WickedFire Congress: Bomb Syria or Not?
- Thread starter Dwight Schrute
- Start date
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8YtF76s-yM]Gen Wesley Clark Reveals US Plan To Invade Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan, And Iran - YouTube[/ame]
Clearly you're a brainwashed statist who would love nothing more than to murder brown people because they're a different skin color than you.
You make me sick. I'm putting you on ignore.
What did I miss? I have drave on ignore and I use dchuk's script so I can't even see he posted until someone quotes him.
As an aside, I do love that the guys on my ignore list are convinced they have "beaten" me in argument when I don't reply. I don't reply because they are on my ignore list and I can't see their posts with dchuk's amazing greasemonkey script. Maybe they did beat me, maybe they didn't but it wasn't my lack of a reply which validated their posts.
I used to allocate a lot of time to arguing online. I don't anymore.
As an aside, I do love that the guys on my ignore list are convinced they have "beaten" me in argument when I don't reply. I don't reply because they are on my ignore list and I can't see their posts with dchuk's amazing greasemonkey script. Maybe they did beat me, maybe they didn't but it wasn't my lack of a reply which validated their posts.
I used to allocate a lot of time to arguing online. I don't anymore.
Sure, but it depends, you can't put a black bag over everyone's head, and it's not worth it for people who are just campaigning for something like no war. I could agree in the US (not familiar with Canada's political system, so I can't compare to there), where the number of people voting is so incredibly diluted in comparison to the people in power - here though, most people are at most a 20 minute drive from their local MP's front door, and it would be pretty easy to talk to them (no fancy offices), so I think here at least, campaigning to your MP can make a difference (well, for issues like war).
I've voted NOT to bomb Syria at first, but would like to change my opinion.
When voting I've totally ignored the fact that US has long time ago created bombs which can detect bad guys based on their actions and moral believes and kill only them leaving innocent people unharmed.
Also, in the early 2014 US will finish up production of DMC-001 - a massive transporter-plane which will bring democracy to Syria on its board.
Mods, please make amends to the poll.
When voting I've totally ignored the fact that US has long time ago created bombs which can detect bad guys based on their actions and moral believes and kill only them leaving innocent people unharmed.
Also, in the early 2014 US will finish up production of DMC-001 - a massive transporter-plane which will bring democracy to Syria on its board.
Mods, please make amends to the poll.
You don't need to. Horizontal tyranny. Fear works the same way endorsements work, but in reverse. You blackbag one and people lose their nerve. Protesting without any perceived cost and protesting with fear of loss of life/torture are two very different things.
No one has ever been more reviled by the state than the peacemaker. See Christ, Jesus ; Martin Luther King ; Gandhi
Voting is asking for permission. It's requesting something. It's a fundamentally weak position. The only time politicians respond to it is when their own political power is threatened. I can't speak for the UK, but certainly in the US, politicians are not usually funded by their constituents, but by special interests and so the values and interests of their constituents is irrelevant.
Also, the system is fundamentally corrupt and immoral. Why participate at all?
I see this differently than most people, even most people on WF, many of which are fairly enlightened and radical. Politics is a charade. A dangerous abstraction. If you "believe" in it, then it is "real". But it is not "real" if you choose not to believe in it. It's just another delusion, people adopting titles, masks, uniforms and pretending they are something they are not, in a system that is arbitrary and irrational.
I can't participate in politics because I see it as the sad farce it is. I speak political language and engage these debates because sometimes I like to socialize with my fellow monkeys, but that's as far as I am willing to compromise. I refuse to pretend I believe in something that is a lie, something that produces much more bad than good, because if I pretend it is real, it will validate my values.
That's how I see it anyway.
Voting is not asking for permission, it's giving permission, which means the voter has some power (though most of the time they don't realize it).
I've met a few politicians, and the eye-opener for me was how much national politics is like office politics. Except office politics is more feudal because nobody votes for the board.
Politicians are just humans and susceptible to same buttons as the rest of the population. They respond to flattery (that's why all those media moguls and foreign diplomats wine and dine them), they are emotional, and they respond to those who shout loudly, especially if the stroppy ones are voters who control their jobs.
