Posts by richard
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Steve Barnes,
And doing what Americans do best, shouting “Wooo, Yeah, USA, USA”
In the end it’s a game of two halves. When the sucking of oranges and the gulping of kool-aid is over the second half will begin with substitutions on both sides…
The celebration of a death is the lowest of behaviours and makes me wonder what the hell it is they are fighting to protect, the right to gloat about killing?.I saw a lot of Americans today (as I do every day -- just walking past in the street) and not a one of them was chanting U-S-A. I have to say that taking the telegenic reaction of a relative handful of people in a country of 300 million (and who can blame an American for feeling some degree of satisfaction at this news) and drawing some overarching conclusion has a name -- and it is not a pretty one. Applied to pretty much any other country in the world, this sort of analysis would look pretty thin, but somehow it is fine to apply it to the good ole USofA.
(And yes, this place is crazy in many ways -- no argument about that. But it is also complex.)
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Paul Campbell,
Jolisa: I don’t know – I was living in the US at the time – OBL had been talked about in the media for a while, his name wasn’t a new one – after all he was Reagan’s golden boy fighting the russians in Afghanistan, funded by the US – the fact that he’d turned against the US was not news
There had been the 1993 WTC attack, various attacks in the middle east, Sudan – the first Iraq war had happened under Bush 1 (with hundreds of thousands of us marching in the street against it!) – if you listened to NPR, watched public television you knew that AQ existed and had the US in its sights
I think you are right that the possibility of Al Qaeda attacks themselves were foreseeable, and it certainly didn’t take long to figure out who was responsible after they had happened.
But I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim to have anticipated something on the scale of what happened on 9/11. (And, yes, I am aware of the FBI guy worried about terrorists going to flight school).
Nor do I think that a "regular" sized Al Qaeda attack on the US would have prompted a response on the scale of the one that followed 9/11.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
So, Danyl, the post WW2 war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo (flawed and ambiguous as they were) didn’t achieve anything – as opposed to going past the judge and jury and straight to the executioners?
With all due respect to President Obama, vengeance is not justice. It wasn’t in 1946, and it isn’t now. Justice is hard and elusive; perhaps we will never find it in this world, or any other. But I just thought we were supposed to be better.
The Nuremberg Trials involved prisoners who were already in captivity. If this piece is even half true – and no man has ever so much loved his wife that he would attempt to lay down her life in order to save his own – then what took place was a rolling firefight in a purpose-built and heavily fortified building, where Osama and co had a home team advantage.
Unless Bin Laden was gunned down while actively seeking to surrender, I don’t think it is reasonable to fault the US for not bringing him out alive, any more than you can gripe about the New Zealand police not being able to bring David Gray in front of a judge after Aramoana.
Sometimes justice and vengeance can be delivered simultaneously.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
I fear you have attributed someone else's quote to me, sir
Your website did it :-) I thought I was replying to webweaver. Sorry.
R.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
Personally I’m feeling extremely uncomfortable about the fact that he was killed (together with a bunch of people with him) rather than being captured.
Who bells the cat – are you volunteering?
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I have my own office with a solid wooden door, several bookshelves, a comfy reading chair, and desk chair, a big monitor, and a ten foot window (and a couple of diggers outside in the street right now – no rose without a thorn), but I can still get distracted.
But this – http://anti-social.cc/ – is worth every penny. I actually thought about coding something almost identical on my own, and while it is trivial to sidestep (hello iOS) I never actually do, unless I get an instant message (which I need to keep alive for actual work conversations) from my spouse with a must-see Tweet inside it.
Not sure how it would work for those who are obliged to Tweet or Facebook professionally, but I like it a lot.
Deflector shields to maximum. See you in three hours :-)
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Odd. No-one has mentioned Dave Dobbyn yet.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
He’s alive, although he retired a decade ago. A friend of mine did his postdoc in Turin and they put him in Regge’s vacated office, which meant he had to spend a lot of time fielding his calls.
The last guy in my office before me (or at least with my office telephone number) apparently owed money on a credit card, which was a bit of pain. But I did once have the office next to Hans Bethe's (with Hans still very much inside of it) for a couple of months.
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Just prompted to do a spot of "where are they now" googling - Dave Frame and I were at UoC together.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
transcript of the conversations between Primo Levi and physicist Tullio Regge, which I see to my surprise has been translated into English even
Will put this on my list for when I am next on the bus. Going purely by his science, Regge is (or was?) a very smart guy. And Primo Levi is, of couse, primo.