Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)
On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 05:45 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Heck, go read some Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey Books. The Royal Navy earned its own keep with prizes, etc., until long after the Napoleonic wars... Come to think of it, the rise of book-entry settlement cooincides nicely with the end of war for profit. How would you distinguish the actions of the Royal Navy from those of ordinary pirates? Just prettier uniforms, better weaponry, and a bitch back in London with a crown on her head, or what? -- Patrick http://fexl.com
Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)
These guys were probably CIA. Now, since they are non-uniformed and not carrying arms visibly, and not engaged in hostilities qualifying under the Geneva Convetions, they are enemy combatants. They don't fall under the Geneva Conventions since they were not in qualifying hostilities. The torture and detention until they turn to fragments of dust, will begin now. Nice example the US govt sets. May God have mercy on them. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA A U.S. government plane with five people on board crashed Thursday in rebel territory in southern Colombia, and those aboard may have been taken away by leftist rebels, a Colombian official said. The Cessna had been headed from Bogota to the Florencia area, 235 miles (380 kilometers) to the south, when radio contact was lost eight minutes before its scheduled landing, said a Colombian Civil Aviation official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official told The Associated Press that he had received reports that Colombian army troops had located the plane but found no one on board, and that it was feared they had been taken by rebels. A U.S. Embassy spokesman told the AP that the U.S. government plane, a single-engine Cessna 208, crashed near Florencia during an attempted emergency landing shortly before 9 a.m. this morning. The cause of the crash was apparently engine failure. The embassy spokesman said the fate of the pilot, co-pilot and three passengers aboard was unknown. The Colombian Civil Aviation official said all five aboard were believed to be American, but the U.S. Embassy spokesman said he was unable to confirm the nationalities.
Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)
At 10:28 AM -0500 on 2/14/03, Patrick Chkoreff wrote: How would you distinguish the actions of the Royal Navy from those of ordinary pirates? Just prettier uniforms, better weaponry, and a bitch back in London with a crown on her head, or what? Sounds about right to me. :-) Seriously, just chalk it up to emergent phenomena, and you're not too far from the truth. Cheers, RAH A prince is a bandit who doesn't move. -- Mancur Olsen, 'Power and Prosperity' -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere. -- Persian proverb
RE: The Wimps of War
Steve wrote quoting: PAUL KRUGMAN And though you don't hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush's staying power a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won't do what is needed to rebuild Iraq is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States. And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? --Lucky
RE: The Wimps of War
why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? This is a continuation of the mythology that extrapolates post-WWII US presence in Germany and Japan (you know, those Americans really help the countries they beat in war) to the present day. Actually, it occurs to me that the only people who still believe this may be Americans. From: Lucky Green [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: The Wimps of War Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 01:21:18 -0800 Steve wrote quoting: PAUL KRUGMAN And though you don't hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush's staying power a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won't do what is needed to rebuild Iraq is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States. And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? --Lucky _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
Re: The Wimps of War
On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 08:39 AM, Thomas Shaddack wrote: And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? Consumers. You have people there. The people want to eat, drink water, use electricity, place phone calls. You build the infrastructure, they will use it. You build and then own the infrastructure, they pay you and they pay through the nose as there is no competition, at least in the beginning. They will need money, they will work shit overtime jobs, and they are closer than Malaysia is. It's not the function of U.S. taxpayers (or any other taxpayers) to build another country's infrastructure. Nation-building is the worst meme of the 20th century. Even for oil it's not. That's the choice Exxon and BP and Shell make, not U.S. taxpayers. --Tim May Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout --Unknown Usenet Poster
RE: The Wimps of War
And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? Consumers. You have people there. The people want to eat, drink water, use electricity, place phone calls. You build the infrastructure, they will use it. You build and then own the infrastructure, they pay you and they pay through the nose as there is no competition, at least in the beginning. They will need money, they will work shit overtime jobs, and they are closer than Malaysia is.
Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 1:21 AM -0800 on 2/12/03, Lucky Green wrote: And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? Apropos of nothing, here's what I wrote yesterday about the entire article, remembering that Charles Rangel claims to want the draft back, straw man or not: At 12:14 PM -0500 2/11/03, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Wherein we witness the spectacle of Paul Krugman fairly begging George Bush to colonize Iraq and Afghanistan. Amazing. Almost as amazing as liberal democrats begging for a return to the draft. Liberal logic continues to implode. 'Round the bowl, and down the hole... I wrote the above yesterday because I'm possessed lately by this goofy notion that liberals, and social democrats, and progressives, and all the other refried Marxists out there will collapse like degenerate electrons against their political opposites into some kind of statist neutronium someday, resulting in something with the political prayerbook of the modern small-l (as in lipservice) libertarian right, with aisles patrolled the usual knock-you-on-your-head bluenose-and-busybody deacons of authoritarianism. Someday. This was brought on by a Bartley editorial in the Wall Street Journal a little while ago that observed that Bush Co. are displaying all the hallmarks of an emerging establishment, operating under the same implicit rules, the same leaderless ability to turn setbacks into opportunities, that the original liberal elite was able to do after the cryptosocialists took over the Roosevelt agenda in the 1930's. Probably just wishful thinking, internet millennialism, and all that, but, if it does happen, the technology this list advocates be what, paradoxically, brings that collapse about. Ubiquitous bandwidth, cryptographic privacy and authentication and so on, pretty much kill closed societies, especially those who calculate their prices instead of discover them with markets. In such a world, actual Big-L Libertarians, as the political inheritors of that technological and economic whirlwind, will become the only logical political opposition to that strange-matter amalgam of refried Marxism and muscular Christianity, both of which, you notice, *are* pretty much theocrats. Like modern neocons had to do under the last 70 years of intellectual occupation, Libertarians will have to considerably sharpen their arguments and organization, and do so under a deluge of criticism that will make the recent liberal pulsar sound like background radiation. That is, if we don't all just collapse past degenerate neutron pressure into the event-horizon of crypto-anarcho-captialism, right? :-). Cheers, RAH Who -- until whatever degenerate political pressure takes hold -- is still voting for the muscular Christians, thank you very much, and who, as a consequence, thinks rather highly of the idea of paving the entire fertile crescent, after pounding certain political features of it to rubble, and replacing it all with a giant concatenation of freeways, strip malls, franchise restaurants and nudie-bars from one end of the Tigris/Euphrates valley to the other. Albuquerque. That's it. Albuquerque on the Euphrates. I *love* Albuquerque. Heck, I even like Walnut Creek (maybe even Concord, too :-)). Yeah. Pave the cradle of civilization. Who *says* you can't go home again? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPkq7XsPxH8jf3ohaEQJjDgCfRBwaKlU/BghTVU2ehJt38A/XhdAAn1jX cBPGGXgXxIsffFx6Q/kYCZxC =4Ocg -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: The Wimps of War
-- Steve wrote quoting: PAUL KRUGMAN And though you don't hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush's staying power a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won't do what is needed to rebuild Iraq is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States. On 12 Feb 2003 at 1:21, Lucky Green wrote: And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? The arabs hunger for development and modernity. In the past they absorbed the worst poisons spewed by western universities, socialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, and attempted to apply them, with predictably disastrous results, Then they healthily came to reject these foolish and dangerous ideas, and attempted to return to their roots, with results that were bad for us as well as them. The theory of the democratic imperialists is to export better ideas at gunpoint. It is far from clear that this will work, even if tried honestly and vigorously -- we are running into a bit of trouble applying it in Kosovo. It is also far from clear that the US has the necessary will and virtue to apply it in Iraq. The Germans and the French are not very keen on doing it at all, but realizing that position is unpopular, instead say they doubt the US will to do it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3cgDYFmaaqwoNleSbHMta+Lh1jBHPKeYH8milYX4 4Jd1XwS8ngV1yW9WaN7beF2CZS5t7tXSXrmZDptBR
