Eighteen People killed in Paris Shootings

[BaalChatzaf]

"Bomb 'em to bits" or "Nuke 'em" are responses we have heard at least since Korea and Vietnam. Whenever I hear those strategies expressed by my fellow citizens, I immediately think to myself, "You coward." They always want to act tough and bellicose by these expressions, while not having the balls for the real world and for saying the truth that making war full tilt in all these cases would require American troops on the ground and loss of life and limb among them.

Bombing wrecked Japan. We bombed and burned the Japanese until they finally surrendered. THEN we put boots on Japanese ground. Utter massacre has its uses. It is not cowardly, but it does save the lives of -our- people. We DID bomb Japan to bits and we DID win.

Those were the days. When we 'Merkins did not give two shits about collateral damage. It was a GOOD time. We bombed, we burned, we killed and we went to bed happy.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

.Michael, do not blame the defenders; blame the aggressors.

Stephen,

I disagree that this is an either-or proposition. (And, please, I am not a bombing-monger or coward.)

Saying that I blame the defenders and insinuate I am giving a pass to the aggressors is a mischaracterization.

Evil does not grow in isolation, just like poison ivy does not grow in the desert. It needs soil and an environment that allows it to grow. If you own an environment where poison ivy can grow and you let it grow, what are you going to do when you keep breaking out in rashes? Blame it and keep making the same mistake? Get mad at people who say maybe we should not have let it grow so much once we knew it caused rashes? Or are you going to identify it with more emphasis--and identify why you let it grow so much in the first place so you can change your own behavior, then do something about it?

When people see an evil organization like ISIS and play games with it, evil will play. It loves playing.

Here's the way this works. When a disaster like this hits, all people on the receiving end openly say this is evil. But what many of them think and do is different. They try to use it to advance other agendas. How? By ignoring the full reality and just focusing on the part that interests them. There's nothing wrong with this in a specific context, like say, study, but when they try to make the public (and themselves) accept partial reality as the whole, bad things happen. They always do.

Look at the open immigration policy (the practical one, not formal one) where the the evil people who did that massacre in Paris came into France. A person can advance leftwing ideas with open immigration, libertarian ideas, one-world government, multiculturalism, get cheap labor, create a pool of government-dependent voters, scratch the itch of white guilt, or any number of things things and ignore that this is where evil people of a certain nature come in.

The partial-reality person says ISIS is evil, it just isn't relevant to immigration. He claims there is no there there. He pretends that the opportunities he supports for evil to operate in practice have nothing to do with the evil the evil thing did, even as he denounces the evil.

That is exactly what Obama does. And he fights ISIS like a coward with drone warfare over civilians--agreeing that the Islamist ideas are valid (by not letting government people identify them with clear language and blurring public perception) while raining hell down on the families and neighbors of the evildoers by remote control and saying, "Oops," when the drone operators miss. Then he takes each element he can from this form of fighting and uses it for propaganda to advance his other agendas. That is totally incompetent.

The warmongers are not any different. They buy and sell the goddam oil from the ISIS people who commit these atrocities. Those are the ones who operate like you insinuated I was doing. Scare the hell out of people, then open up the bombing (and wartime profits). The warmongers say ISIS is evil, but they really want a business advantage in the backrooms. (And think about all those fat contracts from nation-building...)

Trump has a much better approach--take out the funding of ISIS. Bomb the oil fields ISIS controls. Not the civilians. Without money, ISIS can't operate very well. Nobody can. Once they are without money, that's when you go in and beat them down for good--when they are weakened.

This is obvious, but nobody wants to accept this reality. We're all too busy living artificial stories we tell ourselves.

Reality doesn't care, though.

So let me be clear. Of course the perpetrators are to be blamed for what they did. They're evil. They're the bad guys. Our leaders are to be blamed, too. They have been very stupid at recognizing the danger and ignoring it. This is not one side or the other. If you let something toxic grow around you (in order to promote hidden advantages), it will poison you.

