and the dude gunned down thousands of them in cold blood. First and foremost, the people subject to the regime. Which in the case of Libya seems pretty cut-and-dried. They'd not have sustained a mass uprising otherwise. Once a citizenry has clearly made such a determination, it becomes encumbent upon other countries to respect and support that. To do otherwise, is to trespass against their national self-determination. Again, if you can show that NATO intervention increased the "slaughter of civilians," now would be the time to do so. Or at least, offer up some substantive criticism of claims to the opposite. And, no, the insistence that Western media hasn't sufficiently highlighted bad actions by the rebels doesn't cut it. You've got multiple credible corroborating reports of widespread, systematic slaughter and rape undertaken by Qaddafi in advance of any armed rebellion or external intervention. That's what prompted all of the stuff you're criticizing, so if you're going to assert that the cure was worse than the disease, you're going to have to actually answer for the toll of the disease. Frankly, the AU lacks the standing and credibility to be taken seriously on matters such as that. The Arab League and the UNSC were on board, and conducted serious diplomacy. I contend that those bodies are a lot more relevant and credible, than chat clubs like the AU. And, again, the people with the real standing - the citizens of Libya - appear to have been on board, generally. No? What exactly is NATO, or the UN, or the USA supposed to do? Somehow force the parties to come to agreement, but without using actual force? And in the meantime, stand idly by as Qaddafi shells civilian population centers? That's your recipe for avoiding "barbarism?" Or simply your prescription for the US to avoid being criticized by yourself, regardless of what does or doesn't happen in terms of "barbarism?" Because the fact of the matter is that America cares a lot more about real issues than about the approval of anonymous internet blowhards. Also, you realize that the term "Berber" is from the same Latin root as "barbarian," no? So it's interesting that you're here stumping for Qaddafi, an Arab dictator who undertook a campaign of suppression of Berber culture in Libya. Well, yeah, that is typically the agenda in armed insurrections. Relevant point is that such was achieved first and foremost by Libyans themselves, and not by foreign troops marching into Tripoli. So does that make it somehow wrong for the USA to turn on such dictators when the time is ripe, as was done to Qaddafi and Mubarak and Ben-Ali and Saleh? Because those guys were all tight US allies as little as one year ago. Do you demand perfect moral consistency (either way) right now, or are you willing to settle for concrete progress? Because the list of US-backed dictators in the region just got a lot shorter, and you are in the middle of complaining about how unacceptable that was. Not really. Which is why I'm glad that Obama siezed the opportunity to dump US support for various Arab dictators this year. It's a bummer that conditions weren't yet ripe for change to come to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as well, but it all still adds up to a major move in the right direction. The Saudi royalty are not sleeping so well, now. Unfortunately we will have to wait for the citizens of those countries to take the lead, if we want to stand much chance of real progress in those terms. But if and when they do, I certainly hope that the USA will abandon its erstwhile allies and support the people. BTW, the Arab Spring is not the invasion of Iraq. Nobody is advocating US invasion and occupation to fix governance and human rights problems in these states. We're talking about the USA supporting domestic revolutions against nasty tyrants. That's a matter of legal interpretation, and not one that appears to be born out by any of the fora for arbitrating that stuff. But not by NATO forces, nor by anyone subject to their command. Again, we have you scrutinizing the rebels at length, while remaining totally oblivious to the systematic crimes of the Qaddafi regime over decades. If you want to make the case that the rebels are worse than Qaddafi or somehow represent regress, well, then now is the time to do so. If all you're going to do is speak to the strawman that "Westerners" think the rebels are pure white knights and that the war was without human costs, you're wasting your time. Those costs were expected and anticipated, and judged less than the costs of standing by and watching Qaddafi butcher and rape his way to staying in power. If you disagree, you'll need to actually make that case, and not the cheap, irrelevant one you seem to prefer. When the only "distortions" you are interested in are those that delegitimize opposition to dictators, and in the process you introduce a bunch of other distortions to minimize the crimes of said dictators, what you end up with is exactly a program of apologetics for dictators. Do you really think your audience is so insipid that they can't see this? Hell, it's bizarre enough that you can't seem to see what you're doing. Don't assume that anyone else is on-board with your conveniently self-serving distinctions, especially when you so frequently and obviously undermine them. Whatever it is that you think you're doing, the fact is that you're consistently, energetically on-message with the pro-dictator discourse. You should consider getting off of it, if you want to cultivate any credibility as an aloof critic of political discourse.
Your kidding right? How does Iran's policies pose a threat to American security? SAM, literally thousands of papers have been written on the topic. And unlike most of your arguments the vast majority of them are accurate.
Bigots will be bigots. And strawdog, I have been here long enough to know that your position on the matter has not wavered a millimeter. Qualifying you for the bigotry medal.
Okay, give me ONE example how Irans domestic policies affect American domestic security I was wondering wth the Senators were thinking to approve of this bill. But if the Israel lobby is involved, then it makes perfect sense, considering how the senators bobbed like apples for Netanyahu
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I'm amazed how strawdog and SAM have so completely run out of information to use over the years that they're grasping at conspiracies.
