Don't ask.
It basically said that torture was ok, and that your own citizens / any civilians can be considered your ennemies and treated as such. Abou grahib, Condor operation (chili, argentina...) for getting rid of "commies" in south america used nice french para technics.
Like pushing opponents in the ocean from an helicopter far from the coast so that body might not be discovered recognizable. Sleep depravation, gégéne, waterboarding, having muslim naked and possibly being ordered by woman ... A lot of actual technics used in Guantanamo.
Hey, don't look at me this way. I do not support this. At the opposite of USA, war stopped because soldiers revolted against these "successful" technic. And their was a strong opposition between the "conscripted" and the engaged soldiers.
Call french cowards. At least they did oppose their own government and army and accepted (ok, De gaulle took the liberty to choose) to lose war rather than to win with torture. Which triggered another civil war in the metropole between the tenants of keeping colonies and the others not really for tortures. And of course, CIA did its best to put even more mess in the process. (Gladio operation).
Maybe looking like cowards is not the worse that can happen to a nation and as you see french people are still alive.
Maybe they don't look like a great nation, but loosing on the moral battle has proven to be a great way to destroy your own civilization.
At least that is the topic of the peloponesian wars that is a mandatory lecture for westpoint cadets.
Guess, we did not read the same book.
I left the US some years ago and I am strongly considering renouncing my US citizenship. That I would have to pay to do so, is one of the few things stopping me. It won't happen, but if Obama and Bush are imprisoned for murder, among other crimes, I would think about going back.
-Friederich Nietzsche
Don't let yourself get depressed, that's one of the worst things you could do in such a situation which calls for change. I've been there and it helps no one to feel sorry for yourself all the time.
Realize that although we are poised technologically to destroy everything, the world is in fact the most peaceful it has been in a long time.
Also, stop reading so much into YouTube comments, they are not representative of the world at large. I suspect many of the inflammatory provocative comments on there are astroturf anyway.
>Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
-Lao Tzu
This is partly why I wish for Trump to get the top job. The amount of window dressing in society will come down drastically as the clown makes misjudgements at every turn and contradicts himself by the hour.
American politics goes from yin to yang every 8 years because that's was people expect. The media polarizes every thing. Your average person laps it up. "Those damn conservatives/liberals are ruining everything. How can they be so stupid/naive?". We must make America great. We must make America whole. :-P
People believe that it is their duty to vote: we must keep the democrats/republicans out of office! Or you could waste your vote on someone who can't win. As a measure of protest, perhaps. Or maybe if they did win once... then you would have 3 parties. Then 2 would gang up on 1. Or the third will split the vote.
If you wish to stop war, don't get sidetracked on people. That's how you will be defeated, because it's easy to swap people around like a game of 3 card monty. Concentrate on the issue, not on people, parties or politics. Don't simply cast a vote and say, "Well, I tried". That's how you lose.
And my "understanding" of how gravity works is that the Earth is carried around the Sun by a giant invisible rottweiler dog. If I can't back it up, though, I'm not going to get my Rottweiler Theory through peer review. What do you back up your "understanding" with?
My understanding differs though. My understanding is that the commenters understanding comes from finding it difficult to believe human beings, especially people seemingly smart enough to reach the top, could be that stupid. If they couldn't be that stupid or misguided, then they must have had some ulterior motive.
I go with the 'yeah, the neocons really were that dumb.'
It's not fruitful to dump some 5000 word diatribe about it though. I'm not interested in convincing anyone about it ... and anyone who doubts it or feels I couldn't produce a compelling argument if I was pressed to should absolutely feel free to disagree and I am not at all endorsing my fleeting comments as justification.
Clearly you're not allowed to share your views without being ridiculed unless you cite extensive sources and make some flow charts or something.
[/sarcasm]
I enjoyed reading your insight so thanks for sharing that.
13thLetter: Do you think it's possible to tell someone to elaborate on why they believe something without being an asshole. I mean, if you ask nicely then he could've written something interesting about his experiences. If you act like a passive aggressive douche then you'll just get people defensive and they won't write anything. The whole community loses.
Besides, I think it's pretty pretentious to hold someone's views shared at a messaging forum to uphold to the same standard that they would need to get into a peer-reviewed journal disputing gravity. Do you even THINK before you write?
On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.
I don't know what you expect me to say to your second paragraph though. The guy making those "accusations" has already left the conversation, and I don't really feel like having this discussion with you either.
Anyway, good luck getting to the bottom of this!
Gravity is much more of a hard science than the psychological and economic motivations behind war. We're not peering into a sandbox of ants from some omniscient above-view. We're obvserving the actions and reactions of people, which is much more messy.
We enter the conflicts under whatever pretext is popularized in the media, but the real reason is to fuel warfare R&D efforts, grow surveillance infrastructure, and collect data that reflects situations our military leaders forecast to be important.
Large contracting firms profit. Soldiers lose time, often also money, often their mental health and family relationships, and sometimes their lives. Taxpayers lose money. Foreign civilians lose their lives. Few benefits are ever given to soldiers or foreigners, if they are even paid lip service with promises of benefits at all.
It's basically a string of smaller scale proxy wars to fuel tech, surveillance, and population control between larger, "actual" wars.
I fear we are already past a point where democratic process could stop it. I think by now it would require almost an actual revolt from U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and that it would be bloody, and that part of the military engineering being studied is exactly how much civilians will tolerate before being pushed to the point of revolt.
As long as you can watch Netflix on your iPad and put it out of your mind, then while it might ruffle your feathers, you won't actually take action that could jeopardize your creature comforts. Even things like Occupy Wall Street seem like they are more data collection opportunities than anything else. "OK, so they will protest via X, Y, and Z, but too few of them can be pushed to do A, B, or C for us to care."
It's a very depressing feeling. In the meantime, just like everyone else, I have to worry about money, family, life goals, comforts, health, and all my biases push me to ignore the military industrial conflict, because already giving it maybe 1/100th of my overall bandwidth is exceedingly depressing. Something close to 40% of the country believes in young earth creationism. Open up to a highly-visited YouTube video and scroll down to the comments and behold the inanity of how we use our time and what our priorities are.
How could enough people possibly coordinate beliefs and actions around humanity-affirming rebukes of the military industrial complex? Of course they won't, so then I guess I'd better put my brain towards how to live in a world where they won't, which is too depressing to think about... and the cycle continues.
I'm sure it has been articulated even earlier than the early 1900s. It's just goes on and on.