Mr. Lomax says:
Note that, in such a contentious environment, we have been able to reach
complete consensus. All agree on the value of my abstaining from response
to Mr. Ossipoff.
I comment:
But when will you start? This posting of yours is full of replies to things
I'd said in my postisng.
Mr. Lomax continues:
As to idiocy, well, it is idiocy indeed to waste effort
trying to convince idiots.
I comment:
I wasn't trying to convince you. I commented just in case someone might have
believed you.
Mr. Lomax said:
The U.S. only turned against Saddam when he finally went too far, and
invaded
friendly Kuwait.
I comment:
Not really. There were documents indicating that the administration had
intended to attack Iraq as early as the previous spring, and was looking for
a pretext.
The U.S. secretary of state told Saddam that invading Kuwait would be ok.
Iraq had exhausted all legal remedies and gone through the proper channels
in its attempt to stop our Kuwaitis' slant-drilling of Iraq's oil in border
regions.
Let me make a suggestion about what Saddam did wrong. The worst crime that a
foreign leader an commit is to use his country's resources for the benefit
of that country's population, to improve their lives, instead of ripping it
off and giving us our cut. That was Saddam's real crime. That's why the
administration decided to attack Iraq the spring before the bombing began.
"What's that", you say, "Wasn't Saddam living in a palace and skimming his
country's wealth?"
Maybe, but not to a degree that even comes close to what our dictators in
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were doing.
Before the bombing in Iraq Civilian Massacre 1 (aka Desert Storm), Iraq,
along with Libya, had the lowest infant-mortality in the Arab world. Our
puppet dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had the highest
infant-mortality in the Arab world.
Likewise, Iraq and Libya were ahead of the other Arab countries in regards
to healthcare, education, and literacy.
Students from throughout the Arab world went to Iraq to study medicine.
Women had more equality in Iraq, and probably in Libya, than in other Arab
countries.
I don't deny that Saddam was a dictator, but, compared to the other
dictators that we impose on people (and we had a lot to do with getting
Saddam into power and supplying him with weapons), Saddam was pretty good,
as our dictators go.
It's routine that whenever our leaders want to attack a country, our mass
media start demonizing that country's leader. Sometimes they get caught in
their lie, as in the case of the alleged "nurse" who reported babies taken
out of incubators, and who later turned out to be diplomatic personnel or
something, and not a nurse, and lying.
Mr. Lomax continues:
And then, more than ten years later, quite probably because the powers that
be
here decided that Iraqi oil would be more efficiently converted to money in
their pockets if Saddam were gone, and given the political currency by
9-11
I comment:
9-11 wasn't just fortuitous good luck for the administration. They'd
previously been saying that what they needed was "a new Pearl Harbor", in
order to get public support for the things that they wanted to do. The
evidence indicates that the administration participated in 9-11, helping the
terrorists to kill 3000 Americans. But that's another topic.
Mr. Lomax continues:
, it was decided to toss out Saddam, and the excuses were manufactured.
To be sure, Saddam cooperated by playing his old game. He wanted to keep
the world thinking that they'd better tremble in their boots when they
think of him, he wanted them to think about rains of missiles filled with
poison gas or biological weapons, so he played his game of cat and mouse
with the inspectors.
I comment:
Mr. Lomax has been watching too much tv. Actually Saddam co-operated with
the inspection. That's why the administration had to change their demand
from "Co-operate with the inspection or we'll invade" to "Step down from
office or we'll invade". Moving goalposts.
Mr. Lomax continues:
Now, maybe Iraq will end up with a democracy after all.
I comment:
Maybe Santa Claus will bring one. No one but the U.S. and Britain claim that
the election in Iraq was legitimately-counted. And it soon became obvious to
the Iraqis that, election or no, their "government" had no sovereignty and
no significant authority in Iraq. No control of the oil, military matters,
the occupation, etc. That's probably why the elections had no effect in
reducing the number of fighters in the Iraqi resistance.
Mr. Lomax continues:
But it looks to me
like Iraq is repeating many of the mistakes, institutionalizing many of the
flaws in the U.S. and European systems.
I comment:
Apparently Mr. Lomax is referring to the occupation Quisling regime as
"Iraq". I don't blame Mr. Lomax for that, if he listens to NPR or watches tv
news.
Mr. Lomax continues:
By going into Iraq and removing Saddam from power, the U.S. did Iraq a
service
I comment:
A rather murderous service, with various reliable sources estimating 100,000
civilians killed, mostly woment ane children. That's not counting the
serious injuries, which typically are many times as many. That's not
counting the soldiers who were killed or maimed while trying to defend their
country from us.
How arrogant for Mr. Lomax (phoney Arabic name and all) to appoint himself
to say that it's a service for us to massacre people in another country. No
genuinely humane person would try to justify killing and maiming innocent
people in order to change their government.
Mr. Lomax mentions that the could be more 9-11s, and of course he's right.