Once again, who is to be blamed? I say it's not one or the other. It's both: the toxic thing and the person who did not eliminate it from his living environment, but chose to ignore it instead.

Ask any farmer how this works.

No amount of wishing, pointing fingers, rationalizing, shaming this person or that, storytelling, or anything else will change that reality. In fact, that reality doesn't care one way or another. Toxic things grow just like healthy things do. Toxic things damage and kill us. Why? Because that's what they do. That's their nature.

It's simple when you just look without an agenda. A toxic thing kills you, so letting it grow around you (especially when you know better) will allow it to kill you.

Like I said, causality.

We ignore full reality at our peril.

Michael

[Guyau]

.

[Brant Gaede]

"Bomb 'em to bits" or "Nuke 'em" are responses we have heard at least since Korea and Vietnam. Whenever I hear those strategies expressed by my fellow citizens, I immediately think to myself, "You coward." They always want to act tough and bellicose by these expressions, while not having the balls for the real world and for saying the truth that making war full tilt in all these cases would require American troops on the ground and loss of life and limb among them.

Bombing wrecked Japan. We bombed and burned the Japanese until they finally surrendered. THEN we put boots on Japanese ground. Utter massacre has its uses. It is not cowardly, but it does save the lives of -our- people. We DID bomb Japan to bits and we DID win.

Those were the days. When we 'Merkins did not give two shits about collateral damage. It was a GOOD time. We bombed, we burned, we killed and we went to bed happy.

"We"? You don't know these "we." Because of the queer way your brain is put together you cannot grasp what a bad time that "GOOD time" was. If you could have any grace about war, you'd have the grace not to lecture anybody about it. Ignorance begets arrogance and knowledge begets modesty. When you talk about science and scientific endeavor, you are modest.

--Brant

[Guyau]

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This is what we have been doing with ISIS...

Stephen,

We have been bombing ISIS oil fields?

Where?

I see us constantly bombing targets in civilian surroundings.

Michael

[Guyau]

.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

When I see this, which happened right before the Paris massacre, I only have one thought: incompetence and spin.

 

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

.We do both.

 

Stephen,

 

I like the following quote from the NYT article you linked: U.S. Steps Up Its Attacks on ISIS-Controlled Oil Fields in Syria

 

For months, the United States has been frustrated by the Islamic State’s ability to keep producing and exporting oil — what Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recently called “a critical pillar of the financial infrastructure” of the group — which generates about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates.

 

While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodic airstrikes against oil refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the organization’s engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil flowing, American officials said.

 

Do you remember the following from July? 

 

It's a CNN article, but this was all over the news back then.

 

Military analysts: Donald Trump's plan to bomb Iraq's oil fields not a good one

 

But let's go back to the article you mentioned:

 

But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts, American officials said.

 

The first evidence of the new strategy came on Oct. 21, when B-1 bombers and other allied warplanes hit 26 targets in the Omar oil field, one of the two largest oil-production sites in all of Syria.

 

October 21?

 

No wonder I missed it. I haven't been following this because of another project I have been working on. In fact, the only reason I started looking again was because of yesterday's massacre.

 

But there are things I don't forget--like reality rewriting.

 

Trump said do this back in July.

 

(He didn't want to say it because you lose your advantage when you announce your intentions to an enemy you are fighting, but media people were piling on back then, saying he had no idea how to fight ISIS.)

 

Obama folks said he was crazy. Crazy, I tell you! Nuts! Out of touch with reality! Cuckoo! Buffoon! Reality TV star!

 

 

Just recently, in late October, they started doing what Trump said. Granted, they are doing it with Syrian oil fields, not Iraqi--yet. But mission creep will take care of that.

 

Don't forget, the people now doing what Trump said to do called him crazy just three months before for saying it.

 

So who is out of touch with reality? Trump or those who called him crazy?

