Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to R A Hurley,
Osama Bin Laden is anything other than a murderous idiot.
Murderous and a thousand other things, yes. An idiot? Perhaps not - he achieved huge parts of what he wanted to achieve.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
But let’s not forget who killed those thousands of people, and how.
Absolutely, and to all of those, at the very least, and sidestepping any arguments about the legal niceties of justice, I think a moral injustice has been done by not putting OBL in front of a tribunal or court - I would've preferred the Hague or something/somewhere that reflected that this was not just an American hell - and summarily executing him.
That the US opened the gates to that hell a little wider does not excuse those who pulled the triggers one little bit.
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The knee jerk martyrdom from the left and the unpleasant celebratory noise from the right on this are both pretty ugly.
I think the victims of the last decade (and more) were owed the time in court regardless of how difficult such an undertaking was to be. Surely it was no more troublesome than the ten years of evil, bloody war, and trillions of dollars spent getting to that compound.
And it seems fairly clear that a shot in the head was the intended endgame even before the SEALS went in, given what we've been told of the operation's timeline and that we now know there was no firefight to speak of. It seems to have been a targeted assassination, after which any discussion of the Rules Of Engagement are merely a useful deflection.
Richard Jackson in The Hindu wrote a worthy op/ed which summed up much of what I been thinking better than many of the words I've read to date:
The fact that Osama bin Laden, a man who fought his enemies with violence that frequently killed the innocent, is now dead is from many perspectives a positive development. That the world now has one less influential leader who is willing to kill and destroy as a means of engendering political change is hopefully a small step towards a more peaceful world…
But it's a pity that the U.S. chose to pursue a massive ‘war on terrorism' as a response to bin Laden's violent campaign, a war in which far more innocent people have been killed and injured than bin Laden's initial attacks. Their deaths are also part of this story and must be counted and acknowledged in our reflections on the real costs of this so-called act of ‘justice'
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Rob Stowell,
its hard to find a Keith Monks machine, They were usually bought by radio stations for record cleaning duties.
Not that hard it seems.
There is a second hand vinyl shop in Singapore that I've spent too much money in, which has a machine that washes each record you've bought and blows cool air onto it to dry. It's then placed in a anti-static sleeve and sealed in a plastic outer. Wonderful service. You hand your purchases to the staff and then return in an hour or so to pick up and pay after they've been processed.
The owner said the device was custom built for him - it uses no chemicals and leaves no marks.
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
Recommended for cleaning up the vinyls was warm water and a squirt of detergent.
As the owner of a silly number of bits of vinyl, I'd agree Jacqui. All the fancy sprays in the world won't get your record as clean as water and detergent - the latter used very sparingly, and the water lukewarm.
I always clean with distilled water afterwards and let it drain dry naturally.
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to andin,
Des Truction playing C&W.
The Slaughtermen? I didn't ever get to see them but I'm told they were great.
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So much great stuff from Australia over this period is online - a couple more that work for me:
The last one (with the great headgear) is pretty obscure but I was was lucky enough to get boxes of Australian 7"s in the early to mid 1980s and that was one I fell it love with - there were a few to be sure: it was a golden age in Australian indie pop.
We released Nick The Stripper in NZ (along with Birthday Party albums) as the local agent for their Australian label, Missing Link. We sold about 4 copies of that single in NZ but exported thousands because of the NZ exclusive B side and red sleeve (the UK and OZ versions had it in blue).
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Neil Morrison,
they actually do,
If you say so Neil. To quote another post - a few up from here:
Because he wants them to mean a particular thing, that is all he can read in them
Excluding inconvenient words from sentences - like 'direct' in this case - or avoiding any data which might cause you to rethink seems to be your modus operandi in these threads over and over again.
Enjoy your circle, I'm out.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Neil Morrison,
I'll stick with Coll. I'll stick with Jason Burke who continues to write well observed and informed pieces for The Guardian
Neil - neither back your assertion at all, if you'd bothered to actually read what they said and the above posts. In their books, and in Wright and Fisks writings on the subject, they all accept that indirect US funding went to Bin Laden. But feel free to wander around in your own unique self supporting circle.
You really are on your own here.
Bizarre.
ETA: And as per my last post, Burke seems completely unaware of the activities of the Indonesia AQ affiliates in what can only be called an odd and uninformed tweet.
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The Guardian's AQ boffin seems to have missed the string of letter bombs, an assault on a police station in Sumatra, a suicide Mosque bombing, training camps in Aceh and the plot to blow up a Church on Good Friday just in 2011.
yet .... no "al'Q in #INdonesia" since senior figures killed and militancy v. restricted. conservative Islamism yes, bombs no.