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Irritating Things From The 'War on Terror'

I agree with your sentiment, evildave.

My initial reaction was akin to the "lakes of glass" idea, and I've since backed down from that, but it would have at least been a more relevant response than invading Iraq. More of a "We will retaliate harshly for any terrorist acts" statement, as opposed to a "We will use terrorist acts as a pretext to invade and pillage the Middle East in an unrelated profit war" type statement.
 
fishbob said:
Irritating Things From The 'War on Terror'
I am not convinced that a well organized, international police action might have been more effective than a "War" in controlling terrorist activities. Bringing criminals to justice is even supported by Islamic Fundamentalist governments. A criminal investigation makes it difficult to justify harboring criminals, whereas a crusade makes it easy to justify fundamentalism.
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GREAT comment! :bowl:
 
Yup. But look at all the civil liberties and freedoms the government can snatch away from its own gullible citizens:

In the name of W.O.D. they took away the right to be secure in your possessions. They went and took people's homes and cleaned them out without so much as a trial.

For the W.O.T. now the government can just slap a 'terrorist' label on you, and you don't get a trial before they take away your freedom, perhaps even your life.

And then the 'secret' searches the 'Patriot Act' made legal and proper, without so much as a Judge's signature.

The government couldn't all of THAT legally without some sort of 'war' to convince the moronic public that it's 'OK' to piss away all their freedoms and constitutional rights "for the war".

You couldn't call something a 'Patriot Act' without a war. It would have to be called something like the "Screw America Act", and would be a LOT less popular.
 
evildave said:
Yup. But look at all the civil liberties and freedoms the government can snatch away from its own gullible citizens:

In the name of W.O.D. they took away the right to be secure in your possessions. They went and took people's homes and cleaned them out without so much as a trial.

For the W.O.T. now the government can just slap a 'terrorist' label on you, and you don't get a trial before they take away your freedom, perhaps even your life.

And then the 'secret' searches the 'Patriot Act' made legal and proper, without so much as a Judge's signature.

The government couldn't all of THAT legally without some sort of 'war' to convince the moronic public that it's 'OK' to piss away all their freedoms and constitutional rights "for the war".

You couldn't call something a 'Patriot Act' without a war. It would have to be called something like the "Screw America Act", and would be a LOT less popular.
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Even though you and never seem to again, Just for the record I have never said you were pro-terrorirst. I do believe you unjustly blame one person for the problems in the USA.

I don't believe you can use news stories for a source on anything. The media is biased. Futhermore, I find it funny how you will argue against the patriot act but you will argue for "Gun control". How selective of you. So it's ok for you to speak out, but not ok for me to keep my guns?
 
merphie said:


I don't believe you can use news stories for a source on anything. The media is biased. Futhermore, I find it funny how you will argue against the patriot act but you will argue for "Gun control". How selective of you. So it's ok for you to speak out, but not ok for me to keep my guns?
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What shall we use if not news reports? Psychic powers? Precisely how is the whole MEDIA biased?

Where did I argue *for* gun control? Citation, please.

You certainly are leaping to some odd conclusions.
 
evildave said:
What shall we use if not news reports? Psychic powers? Precisely how is the whole MEDIA biased?

Where did I argue *for* gun control? Citation, please.

You certainly are leaping to some odd conclusions.
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How are they bias? That's funny. Here is one way. Source If you can't see how biased they are then you are blind.

You can use psychic powers if you wish. You could also request information from the government under the "Freedom of infomation Act".

I was sure I saw you somewhere arguing for gun control. I could be mistaken. Since they lost my account I can't go back that far in post.

If I had you pegged wrong, I appologize.
 
merphie said:
How are they bias? That's funny. Here is one way. Source If you can't see how biased they are then you are blind.

You can use psychic powers if you wish. You could also request information from the government under the "Freedom of infomation Act".

I was sure I saw you somewhere arguing for gun control. I could be mistaken. Since they lost my account I can't go back that far in post.

If I had you pegged wrong, I appologize.
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OK, you've shown one article by one man about how elements of the media are biased against guns. This topic is not about guns.

Here is a more interesting link to an article about GENERAL media bias: http://slate.msn.com/id/2078200/

For 'war bias' as a for instance, Ted Turner calls Rupert Murdoch a 'Warmonger'. http://pages.zdnet.com/trimb/id81.html

You should note that some of the more damning citations in the opening post are from the White House's own web site.

Naturally a 'Freedom of Information Act' citation on my part would take the better part of a year to complete, and if I posted the result, you would merely claim it was fabricated, and if I told you to submit your own 'Freedom of Information Act' request, then you would not bother because it would take YOU a year to get it completed, and you'd just claim "inaccessible evidence". No, for the time being, links from major and relatively respected news organizations will have to do. I am forced to rely on records already made public, usually by reporters who have filed a 'Freedom of Information Act' for me, or gotten someone on the inside to fax some papers out.