 

How long are we going to keep swallowing the spin that Obama knows how to fight this war and Trump is out of touch with reality?

 

Here's a Trump tweet to hammer this home:

They laughed at me when I said to bomb the ISIS controlled oil fields. Now they are not laughing and doing what I said. #Trump2016

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

November 13, 2015

 

Michael

[Guyau]

.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Do you know the three things that happened yesterday that were bad news for ISIS on the ground in Syria and in Iraq? Could it be that the attack in Paris has been readied a good while to be executed precisely on a day so dark for ISIS to obscure their losses back in their territories?

 

Stephen,

 

Just Jihad John's death.

 

But as to your second question, I actually suspect this.

 

Apropos, here is a discussion with Bill Maher that I thought would be awful (based on the general commentary and headlines). It was surprisingly insightful and somewhat germane to our different points of view.

 

 

The only thing I don't like is Maher's "us against them" mentality. This leads him to treat Trump like a neocon, which he is not. There is no place in Maher's mentality for someone who doesn't agree with both sides of the progressive versus neocon divide (or any other of the false-dichotomy divides he favors, like with Islam). The idea that progressives and neocons have lots of backroom common ground is not on his radar.

 

He, and people who think like him, ignore Trump when he says Putin is stepping into a Vietnam-like quagmire in taking on ISIS within Syria, but blast him for saying he is happy to let Russia do all that fighting if that's what it wants to do. (Oh my God! Let Putin and Assad unite?) He says Russia will go bankrupt doing it, but the folks who think he is a neocon ignore that part.

 

The neocons ignore him for those things, too, but for different reasons. They don't want him to blow their crony-capitalism-war-profits gig, so they call him a liberal. For example, Trump was against invading Iraq before the invasion because he said it would destabilize the region and put Iran much higher in the balance of power--with lots of bad consequences. That happened. Before 9/11, he predicted serious damage to the USA from Osama bin Laden. That happened, too.

 

This is all on record and explicit. I can dig up links for anyone interested.

 

Do you know why Trump knows this stuff? Pure capitalism. It's because he builds big projects the world over. He has to scope out places before putting his money there. He wants to know if a social upheaval will trash his project and make him lose the money he invests and the work he does.

 

To me, that's about as Randian as it gets.

 

Michael

[Peter]

Wolf wrote: Naw. Much worse to come. Paris has 1.2 million muslims, some thousands of jihadis. England, Holland, Germany are screwed, too.
end quote

Twenty years ago in a Tom Clancey novel terrorists took over Malls and shot everyone they could, and fictional blimps or planes have been flown into sports stadiums in other books and movies. 3 attacks in France in one day, left less than 200 dead so far. Is the goal of ISIS world domination and the conversion of the world to Islam? Sure. Death to America. You can’t appease or be politically correct when someone is trying to kill you, and at some tipping point, the civilized world will isolate Islam.

I am reading a Patrick O’Brian book, Treason’s Harbor, written around 1980, about the British navy in the early 1800’s. It takes place around the Arabian peninsula. The Islamists were at war with western values then too. That British actor who played the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings series talked about his civil servant grandfather and father. They saw a coming war with Islam around 1900 and it has only gotten worse. The solution? Economic Isolation. No immigration. Defense. Retaliation. No PC bullshit. We thrive. They are left to rot.
Peter

[BaalChatzaf]

But that has not been our situation, the situation of the US, with respect to Iran or with respect to the Islamic terrorists. Neither is a threat to the US on the scale of the fascist powers in WWII or the Soviet Union/Russia thereafter. Korea and Vietnam were not that sort of situation for the US either. Sure we could bomb so massively in the areas held by ISIS to kill all of them there and all of the people they are brutalizing there. It is just beer-talk to say that’s the sort war we should be doing against them or against Iraq at this time. It is in the talk that there is a lack of courage. The courage, the intellectual honesty, to speak within the real total context. And if one is complaining at the softness of our current military effort, then like Lindsay Graham, one should have the courage to say what more is required, and not just lift another stein to ye ole “obliterate them with the bomb.”

