Subject:
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Re: From Richard: "It's all bad news - Chaos is my fault"
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 28 May 2004 17:42:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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1563 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
> No, I am saying if our actions are the cause of terrorism against us, then
> how do you explain the actions of terrorists perpetrated upon other countries
> which have engaged in no provocation? The answer is that it is {not}
> anything we {do} that incenses these fanatics, merely that we {are}.
I see in this post this suggestion advanced again. I think I have seen it
before. It goes well with this one that John prepared earlier:
> Listen to me, Scott, because I'm sick and tired of "going there" over this
> issue. The motivation of the terrorists is {not} our concern. We can't stop
> sick minds from thinking evil. Do you even {know} what the terrorists
> want???? Do you? What do they want, Scott? Even if America pulls every
> single American back to the US and never steps foot outside of her borders,
> do you think that would make them happy?
I mentioned that I saw a structure and underlying logic in some of Scott's
posts, and felt bad for not being more forthcoming. Coy does not become me.
And since I have a little more time this weekend (warning: longish post, and Don
may need his dictionary), here goes...
Will all Americans going home make terrorists happy (enough to stop their work)?
Nope, that surely won't do it.
It won't even help.
An no-one with any understanding beyond their own blinding pain is asking for
this.
> This isn't about poverty or suffering of the poor or any other social
> issue you want to envoke.
Of course it is.
Its about <takes a deep breath> the ever expanding disparity in first and third
world per capita wealth created each and every bright new day by the policies
and coercion of the first world, an international trade system that
systematically rapes third world countries' resources in the name of free trade
and leaves them powerless to ameliorate the obviously anti-free trade and
defensive barriers the first world imposes to protect itself from the pain of
free trade, an international financial system that turns perfectly serviceable
third world economies into basket cases by dictating policies for developing
economies that next to no first world economy applied while developing and that
only work now to the benefit of first world economies and the advantage of first
world currency speculators, that taunts poorer governments with foreign
investment as a benefit and route to national and personal prosperity only to
deliver a net transfer of wealth out of the country and debt that can never be
repaid, an international justice system that only works to right wrongs for the
sensibilities of the first world states and ignores the evident injustices the
first world and its people commit against the third, an international
intellectual property system designed to ensure that the third world is locked
into royalty payment slavery to the first world forever, and a global superpower
that espouses democracy and freedom for all, yet rigourously stifles and stunts
international 'democratic' organisations to ensure that they can not possibly
pose a threat to its national interest and limits freedom with an enthusiasm
that other more barbaric epochs could only admire.
> It is about religious fanaticism-- psychotic, inhuman, and irrational.
Bollocks
> Try to get this through your thick skull: they want [everybody] (not just the
> US) either to become one of them or die. That's it.
Goodness. Well, you better kill them all then.
> What did {you} ever do to these people?
Sad to say, but what you did to these people was use fifty times as much energy
as they do while you complained that they should slow their development to
reduce their greenhouse emissions, casually throw away more food than they eat,
take their natural resources for a price far less than any equitable assessment
of what they cost or what they are worth, dump your subsidised produce on them
driving their perfectly adequate domestic industries bankrupt and preventing
them from paying off their debts to you, kill their wives and children by
preventing them from buying life saving medicines at a price anywhere near the
actual cost of making them in order to make yet larger profits for your
pharmaceutical industries, while supplying nearby warlords with weapons, weapons
and yet more sophisticated weapons when anyone with their eye on anything but
profit could not have helped but notice that what was needed was infrastructure
and education. And then you called them psychotic, inhuman, and irrational when
they picked up a stone (or in a very well organised and highly publicised
instance you may have read about, an aeroplane or four) and chucked it at you
after you refused to listen to their protestations.
You didn't do these things?
But you did. You do. I do. Every damn day. And we will tomorrow. We do it
personally, or through the agents we elect to act on our behalf in the form of
our governments. Of the people, for the people, by the people. We did this.
And we continue to enjoy the benefits. Its quite pleasant in its own way.
Pleasant like the way innocent and clueless children might eat hot juicy Big
Macs, desperately trying not to think about where meat comes from (only its
actually much much worse than what we do to cattle).
Indeed, America did this, but only as the most recent and probably most
successful of a long line of oppressors of the weak. And Australia, bright and
shiny in its historical emergence from its own status as a member of the weak,
has happily tailed along in its own national interest, for mine carrying just as
much responsibility for not opposing it.
<exhales heavily>
Obviously we could try to imprison or kill those fed up with being enslaved to
support our lifestyle, but that seems as futile as the French Secret Service's
attempts to stifle Greeenpeace by force of arms.
Is there nothing else we might do?
And as a small observation on the subject of thick skulls - we're going to need
thick skulls, full body armour and plenty of ammo if we're to survive the next
20 years if we don't get a better plan, so if Scott's already advanced down that
path, all the better for him.
Oh, and the reason that folks other than Americans are targets is not their
existence or their religion, its the taking the benefit from the suffering and
systematic oppression of other nations that qualifies you as a target, and the
more of it you do, the bigger the target you are. Australia has an
appropriately sized target on it.
Richard
Still baldly going...
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