Hard News: Only in a relative sense
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What is it about you lefties? There doesn’t seem to be a murdering tyrant or Marxist you don’t love, admire and whose ass you don’t want to kiss. Saddam, Castro, Che, Mao, Stalin, never heard a leftie say a bad word about the Marxist nut in Pyongyang who has starved millions to death. And you think of yourselves as the nice guys. Bizarre.
Gotta hand it to Giovanni, that measured tone, always somewhat strained and constipated, couldn't last. Leftie . . . leftie . . . the inevitable slide into Rushian baby-talk. Let's Limbaugh some more - how low can you go?
But I’d much rather own that than having effectively supported the continuation of one of the worst regime’s in human history, or handing the country over to a bunch of head hacking psychopaths. Every one of you who have opposed the undertaking own a piece of that. You might not like it, or be intellectually honest enough to admit it, but that is the truth.
Teetering atop the moral high ground, hold that pose, grab a snapshot, quick, or better still, call a taxidermist. Set against the backcloth of history it might go some teensy way towards offsetting the Rummy/Saddam handjob photo-op.
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I didn't say every displaced Iraqi was former Baathist. But a significant portion is.
Spoken straight from the arse, again, and not deserving of a response.
Except to say this: when my father was a child, his hometown was heavily bombed by the American forces, and his family had to flee temporarily, forgo their income, make do for a number of months. They came back to a fair bit of destruction, including significant damage to their own house. Nor him, nor anybody in my family, nor anybody I've ever met, nor the communist and socialist partisans who rushed to enter Milan before the allied troops did, nor the history books of any hue, ever so much as suggested that the Americans were wrong in bombing and invading our country. They were, truly, greeted as liberators. And that's not because Italians then were culturally superior to the Iraqis now, or because Mussolini was worse than Saddam, and it's not because Italians weren't on the brink of a civil war either. It's because the invasion hadn't happened under false pretences, heaping a disproportionate and callous amount of destruction on the civilian population and displacing millions.
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James Bremner:
If you were an Iranian would you want to protect yourself from the nutter who killed over at least a million of your people from 1980 to 1988?
Then how do you account for this (from 1983 BTW)?
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James, I never realized you where investment savvy. Are you in construction, transportation, oil?
Arms?
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Bremner, a diminutive but hard midfield player, was scouted by Leeds while playing schoolboy football in Scotland and signed for the Elland Road club in 1959, the day after his 17th birthday. He was brought up in the Raploch area of Stirling where he attended the Catholic junior school, St. Mary's. He had previously been rejected by Arsenal and Chelsea for being too small.
He made his first-team debut in 1960 and was a permanent fixture on manager Don Revie's team sheet for more than 15 years thereafter unless injured or suspended. Bremner quickly established himself as an uncompromising player, tough in the tackle and often going beyond the rules to get the better of a skilled opponent - a Sunday Times headline dubbed him as "10st of barbed wire"
Oh, sorry, that was Billy He made much more sense.
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Ok. This has been bugging me all night. What the hell is the Herald on about, Phantom Expander? WTF? what does he do? EXPAND? no, he doesn't. Look, I am a great fan of rhetorical devices and it pains me, yes pains me, to have to put up with this lazy, sub editorial bullshit. here was a perfectly good opportunity to use alliteration but what do they do? at best they attempt to employ a transferred epithet and fail miserably. phantom Expander my arse. It is the Phantom Phoamer.
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It is the Phantom Phoamer.
Aw man, this takes me back to the good old days (about 2 weeks ago) when Radio NZ: Noelle played an episode of Chickenman (he's everywhere, he's everywhere) every day.
The Phantom Phoamer would feel right at home in Brent Harbour.
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Noelle played an episode of Chickenman (he's everywhere, he's everywhere) every day.
Yeah, never uses her own work eh?
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Damn it. Now the Washington Post is at it.
Iraq's Winning Vote
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/03/AR2009020303284.html
Honestly, what bloody nuisance. How are you all supposed to maintain your "Iraq’s a disaster, blah, blah, blah" diatribe in the face of an onslaught from the decidedly non-neocon WP and the NYT? (NYT link in my first post)
How inconvenient. I am sure many of you would be so much happier if Iraq was still going badly so you could screech “Told you so, told you so. Liar liar Dubya’s pants are on fire” at the top of your voices.