The Bush administration could do another terrorist attack, as they did 9-11,
if they deem it necessary.
Mr. Lomax says:
Now, certain obvious injustices existing in the Muslim world have been
mentioned here [by Mike, whom I won't name, because I don't reply to him],
as if these injustices were somehow inherent to Islam and
that, by being Muslim, I would somehow be obligated to defend them.
I comment:
No, I didn't say that. I don't criticize anyone's religion. I do criticize
abuses.
Not knowing that Mr. Lomax is all-American, I was trying to culturally
explain his resistance to reform. Actually that's a low tactic, of course,
and one of the very few things I've said here that I'm opposite-of-proud of.
His resistance to reform is genuine, but it has some other cause.
Mr. Lomax continues:
Assumptions have been made about me that are actually ridiculous if one
were to simply look at my name
I comment:
No, not at all. Maybe your mother was Arab and your Father was American.
Maybe both parents were Arab, and your mother re-marri
, not to mention how I write, even without
doing research on me. I was born here. I was not born into a Muslim family.
I'm not an African-American, though there are African-Americans with the
name Lomax; they have that name because I have ancestors who owned slaves
here and those slaves continued the name when slavery was abolished. I
accepted Islam in 1971 or so, when I began to realize what it was. It is
not what the vast majority of you, most likely, think it is. But Islam is
not the topic here. The topic here is Election Methods and, related to
that, how election methods and society interact.
I'm not here to defend myself nor to defend Islam. Nor am I here to prove
that any of the readers and writers here are idiots, tempting as that might
be at times. I'm here to increase my own understanding of election methods,
to help advance that understanding for others, and to publicize my own
general solutions to the problem of government. In the latter I am trying
to solicit broader participation in the development and application of the
delegable proxy concept, which I developed independent of other efforts,
long before "2002." I'm not sure exactly when. In elements, it was as early
as the eighties. But if there were any Free Association with Delegable
Proxy organization about something that even remotely interested me, I'd
join it. I do not desire nor need to be the center, for FA/DP organizations
are designed, among other things, to gather and efficiently process ideas.
Ideas become important, not so much the personalities who have the ideas.
But obviously I can't do this by myself.
I have suggested a specific election method using DP techniques. It is at
least as practical as many other suggestions here. I think it deserves some
discussion. The discussion page for it on the wiki has not been used. There
may be others here who are quite happy to say, "Yes, I've thought about
this, it isn't a new idea," but there is a severe shortage of cogent
discussion about it.
Anyway, I don't have time for more of this irrelevancy. It is a general
rule on mailing lists that silence does not indicate assent; this is one
reason why some members of mailing lists, in the absence of specific
mechanisms for measuring consensus, can imagine that a consensus has been
found simply because opponents stop writing. It hasn't. It has only been
found when a large majority of participants actually and explicitly,
directly or through chosen representatives, have validated it.
I'm probably going to be moving my efforts toward the promulgation of the
FA/DP concept among Muslims -- where there is a crying need and where the
theory of it should be rather quickly recognized as, indeed, a religious
necessity, at least among Sunni Muslims -- and among the Chinese, where
there are immediate applications. I've been seeding a lot of FA/DP
organizations, most of these seeds just sit there. But it only takes one
germinating for me to have accomplished my purpose.
And the rest of you are welcome, if you choose, to continue to complain
about the way things are, how idiotic those who don't understand you must
be, how the world would be a better place if just we could throw the bums
out, or institute some superior election method when what we are proposing
is just a band-aid on a gaping wound. Don't get me wrong. Election methods
are important, just as bandages are important. It is valuable that people
study and develop band-aid technology. And I'll continue to support
superior band-aids, and especially ones that are practical and relatively
easy to implement. I'll not only vote for superior election methods, but
I'll probably help campaign for them and I'll donate to the cause. If I can
find a trustworthy organization, which is not a trivial task. Even without
that discovery, I could still contribute; after all, I'm free to place ads
in the local newspaper, same as everyone else. It is not terribly
expensive, compared to the hundreds of hours of volunteer work that some
people are willing to put in. I already write letters to the editor of the
major newspaper here, which have uniformly been published.
But I'm going to continue to put most of my effort into global solutions,
into examining the structure of democracy, not just one specific part of
it, the technology of elections; indeed, elections are not central to
democracy but only to some implementations. You can have elections without
democracy, remember Saddam, but also Ruanda, the Germany that elected Adolf
Hitler, the Soviet Union and even the U.S. in some ways, and you can have
democracy without elections, as in some small share corporations and many
informal direct democracies. And, hopefully, in FA/DP organizations, which
may or may not have actual elections; FAs may not need them at all, non-FA
DP organizations, which may have collected power and property, may need
officers, and elections can be appropriate for officers. Never for
representatives, except in the extreme cases -- too often the case in the
present world -- where secret ballot is required, and even then true
elections can be avoided, secret assignments of proxies can be employed
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