Posts by Tom Semmens
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Margaret B: "professional protesting class" is not necessarily a pejorative. I have a lot of time for those people who can be bothered to get off their chuffs and protest regularly, and they have a role in our democracy. But protesting all the time also introduces a significant element of tribal ritual to the confrontations with the police. When I see unedifying carry-ons on telly between protesters and police I am always reminded of films of posturing hostile tribes from the New Guinea Highlands.
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I have a wider question for the lefty- left - why do people who profess such anarchistic and revolutionary views make such a knee jerk alliance with a bunch of reactionary, patriarchal tribalists with a fixation on the 19th century?
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As Paul Litterick pointed out, this is the professional protesting class we are talking about here. Now, like the annoying and officious colonel blimp types who also happen to be the only people who can be bothered keeping a myriad of local bowling clubs/bridge clubs etc etc running the protesting class fufills a valuable role in our society. But the police raids fed every conspiracy theory, persecution complex and repression fantasy these people have, and from a simple human psychology viewpoint the rather hysterical reaction is entirely predictable.
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looking back at our time of Empire I suppose our "away game" was the fighting on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Our belief in Empire and with it our Imperial hubris is on war memorials everywhere.
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Tell me James, given that Al Qaeda was no friend to Saddam do you think the good ol' US of A could have "handed Al Qaeda its ass" without a million or so Iraqi civilians as collateral damage if they hadn't invaded Iraq?
Conflating the so called "war on terror" with Iraq might help you win an argument in a downtown bar in Mobile, Alabama but it doesn't cut much ice anywhere else in the Western World.
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Actually apart from the same depressing "manifest destiny" compulsion to excessive genocidal violence that the US has displayed in all its colonial wars to me the most strikingly similar comparison with Vietnam is the massive deficit spending being used to fund the whole Iraq adventure. Vietnam damaged America financially until the Clinton boom; It looks like another financially incompetent Republican nincompoop with links and parallels to Nixon is doomed to repeat the same economic mistake.
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Will US history books ever acknowledge this monumental (on every level) cock up??
Probably with the same general deafening silence that is shown by most US publications in letting Americans know about their invasion and genocidal subjugation of the Phillipines between 1899-1902.
The blueprint of the American way of counter-insurgency is all there. During the US suppression of the Filipion rebellion some 250,000-500,000 civilians were killed, the US engaged in scorched earth tactics, built concentration camps and practiced widespread torture and engaged in numerous war crimes including the infamous "Kill everyone over age ten" order given by General Jacob H. Smith.
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rogerrd - They may be volunteers, but only volunteers after a fashion, especially in the United States Army were the inordinate percentage of the army is recruited from the trailerparks and ghettoes of the western worlds least socially mobile nation.
But even volunteer soldiers should be able to trust those in the political leadership who would order them into harms way to exercise a duty of responsibility and leadership that ensures they are not sent to hell holes where their lives as well as the lives of their victims are wasted for nothing. While the national-centric nature of casualty reporting is almost obscene in its myopia a poor hispanic or black private who joined up for a green card and/or a better future only to be killed for nothing also deserves to be mourned.
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God Iraq is depressing. Unfortunately, because of the country they lead, Cheney and Bush will probably die old men in their beds instead of in the prison cells where they so richly deserve to reside for this unmitigated disaster.
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Did they come up faster?
The theory goes that that the bowl will absorb more of the MDMA and absorb it faster, leading to a more intense experience. Apparently, you pop the pill up your bum until you "hit the little shelf" which is where one deposits it. Those who the lack the shame and mkae it a regular practice apparently swear by it.