Believe me, there are plenty of anti-war hits on web sites and sources that I don't bother to cite because they have an obvious bias.

Here's a better organization to cite about what may be biased or not: http://www.fair.org/whats-fair.html

As for my 'argument for gun control', I usually use vehicle deaths as an example of a benchmark for something that should be 'banned' before guns are. I usually use the CDC's mortality data for this.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/

Unintentional
MV Traffic 42,443
Firearm 802
(The 'accidental' figures speak for themselves, and if you go for children 'accidentally' killed, it's less than 40 versus thousands.)

Intentional
Homicide Firearm 11,348

Suicide Firearm 16,869
(Suicide doesn't really count in my opinion; if you don't have a gun to shoot yourself, there's always rope to hang yourself.)

It also has a new category this year: 'Terrorism' (from the 2001 data). It compellingly shows that cars kill and injure WAY more people than terrorists do, which also shows where the relative threat of 'terrorists' stands compared to your daily routine.

2001, United States
Overall Motor Vehicle Deaths 43,987

2001, United States
Terrorism Deaths 2,926

2001, United States
Adverse effects - Drugs 277

So, as you can see, the 'War on Terror' and the 'War on Drugs' and even firearms are relatively small things (as measured in annual deaths caused by them), compared to what people driving vehicles unsafely do every day.

So, you'll find that I'm very anti-car, (in a tongue in cheek sort of way). Seriously anti-scary drivers, though.
 
evildave said:
OK, you've shown one article by one man about how elements of the media are biased against guns. This topic is not about guns.

You should note that some of the more damning citations in the opening post are from the White House's own web site.

Naturally a 'Freedom of Information Act' citation on my part would take the better part of a year to complete, and if I posted the result, you would merely claim it was fabricated, and if I told you to submit your own 'Freedom of Information Act' request, then you would not bother because it would take YOU a year to get it completed, and you'd just claim "inaccessible evidence". No, for the time being, links from major and relatively respected news organizations will have to do. I am forced to rely on records already made public, usually by reporters who have filed a 'Freedom of Information Act' for me, or gotten someone on the inside to fax some papers out.

Believe me, there are plenty of anti-war hits on web sites and sources that I don't bother to cite because they have an obvious bias.

Here's a better organization to cite about what may be biased or not: http://www.fair.org/whats-fair.html
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Well, as I said. If i am wrong about you being Anti-Gun then I retract my statement. I think you and I disagreed on Bush/Kerry more than anything. Since they account got lost last week, I haven't been able to review my previous post. I am sorry for the assumption. I don't compare cars to guns anymore because people attack it too much. Now I just present the truth in statistics. No one has been able to prove me wrong. They attack other minor things.

I assume you are talking about the prison abuses. I found the links to the whitehouse interesting. However the one commision report on the detainee also said that the president ordered differently. The failure was pinned in mid management who didn't even tell the high level people what was going on.

Yes the article I cited was about guns. It still goes to show there is a bias opinion in the media. If they are bias on one topic then who is to say that they won't "forget" other details?

Lately if you read the news you get a negative opinion about Bush. They might as well be campaigning for Kerry. I have seen some examples of this in my Local News channel when they do a "Letters home" story. Letters from the troups seems to give a different opinion on Iraq. When searching in Google almost all the stories on good things in Iraq are from foreign media. CBS is obviously a mouth piece for the Kerry Campaign. To me CBS has not clout.

I can watch two different news channels here and get two different sides of a story. They cherry pick their facts.

Interesting, you know what I would do in the future. What else does that crystal ball tell you?
 
Oh, so you (and up to 284,000,000 others) should perform a parallel 'Freedom Of Information Act' lawsuit in parallel whenever a point of contention comes up?

No, I am too lazy, and you are probably too lazy as well, as are the grand majority of the other 284,000,000 others.

The 'crystal ball' is an observation of human nature, and if everyone depended solely on 'Freedom Of Information Act' lawsuits for their news about what our ever more secretive government is doing, we would have a court system with a 10,000 year backlog preventing any one of us from getting that information in a timely manner.
 
evildave said:
Oh, so you (and up to 284,000,000 others) should perform a parallel 'Freedom Of Information Act' lawsuit in parallel whenever a point of contention comes up?

No, I am too lazy, and you are probably too lazy as well, as are the grand majority of the other 284,000,000 others.

