Posts by giovanni tiso
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I chose not to have children but home births really are kinda nice:)
Hear, hear. We did the home thing for #2 and #3 (we were planning to for #1 also, but he had to be induced in the end - probably a good thing, in hindsight, I have a feeling the birthing pool would have gone through the floor of the living room in the rickety old place we used to inhabit, which hadn't been repiled since the Punic Wars) and we never looked back. #1 was there to witness both events and that made it even more special.
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The very same. The long version is better viewed on an empty stomach, kind of like an episode of the Office.
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They were aware that 9/11 could have been 30,000 dead.
And that had fuck all to do with Iraq. But I refer you to Danielle's point: even allowing that the case for Iraqi WMD was made in good faith (which is one hell of a concession), the claim on the part of the administration that the war would be swift and painless was a lie, plain and simple.
The problem for Naomi is over 800 million people within developing nations have been freed from grinding hand to mouth subsistance poverty by themselves reforming to increase market participation. Naomi Klein's basic claim - this poverty reduction is a disaster.
How many time does the woman need to repeat that she's not against globalisation before her Sunday critics stop claiming that she is?
The fact that international trade has bettered the lives of a great deal of people should not be allowed to obscure the instances in which it has destroyed the lives of others, nor prevent us from questioning the democratic legitimacy of those who make the decisions. Joseph Stiglitz said much the same things when he came to New Zealand a couple of months ago and he's hardly what you would call a fundamentalist, no?
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Naomi Klein - the Ann Coulter of the fundamentalist left?
Give me a break.
Seriously, have you guys bothered to read her books? I agree that at times she's irritatingly simplistic, but it's not as if the basic claims in Shock Doctrine are outlandish. Or new, for that matter. But aside for the polemic itself, which I can take or leave, the content is well researched and certainly interesting.
Ann Coulter, on the other hand, is a deranged loon.
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Try for a starter a view from the inside of US policy: War and Decision, by D J Feith, former under secretary for Defence.
Care to summarise what the little man had to say? I saw a couple of his interviews when he was promoting the book (including the one on the daily show, which was hilarious) and the gist seemed to be "we were right, you shall see, just you wait." What do you reckon?
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Except that free-market absolutism has not been applied anywhere within that time period.
Huh?
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sorry, an assumption on my part is that the pre-911 conspiracy is widely known.
i'm not convinced by that.Neither is Klein, just to be clear.
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This scathing critique of "The Shock Doctrine" is also worth reading for a wider-ranging review of Klein's thesis.
You mean for the entertainment factor? This guy is one of the biggest Friedman apologists on the market. I'm not saying that he's not entitled to write a critique of Klein's book, but I went straight to the part where he (oh-so-predictably) tried to severe the ties between Pinochet and Friedman, and found it well deserving of a laughing track.
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iraq otoh? if those neocon fkcers had been planning to murder an individual other than hussein they'd all be on death row for premeditation.
I wasn't suggesting that Iraq follows legitimately from 9/11, it was obviously well planned in advance as is well documented, but without 9/11 Saddam would have had to do something rather spectacular for Iraq to be invaded again. So Bush and co. seized the opportunity, and that's what Klein's book is about - disasters that are not the result of conspiracy (she says so explicitly) but that allow TPTB to apply the shock doctrine.
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The ease with which they all moved over to the Islamist threat is quite remarkable.
Well, they did get their Pearl Harbour, though, it's not as if it happened by force of persuasion alone. What Shep said about the song sheet is very valid, at any rate, the discipline of neocon politicians and commentators in pushing their talking points in unison is well documented; I might have the timeline wrong, but it seems to me that it was around the time of Katrina that the united front started to crack.
Another thing to be said in favour of the cabal idea: it's not as if the US or any other Western administration can push its politics through the various branches of govenrment without attrition and compromise, except when it comes to the small business of waging war - amazing how easy it is then to suspend democratic and public debate. So if you have what is essential a very small group of like-minded people who have read the same instruction manual making the military decision, the attrition disappears and yes I think it becomes quite legitiamate to make the kind of argument that Klein makes in her book. But again, they needed a Pearl Harbour, no question about it.