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I don't know why 'some people had a reasonably but not totally awesome democratic election after hundreds of thousands of them were killed and millions of them were displaced by a war waged under false pretences' is suddenly a reason for you to wrap yourself in glory, dude.
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New Orleans? Is that still there?
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I am sure many of you would be so much happier if Iraq was still going badly so you could screech “Told you so, told you so. Liar liar Dubya’s pants are on fire” at the top of your voices.
And all the while chanting the praises of Mao, Stalin, Castro, and everyone's favourite bogeyman, Kim Jung-Il.
Talk about straw people. What you lack, James, is even the most rudimentary level of imagination, the ability to understand that not everyone parrots some form of party line. While it's plainly beyond your limited comprehension, there are those who at least attempt to think for themselves. From such a standpoint, your supine sermons from the pulpit of a failed ex-president's rectum are downright laughable.
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There's a famous old photo (well, two actually) of Stalin strolling along the Volga with his chief of police, in one of them, and then the exact same photo without the other guy - Nikolai Yezhov his name was - who had since become the kind of person who should be erased from history. Such were the Orwellian ways of totalitarianism, and we can almost laugh at their quaintness these days.
But in the West we don't need any of that, because we have freedom, including the freedom not to remember, and not to even see, the things that don't fit with our self-interest. In your case, James, for instance, it's not necessary to delete Saddam from those not-so-old photos with Rumsfeld, or cancel the historical memory of who installed and armed the hated dictator, because you have already done so in your mind.
Nothing especially surprising there. What I find pathetic, is you are taking ownership of the war decision, you speak of a role that you had, as if your opinion counted more than an infinitesimal fraction of diddly squat. Well, it didn't. You might have voted for Bush, but that's utterly irrelevant: the war was a product of a culture, not a cadre of politicians; it was the culmination of the West's heroic ability to twist the historical record and the factuality of the present in the name of self-interest. So, by all means, keep telling yourself that the war was just and that Dubya shall be remembered for the great president that he truly was; and that you yourself where one of the righteous oes who saw what needed to be done and stuck to his guns (literally) even while other swayed. None of it is true, and nobody much cares.
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New Orleans? Is that still there?
Heh. My Dad is still there, and I just found out that his most recent business venture is making little boats for people. I assume that's so they don't drown next time...
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psssst! Danielle, don't tell James about the little boats.
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I blame Lucy.
I am about five pages and two days late for this, but - did *I* mention the Marshall twins first? I think not.
There's a famous old photo (well, two actually) of Stalin strolling along the Volga with his chief of police, in one of them, and then the exact same photo without the other guy - Nikolai Yezhov his name was - who had since become the kind of person who should be erased from history. Such were the Orwellian ways of totalitarianism, and we can almost laugh at their quaintness these days.
On a total aside, Guy Gavriel Kay's most famous book, Tigana, is partly based on this idea - the erasure of people from history - and I think he even talks about this photo in the introduction. It's a very powerful concept, not so much because people succeed at it - not today, anyway - but because they try.
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Giovanni, you stopped one letter too soon - "noes means noes", surely. :)
I took him to be talking about the t-shirts that are used on campus during orientation as part of the education campaign about respecting people's choices when it comes to sex. I think I still have one in a draw somewhere. And probably stickers.
In which case, no esses, as the slogan is "no means no".
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Yes, but, o! noes, it's teh intarwebs!!1!
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talking about the t-shirts
I noes, I noes.. :)
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New Orleans? Is that still there?
Just less colourful than it used to be..
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New Orleans? Is that still there?
Just less colourful than it used to be..
Less homes, less people,broken levees, who really cared? :(
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Some groups of people were lessened more than others, leaving..
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Ah. A band who's name made no sense sang a song who's lyrics made no sense also made a video that made no sense. 40 years later they are still arguing about the copyright and Sacha uses it as an example of underlying racism on the part of FEMA. Hmmm
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Hey it has to be useful for something - actually I ran out of steam before finding a better clip. I tend to misread their name as "protocol harem" which conjures up all sorts of geeky fun. :)
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Random news-related oddity: this modest piece on the Auckland Lantern Festival, by Lincoln Tan, seems to be so loved at the Herald that they've run it twice today - once on Page A3 and slightly expanded with about two more sentences on A8.
Run out of adverts or something? :)
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