The 'crystal ball' is an observation of human nature, and if everyone depended solely on 'Freedom Of Information Act' lawsuits for their news about what our ever more secretive government is doing, we would have a court system with a 10,000 year backlog preventing any one of us from getting that information in a timely manner.
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Of course I am not suggesting everyone should do it. But it would be nice from time to time to have someone do it just too check the accuracy of the news media. A check and balance, if you will.

If I depended on the Media for everything I would have a drastically different view of the world.
 
merphie said:
Of course I am not suggesting everyone should do it. But it would be nice from time to time to have someone do it just too check the accuracy of the news media. A check and balance, if you will.

If I depended on the Media for everything I would have a drastically different view of the world.
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But what to check them against? I usually don't grab the first link I find. Nope. I compare it. Get corroborating data. Go find the source of the quote, if it's convenient.

You're talking to someone who actually does research his rantings a bit.
 
evildave said:
But what to check them against? I usually don't grab the first link I find. Nope. I compare it. Get corroborating data. Go find the source of the quote, if it's convenient.

You're talking to someone who actually does research his rantings a bit.
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That's good to hear. I have my doubts. I think you should focus more on how our government works because it isn't all the president's fault. Congress has a heavy hand in it too. Which makes Kerry responsible.
 
The president has those 'executive orders', and can in fact launch an attack on a country without congressional approval.

He is the commander in chief of the military. What the military screws up lands on his desk. Especially when the administration went to all the trouble to GET congress to 'approve' his little war.

They all get voted out. The president, who ASKED for the war and LIED to get it through congress, gets the major share of the blame. Unless lying is "OK"?

Clinton lies about a B.J., and they want to impeach him. Dubya lies about Iraq in front of Congress, starts a whole WAR, kills over 1,000 of our troops and over ten thousand Iraqi civilians alone, and he's a "hero".
 
evildave said:
The president has those 'executive orders', and can in fact launch an attack on a country without congressional approval.

He is the commander in chief of the military. What the military screws up lands on his desk. Especially when the administration went to all the trouble to GET congress to 'approve' his little war.

They all get voted out. The president, who ASKED for the war and LIED to get it through congress, gets the major share of the blame. Unless lying is "OK"?

Clinton lies about a B.J., and they want to impeach him. Dubya lies about Iraq in front of Congress, starts a whole WAR, kills over 1,000 of our troops and over ten thousand Iraqi civilians alone, and he's a "hero".
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Strawman. He didn't use an executive order. So there is no argument. Your investigative report you posted on another thread on the prison abuse said that higher command was not made aware of the problems.

Bush didn't lie about anything. The president had the wrong information from the CIA. Not his fault.

All you have is wild accusations and opinions. There's not one shred of fact in any of your post. Well, ok you were right about Clinton and the BJ. Information YOU posted states the opposite of your ranting.

Again, you are allowing your baseless hatred of one man get in the way of reasoning.
 
Bush didn't lie about anything. The president had the wrong information from the CIA. Not his fault.
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Not his fault my left buttock.

Intelligence info was filtered through a 'special intel' office set up by the Bush administration to cherry pick data that would help scare the US into approving the Bush invasion of Iraq.

The president, and his close advisors, selected questionable information and ignored the analysis of that information.
 
fishbob said:
Not his fault my left buttock.

Intelligence info was filtered through a 'special intel' office set up by the Bush administration to cherry pick data that would help scare the US into approving the Bush invasion of Iraq.

The president, and his close advisors, selected questionable information and ignored the analysis of that information.
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Was it? Can you back up your claim?
 
Was it?
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Been discussed here. Several times.

Bush didn't lie about anything???? Can you back up your claim? What a doofus comment that is.

We are sitting thousands of miles apart, discussing a complex and intensely media spun subject. I can only point at Net articles, I can't show anybody any real evidence. But I can call BS when I see it.
 
fishbob said:
Been discussed here. Several times.

Bush didn't lie about anything???? Can you back up your claim? What a doofus comment that is.

We are sitting thousands of miles apart, discussing a complex and intensely media spun subject. I can only point at Net articles, I can't show anybody any real evidence. But I can call BS when I see it.
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That's just it. Everyone is claiming they know one side or the other. Frankly it depends on which news agency you watch.

The other idea is I constantly hear the same thing over and over even when they are debunked. If someone is clinging to some idea then they must have proof of it. As skeptics, surely no one is holding to some idea that is not supported by any measureable facts.

You are moving the goal post. I never said Bush didn't lie about anything. Did Kerry ever tell a lie?

You suggest that Bush set up some special committee because he wanted to go to war with Iraq. I say there is no evidence of it. What stories are you using as your basis? Where do you get your information? Is it just opinion to fuel your hatred of one man?
 
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