Subject:
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Re: Why the founding fathers limited government scope (was Re: Rolling Blackouts
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 11 May 2001 20:08:49 GMT
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Viewed:
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941 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Daniel Jassim writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
>
> The bottom line of your statement is being in favor of a space based missle
> defense system for whatever reasons you argued. Those weren't of any
> particular interest to me since I'm obviously on a different tanget. It is
> clear to me that you believe America will always have an enemy at some point
> in time. So what I'm saying is that we WILL always have enemies because we
> help make them. America needs an enemy to justify the trillions spent on the
> military. Face it, war makes money and you even alluded positively to the
> business venture of this defense system.
Yes, there always will be a bogeyman - 'cause we will make one up if he
can't be found. Military-Industrial complex. Or is that a bogeyman....? :-)
>
> With regard to Iraq, there's no doubt that we made Saddam into our enemy. He
> had always been a dirty thug but we were fine with that for decades. The
> Iran-Iraq War raged on throughout the 80's and we "helped" BOTH sides,
> despite the fact that Iran was our foe after ousting the Shah (another
> American puppet). We helped instigate the invasion of Kuwait by supporting
> Kuwaiti slant drilling, supporting Kuwaiti oil overproducing that
> deliberately undercut Iraq's ability to help pay off their war debt and
> repeatedly rejecting Iraq's pleas in the U.N. for Kuwait to ease off so Iraq
> could stabilize it's infrastructure.
George the Elder had no problem with tyrants so long as he felt he could do
business with them (they'd play along with "american" (George's) interests).
As to the rest, let's call a spade a spade: Iraq fought one war to grab oil,
then used the excuse of oil costs to try and grab an easier target's oil.
Sheer greed. Could George have done more to avoid the situation? Yup.
>
> To top it off, our ambassador gave Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait and
> the fools took the bait and we all know what happened next. The Persian Gulf
> War cut Iraq down and President Bush publicly called for Iraq's people to
> rise up and overthrow Saddam. The CIA got involved and promised support and
> when the Iraqi people in the north and south started the revolt, we pulled
> out and left them to be slaughtered. The "no-fly" zones remain as a defacto
> partitioning of Iraq since that's where the oil fields are and Saddam
> remains in power so that Americans can talk about "Scuds" and so on to
> justify outer space missle defense platforms.
Shoulda learned from the 1956 Hungary uprising: don't give people the idea
that you are going to help if you can't back it up. That was outside of
what the rest of the Arab world gave it's approval to (free Kuwait, but
that's it).
>
> We make our enemies and keep it that way as long as we can because there's
> lots of money to be made. To think otherwise is just plain naive in my
> opinion. Look at the political map of the world and figure out who we're at
> odds with and consider how we reflect that in our films and TV shows. That's
> paranoia.
Gosh, now I've forgotten the saying about don't credit to (fill in blank)
what can be ascribed to stupidity. Anyway, in regards to Hollywood.
>
> Rather than even consider such stupid weapons and take the warmonger
> approach, we should consider our foreign policy of economic imperialism and
> exploitation. Look at the dreadful environmental consequences of a century
> of greedy industrialization. Are we really better off? Each time we spend
> billions to send up a shuttle or rocket, we also punch another hole in the
> atmosphere. What are the far reaching environmental consequences of stepping
> up our space program? What sort of mess will our children have to clean up
> because of us? Are we going to revert to the idiotic rhetoric of "It's all
> about saving jobs"? That's the short term, fast buck approach for the greedy
> morons that got us into this big mess. The ONLY reason I would support such
> space weapons is to protect our planet from comets and meteors that will
> eventually come our way. That's reality.
Ummm, the air flows in behind the rocket. :-)
>
> As men, we are easily facinated with our ability to inflict death and
> destruction with our big toys. We pride ourselves on how many
> rounds-per-second our machine guns fire or the gross yield of a bomb, like
> these were sports statistics. We've made warfare into a science and we
> pretend that it's for the greater good. Yet it never fails that people
> suffer, lose their homes and culture or killed for the "greater good" of
> another people. How arrogant.
>
> Dan
Everybody bullies someone sometime. Be aware of it and be on guard, but
don't think that anyone has a monopoly on it - people will see right through
that argument.
Bruce
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