Posts by Rich Lock
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being called "Shakespeare" by ignorant youths, just for speaking normal proper English.
Who you talking about, Grandad?
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Plus, it's set in post-apocalyptic Liverpool, which is quite hard to tell apart from pre-apocalyptic Liverpool.
yup.
Alex Cox
I have mad love for this guy since BBC2 gave him a late night slot on sundays back when I was a teenager, which he used to show weird leftfield cult films. Including, it must be noted, a couple of his own ('Repo Man' and 'Walker').
Moviedrome, it was called. He'd introduce each film with a 10-minute spiel of interesting facts and vignettes. Really turned me on to some cool shit.
I've just discovered the full lists of the films he showed are on his website.
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Blake's Seven, anyone?
Ah, Sevalan, Sevalan, and your shiny boots of leather.
Strike, dear mistress, and cure my heart.
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Should the soldiers who pulled the trigger carry the blame? Should it be the commanders who gave the green light? The generals who authorised the Rules of Engagement? The politicians who put them there in the first place?
The blame lies squarely with the politicians who got us into this debacle. The US president holds the title of commander-in-chief for a reason.
An army is a tool that is wielded by government.
The blame also lies with the decision-makers in the pentagon, who have failed to create a flexible, adaptive, intelligent armed force capable of acting both as a conventional army and as an effective peacekeeping force, despite the fact that asymmetric warfare has been the prevailing operational scenario since around 1960.
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Yes.
But whatever you do, don't ever watch the remake of 'gone in 60 seconds'. That will make you watch through your fingers with horror and fear. 'Christopher, Christopher....what have they done to you.....?"
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Unlike Vietnam (where much the same sort of thing happened), the Americans have really kept their own body count down. A friend and I speculated before the war broke out just how many bodies would be required for the Americans to lose their bottle and GTFO. I settled on 10,000, based on the idea that about 5 times that number were lost in Vietnam before it was too much, and the politicians have most likely learned a lesson from that. There's a loooong way to go.
It was, in my opinion, the draft that decided things in Vietnam, politically speaking. Not the bodycount.
No-one really gives a stuff about poor kids too young to legally drink signing up. But if mommy and daddy's precious little middle-class sweetheart is called up to get their hands dirty, you'll start hearing some screaming.
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Even though they probably can't sell advertising
My wife rather dryly noted that the number of scheduled programmes appeared to have doubled.
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Also the longer version made it clearer that one of the people was carrying RPG. An RPG is a sure sign someone is up to no good.
I'll need a pretty impeccable source on this before I'm willing to conceed any of the people in that group were carrying RPG's.
The video was shot on July 12, 2007, over Eastern Baghdad, a war zone, in the middle of the surge. If you are going to walk around in a war zone, during a much publicized “surge”, in a neighborhood during on going clashes...when the US is well known to be extensively using drones and attack helicopters, I am sorry, it probably isn’t going to end well very well for you.
Just...wow. Would you care to elaborate on where the occupants of Eastern Baghdad should have gone that might have been safe? Like Syria, perhaps?
After 7 years in Iraq and longer in Afghanistan, there must have been hundreds of thousands of individual combat actions on the ground and in the air. The number of incidents where soldiers or airmen have screwed up have been few in proportion. In order to show any kind of pattern of behavior or systemic issues in the US military, there would need to be thousands of such incidents and nothing like that has come out and that number of incidents could never, ever be kept under wraps.
To use your words, Eastern Baghdad is a 'war zone'.
WW2: 1st Sept 1939 - 2nd Sept 1945. Six years.
Major US involvement in Vietnam: 31st Jan 1965 to 15th Jan 1973, approximately. Eight Years.
Gulf War 2: 20th March 2003 to present. Seven years.
Care to speculate as to when we might see the end of 'combat operations'?
It is estimated that 7,000+ civilians lost their lives during the first phase - 20th March to April 30th 2003.
Here's a list of just the miltary-on-military mistakes for roughly that period.
It is further estimated that there has been a minimum of 92,489 Iraqi civilian deaths up to June 2009.
Still, freedom isn't free, right?
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Ahhh. Up to speed now.
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"remove the concept of leadership"
I find it hard to hard to square this statement with the Homage to Barcelona above.
If I recall correctly, the CNT still had officers. Elected, but still leaders.
Orwell also explicitly points out the contrast between the soldiers at the front (always chronically short of material and supplies, but great camraderie), and the REMFs in Barcelona proper, who always seems to have as much of everything they care for.
So plus ca change, really.