Fine. Then if we don't nuke them into a gaseous state how shall we obliterate them. And its not just ISIS either. Islam as a set of concepts and ideas is a Killer Meme. Islamic ideas + Sexually Repressed Young Males = Bloody Murder.

[Wolf DeVoon]

If you follow the money, it ain't teenage jihadis scratching their beards and arguing about how to repair battered oilfield junk they captured in Syria -- it's Saudis and Qataris showering tens of millions of petrodollars on their empty heads. Suicide belts and AKs don't grow on trees. This is a bigger struggle than advertised, Shia vs Sunni vs Ba'ath-Alawite. Russia doesn't give a damn about Assad. They want screw Arab oil output, cost the ragheads every penny possible, promote regional conflict, sell AKs and explosives to all three sides. They despise Islam.

US role in MENA is colossally stupid. Stevens in Bengazi was shipping weapons to "friendly" jihadis, reminiscent of Bud McFarlane and Ollie North delivering Israeli SAMs to Tehran during Ramadan, then using the proceeds to fund Contras. The only right way to handle this is to quit, walk away. Concentrate on traitors like Nidal Hasan. Find them and kill them. All foreign-born Arabs on student or expired H1-B visas -- out! No Syrian or Iraqi refugees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10inquire.html?_r=0

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/619447/Paris-terrorist-Syrian-refugee-Greece-government-official

http://www.walb.com/story/30428985/syrian-refugees-beginning-to-arrive-in-new-orleans

[Guyau]

.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Concerning Mr. Trump. Those two insights are not remarkable.

Stephen,

I beg to disagree. I don't mind if someone doesn't like Trump, but all you have to do is go back and look at what everyone else in the public was saying when Trump said those things.

So, on the contrary, I say Trump's two insights were quite remarkable. Like him or not, they were remarkable.

You said a business moved out of the WTC after the garage attack. So? I never claimed Trump was the only human on earth to feel uneasy. But that was not the spirit of the times. After all, look how many businesses stayed and/or moved in. Look at what people were saying about Bin Laden back then. Actually look what they weren't saying. Crickets chirping. But Trump was saying watch out, with special emphasis on Bin Laden. (He even put this in one of his books.)

And on the Iraq invasion, Trump had Bush advisors show up to ask him to shut up. Take a look at Congress back then. Take a look at the others now running for the presidency. What were they saying at that time? What did they do, promote the invasion or protest it?

I say Trump's stance was very remarkable for the times.

In my opinion, it is precisely a person with Trump's temperament and qualifications who I want near the nuke button. But then, I look at what he has built, not just a branding persona for elections and the press. I'm not aware of anything he caused mass destruction with. He's a deal-maker and builder, not a destroyer. He has been all his life. I am 100% confident he would know exactly what happens if he pushes the button and that knowledge will inform his decisions. He works with demolition all the time in construction. I can't say that for someone who is solely ideologically and politically motivated.

Frankly, I'm not comfortable with Obama. Mr. Community Organizer, having his finger near the nuke button. Look at the mess he's made with drones and electronic surveillance. And, of course, he won't come out with a YouTube video to explain the Paris massacre this time around, but he sure enough did for the Benghazi attack.

If he keeps screwing up as much as he has been doing in the Middle East and gets into a big enough hole (how about an Arab Winter to complete the Arab Spring--what would that look like?), I don't trust him to use it when he should, nor do I trust him to not use it when he shouldn't. I'm just hoping he won't have to consider it before he leaves office. Granted, he's the kind of person who is hard to fall apart, which is a plus, but, in my experience, once an incompetent person like that goes over the edge from pressure, it's never pretty. And that's not very reassuring in a Commander in Chief...

That dude could get us all killed over incompetence.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

We all knew Bin Laden was going to continue to try to attack the WTC

I've heard a lot of crazy stuff, but that's in a class by itself.