If all politician gets is Saudi diplomats flattering them and persuading them to go to war and this isn't countered by citizens yelling that they'll lose their jobs if they do so, guess what happens? The politician rationalizes that the voter is in agreement with what that nice prince who is happy to buy dinner at a Michelin starred restaurant wants.
People are guilty of building up politicians into this all-powerful "them" who can't be swayed (an attitude which admittedly politicians do their best to foster), whereas the reality is that if you can sell rubbish to a mark online, you can easily sell peace to a politician who badly wants to get re-elected and who gets that sinking feeling at election time.
The notion that a politician needs your permission to do anything is very funny.
Rapists, child molesters and mass murderers are also just humans.
I suggest you read Machiavelli's "The Prince".
Food for thought, in power relationships if you don't see the sucker, you're the sucker. Now ask yourself, is your politician the sucker?
I remember doing this as a child. We'd get together, don our costumes (cowboy hats, toy guns, and the like), and choose good guys, bad guys, and leaders. And then, we'd kill everyone.
At least we knew it was only a game. Silly adults.
I've read The Prince - and the idea that our dear old MPs could put the ideas in The Prince into practice is laughable. They're too incompetent. In any case most are backbenchers who just hope to survive the next election.
The thing I've learnt since the Iraq war, is that if voters actively demonstrate the downsides of going against them, backbenchers are less likely to back the leadership of their party - their own need to survive trumps it.
During Iraq, some Labour backbenchers were persuaded to back Blair because they really believed that "their voters had nowhere to go" as they would never vote Tory. A lot of these people were culled in the 2010 election by people voting Green or LibDem. This scarred the remainder. When the Syria vote came around, Ed Miliband was informed that maybe 5 MPs out of 256 Labour MPs were willing to back war. So he duly led his people into the No lobby.
The Tories in 2003 were enthusiastic about Iraq. This time round, some of them are under threat from the anti-war UKIP, who are threatening from the right (UKIP took votes off the Tories in the local elections). As a result we got some Tories voting against or abstaining on the Syria war motion.
The key to voter power is not just to threaten consequences, but to actually deliver on the threats. All thoughts of acting like Machiavelli flees the minds of the politicians and naked fear takes over.
I'm guessing that in the United States the reason voters haven't cowed politicians into submission because a) lots don't vote and even fewer lobby and b) they haven't yet demonstrated that they really will take their votes elsewhere. Once a third and fourth party springs up and takes control of a state or two, the dam will burst as the rest will be too scared to think about acting like The Prince.
Not sure what a limited military strike is, and not sure what red line is, and not sure wtf john Kerry is talking about when the say the WORLD is backing the USA.
Me and John Mccain were on the poker table online while this was happening, we were playing poker/
Me and John Mccain were on the poker table online while this was happening, we were playing poker/
And yet they are in power, and you're beseeching them to heed your will.
Weird how the power dynamic runs the opposite of the way you perceive competency to run.
Have you spotted the sucker yet?
This is nice to read and all, but until #3 displaces #2 in the psyche of the population, issues like this will remain confined to small ideological debates with no action taken.
Our lot arn't going to be participating in Syria no matter how much Cameron wants to. If Cameron thought he was the Prince, he's made a mistake
He's been consigned into the dustbin of history, and who knows how long he'll survive his humiliation. Prime Ministers who can't command the Commons don't last long.Regarding the United States - Ron Paul made a strategic mistake running for the Republican nomination instead of the Libertarian one. He was never going to win the Republican nomination and they found it easy to silence him at conference time. Whereas outside the Republican party, he would have had a voice till election day, and may have helped some Libertarian congressmen to get elected. That would then have had the effect of scarring the remainder Republicans into paying more attention to their voters. Same effect on the left with Greens breaking away from the Dems.
If you have just two parties and gerrymandered districts, the only choice is vote for the dominant party in your district, or abstain and let the dominant party in your district win without you. Having more than two parties really breaks up this dynamic.
Hopefully instead of Americans giving up and abstaining (which is a vote for the status quo), people will start pushing third and fourth parties to open things up. Once there is actual choice on both sides, anything can and will happen.