Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Obama only has to deal with the clamour of "bomb the arab tyrant" rather than "stop bombing the arab tyrant".
The anti-war protests for Iraq and Afghanistan were more "stop bombing the innocent Arab people who get killed and injured when you try to bomb the tyrant and miss" and "stop bombing a whole country because one guy might be hiding there", actually.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Gareth Ward,
http://www.xkcd.com/647/
And even that was two years ago…Also, this, though I'm not sure it's really aimed at you lot.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to webweaver,
The “having no gun” bit but still (according to the WH) “resisting” is interesting… especially when the question of whether it was an assassination or an unavoidable death is being debated.
The guy I saw was pretty up-front that the primary order was to kill, not capture. Whether capture was a viable secondary option...probably impossible to determine without a lot more evidence than will ever come out, and sure as hell no-one on the ground will get any blame for it.
He also commented that the changing story was mostly due to more detailed debriefing of all the soldiers involved. I suppose that in a combat situation like that, the stories will differ, and the final account will probably involve putting all of them (and the audiovisual evidence) together. At this point it seems unlikely to be deliberate editing of events - though you never know.
As to good taste in newspaper headlines that’s a wide open field.
Utu as a description for US blood revenge doesn’t seem too inapt.My favourite bad-taste Dom Post headline (actually, it would have been the Evening Post then) was after the 1999 RWC semifinal, which simply read "BUGGEUR".
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Sacha,
Welcome to the NZ government’s housing policy. For real.
I was somewhat more hopeful then that we'd do better.
Today we hear that:
- Osama was unarmed when shot
- He didn’t use a woman as a human shield as earlier ‘reported’
- He was identified by facial recognition software when exercising outsideso the full story is still a work in progress…
The head of the CIA just said that the orders were to kill, but capture if he "put up his hands and surrendered". I think we can all agree how likely that was - and how likely it was to be taken seriously by the soldiers involved.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Tim Croft,
It seems the White House is thinking of releasing the photos of his dead body, but can someone explain how on earth this will give further closure? Surely it will martyr his image.
I'd think the only reason to do that would be to prove to the doubters they'd killed him. Personally I don't think anything will do that, but they'll be tempted to try.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Sadly, they managed to not make that one a very big budget priority. Large parts of it are still a horrible mess I understand.
I was there in February for a Fulbright thing. We toured one of the worst-hit wards, and large chunks of it had just never been rebuilt - not a mess, per se, but just empty lot after empty lot, with only the concrete plinths that had been the front porches left. Rebuilding was happening, but through charities, not the government. I found that really depressing.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to DexterX,
It is my opinion that the US, particularly in the wake of Cyclone Katrina and the GFC, doesn’t have the budget to continue to fund Israel to the degree it seems to need adn this will be a consideration particularly when the Aid doesn’t solve the problem – the solution I mentioend above.
Not a problem - just cut those pesky Medicare payments, that'll free up plenty of cash for Israel.
(And the aftermath of Katrina is...really not their biggest budgetary concern right now. I mean, really not.)
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to nzlemming,
I thought that when she was 14! O_o
You thought I was seven the first time we ran into each other online? Now I'm disturbed.
Well, I guess you’d be surprised at how much intelligence can be gained from even the deleted sectors of those hard drives. Try not to be too much of an idiot, Rich.
Although there's always the possibility they used something like TrueCrypt. I'd laugh.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to BenWilson,
I read this not long after 9/11 and have been waiting for that “when it was over” time ever since. Are we there yet?
I don't think we ever get there. I'm pretty sure people have been feeling the same way for centuries now, through all sorts of war and terror and disaster; surely once this is over we can get back to being normal, we can get back to acting like civilised human beings. And we don't, we just adapt to the change and bury the shock for a little while, until it's some new generation's turn to be shocked at the way the world can change beneath you. Probably that's how they felt in Winchester when Lindisfarne was burned, or in Rome when Augustus declared himself Emperor.
Gawd, from the maturity of your writing I’d always picked that you were in your 30s.
Aww, thanks.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Paul Campbell,
That same argument applies to every crowd of muslims burning an american flag to celebrate OBL’s latest bombing that Fox shows too – neither is representative of the overarching bulk of the populace of any of these countries – but they’re equally ugly representations of the extremes in those countries – until the larger populations of the US and Muslim countries stand up to their extremists that’s who will represent them.
I don't think those are quite equivalent things - these people aren't celebrating random violence against bystanders. (A lot of them are also university students at the end of the university year, who will cheer damn near anything.) A better equivalent would be a Tea Party rally v. American-flag-burners. These celebrations really haven't been anything like that.
Like Russell says in the other thread, most of these young people have known nothing except the post 911-world, the idea that a terrible tragedy happened and no-one was ever really brought to justice for it. This might not be justice, but it's closure for this thing that's loomed over all their adult lives. I don't think it's worth celebrating myself, but I can understand why people would.