"None of the U.S. government's indictments against former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin suggested that he had any connection with the 1993 bombing." [Wikipedia] see also FBI's 2008 account of the 1993 WTC bombing

[Guyau]

.

An innocent hasty generalization, Wolf.

Unknown to me why such an outburst of disrespectful vitriol from you towards me.

There are easy respectful ways of pointing out errors of OL persons you are writing to and about here.

I've cleared out my disvaluable contributions to this thread, and I'll avoid offering such in the future.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS – 11/16/15 a.m.

Thanks, fellows, on the follow-on personal notes #44, #46, and #47.

[Wolf DeVoon]

.

An innocent hasty generalization, Wolf.

Unknown to me why such an outburst of disrespectful vitriol from you towards me.

There are easy respectful ways of pointing out errors of OL persons you are writing to and about here.

I've cleared out my disvaluable contributions to this thread, and I'll avoid offering such in the future.

I always read your contributions with sincere respect, Stephen.

Please consider forgiving me for frank talk. I'm seldom nice and not overly bright.

[Wolf DeVoon]

Concerning "the nuclear button," I disbelieve that the U.S. president has a button on a wireless remote that, with one press, launches anything. But I'm often wrong, so let's see what Wikipedia knows about it.

There are four things in the Football. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Alert System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes. The Black Book was about 9 by 12 inches and had 75 loose-leaf pages printed in black and red. The book with classified site locations was about the same size as the Black Book, and was black. It contained information on sites around the country where the president could be taken in an emergency.

So! -- a 3x5 card with authentication codes that presumably have to be spoken aloud to someone at The Pentagon.

PRESIDENT TRUMP

Gen. Turgidson, this is the President.

BUCK

Good morning, sir. How are you?

PRESIDENT TRUMP

Never mind that. I want to bomb Iran. CC88uWl0x.

BUCK

Could you say that again, sir? CC-what?

PRESIDENT TRUMP

C.C.8.8 ... little U...

BUCK

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I have another call,

can I put you on hold just a second?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

.I've cleared out my disvaluable contributions to this thread, and I'll avoid offering such in the future.

Stephen,

That's a shame. You were providing a good balance against my enthusiasm for Trump and disdain for Obama's foreign policies. I think the reader was getting a bunch of stuff to think about.

(To me, that's far more important than agreement with me. An honest well-thought-out conclusion made by a reader doing the hard work of looking at different sides and having his brain hurt is my version of a piggybank for Heaven, or at least a better future for the human species. And I hold to this even when people disagree with me.)

But it's your choice. This stuff is part of it, too.

Maybe next round...

Nice pictures, though.

I like them.

And I love the creativity in using them...

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

.

An innocent hasty generalization, Wolf.

Unknown to me why such an outburst of disrespectful vitriol from you towards me.

There are easy respectful ways of pointing out errors of OL persons you are writing to and about here.

I've cleared out my disvaluable contributions to this thread, and I'll avoid offering such in the future.

So, you're a victim now and now you have your revenge? You did what you said you did for I quoted you but now your entire post is one big blank.

You've deleted posts on your corner you did not like but couldn't delete Wolf's nonsense so you deleted yourself. But thanks for leaving up your beautiful pictures. The French are great with their statuary.

When you deleted posts in your corner I assumed you had a serious purpose in getting rid of distracting clutter and threads tend to get full of that stuff. But it did make me a little cherry of posting on your threads for a while, especially when you deleted an entire thread.

In the contretemps at hand you were literally wrong about Mr. B. L. and Wolf literally right. Abstracting the entire thing, however, and you are completely right and Wolf too unable to understand why. I was going to explain that before this happened.

This is a tough place--that explains my previous paragraph. Not many people survive in this type of environment and that has little to do with mere name calling or what set you off. It has to do with the fact that I am the biggest SOB here---yes, and I play one on TV and I'm playing one right now (I think[?])--not someone like Jonathan who likes his ad hominem name calling and references. The people he blew off left not because of that, but because they couldn't handle his knowledge and reasoning under the lack of social graces veneer of his.

You must be the most hyper-sensitive man I've ever run into in or on any venue or context. I do not know why and certainly won't speculate. It does seem to be part and parcel of what I once said was your highly refined intellectual and moral sense. When it comes to ideas you manufacture Faberge Eggs. I examine them in wonder at the artistry involved. I'm not qualified to examine the inside of the epistemological-metaphysical issues you mostly seem to deal with so I can't really give up any better feedback. I don't know anyone here who can. This is in contradistinction to George H. Smith and his expertise with historic political philosophy. I know enough of the subject to appreciate his expertise and that I can do little more than shine his shoes. Between the two of you you are book ending the bulk of the Objectivist philosophy which is the ethics and human conduct. That's where Rand spent most of her effort and time. This in spite of the fact you are interested in more than Objectivism and George is much more indifferent to it.

I was so angry yesterday at something that happened in my life I was being choked into irrationality as my alligator brain took over my whole person. I do not, however, live my life as a victim even though my own panties were in a bunch. I knew I would be in a better place soon. Because I knew what and why what was happening at the time, I could enjoy my anger and the steam coming out of my ears. Why was that possible?* It was more than understanding what was going on: it was not visiting my anger on another. I kept it in house.

Please, I implore you, next time count to ten. If that's not enough do the ten again. No need to spend $200 for an hour with Dr. Brainius. Dr. Brant is here. He's free--with what he imagines is all you need to know about these things you don't already know.

--Brant

*because I was riding a bicycle so the motion of my body matched the motion of my mind; a vigorous walk would have done the same--or chopping wood--all much better than a vigorous albeit dramatic gestalt which derails, by excluding, reasoning and figuring out (I don't know shit about meditation except it seems un-American and therefore un-patriotic)

[Jonathan]

This is a tough place--that explains my previous paragraph. Not many people survive in this type of environment and that has little to do with mere name calling or what set you off. It has too do with the fact that I am the biggest SOB here, not someone like Jonathan who likes his ad hominem name calling and references. The people he blew off left not because of that but because they couldn't handle his rigorous reasoning under the lack of social graces veneer of his.

--Brant

I'm glad that you used the word "veneer."

I'm not lacking in social graces. I simply respond in an appropriate style to others' vicious cores disguised with a very thin veneer of social grace.

My view is that their acting prim and proper and speaking sweetly and politely while pissing on others is not an example of truly having good social graces. Although it may fool some people, the courteous use of language doesn't cancel out the action.

Example:

Deleting others' contributions to a thread in one's "corner" without warning, reason, explanation or apology is an act of rudeness far beyond any name that I've ever called anyone. The content of mine and others' which was censored by Stephen was in no way lacking in grace or respect. It was substantive and polite. He couldn't answer it, so his solution was to snobbishly pose as if he were above it, and to throw it out as if it were trash. Sheer rudeness.

And Stephen isn't alone in trying to maintain the cracked and peeling veneer of social grace over the core of unwarranted self-importance, condescension and pompous twattery. Many of the Objectivish douchelords whom I laugh at do exactly the same thing.

Take a few moments and reread some of the social confrontation scenes in AS, and notice that the villains use the same tactic of the polite facade accompanying the twisting of the blade. And, oh, how uncouth of Hank or Frisco or Dagny to call their bluff!

J

[Brant Gaede]

I suspect you get your posts from OL by email and the follow-on editing doesn't follow. Makes no difference in this case, but it's the rational way to do OL if you don't want to or can't come to OL everyday. That will eventually be my case.

--Brant

I do a lot of editing of my multi-paragraph postings

[Brant Gaede]

Objectivist "douchelords"--so close yet so far--to me, from me. (Also, billionaires.)

--Brant

green with envy