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Golbez posted:No, I'm not. However, when I openly support those actions, I'm kind of taking ownership of them. If I were walking around saying to an Afghan that I unquestionably supported the U.S. knowing we bombed his town and killed members of his family, I shouldn't expect to walk away without a bloody nose, or worse. Looks to me like a simple case of the Misratans taking their rage at Gadhaffi out on his entire tribe. The fact that most of Gadhaffi's tribe-mates would support him should be unsurprising. I don't know what's wrong with you for you to sympathize with reprisals against civilians for being on the losing side of a war.
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Oct 5, 2011 23:26
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shyguy posted:You're right, but there were some news reports originally saying it was Jones who produced it. Some of them have corrected, but Jones has still been involved in a promotional role. I still stand by what I said about him. High-schoolers produce better quality "movies" than that. I don't get it. Anyone could see even from the clips shown on the TV show that the "movie" is nothing more than some idiots with a camera and cheap editing software.
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Sep 12, 2012 02:31
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I think there's about a zero percent chance the production of the video is connected to a Libyan militant group, but the fact that the film-makers went out of their way to get the word out that it was made by Israelis and Jews is fishy as hell, especially since it's looking more and more likely that they're lying. The fact that it's likely one ethnic or religious group trying to create a false-flag attack by pinning the blame on another ethnic/religious group is well worth investigating. Also, according to that one Washington Post article, the full-length movie quite possibly does not even exist, only that trailer does. Which I can say has served the purpose of whomever made it. I think Fruity Rudy is going a little too far, but something sketchy is going on here.
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Sep 13, 2012 04:52
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I just watched the "trailer" again. There isn't a single mention of Muhammad or Muslims that wasn't dubbed in after filming. When the actors aren't dubbed over, they always just refer to the Muhammad character as "the master" which is in line with what that actress involved in the movie claims the character was called in the script. Does anyone else find it unbelievably lovely that these producers would apparently put the lives of a bunch of low-budget actors in serious danger without their knowledge, while the cowards who actually dubbed in the references to Islam never show their faces? Seems like there has to have been some sort of law broken here.
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Sep 13, 2012 23:17
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NathanScottPhillips posted:Dude, no poo poo he's a moron psycho fucker and has lovely opinions and inconsistencies. I'm not defending any of their actions. And if the causes of their uneducated religious furor are anyway similar to Bin Ladin's, we're better off fighting them. Did anyone actually read Bin Ladin's justifications for attacking the US? His main issues with the US are: 1. Failure to allow Islamists to destroy the 50-year-old state of Israel. 2. Fighting against Islamist fighters trying to violently institute Sharia law, in places such as Somalia. 3. Middle Eastern governments allowance of infidel forces to build bases on their soil 4. The United States support of brutal Middle Eastern dictators, and the United State's embargo against a different brutal Middle Eastern dictator, Saddam Hussein. I've seen these two attacks against United States policy back-to-back plenty of other times, without any trace of irony. The US has done some nasty, unjustified things in this area of the world, but if the reasons Muslims are outraged were the same as Bin Ladin's, then the world would be in for a heap of trouble that's not going to go away no matter what the US does, with the possible exception of letting Israel be wiped off the map.
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Sep 15, 2012 00:15
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I give up. This is all the fault of whoever dismantled the Ottoman Empire.
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Sep 15, 2012 00:30
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CharlestheHammer posted:Not really, we mainly focus on how the situation can benefit us, and try and dress it up as just trying to help. Because its easier for the public to swallow. We are not the first power to do this, we will not be the last. I am really surprised how many people seem to think the US cares about anyone but themselves. The US has never cared about anyone but themselves. The question is what factors currently cause conflict between the US and Muslim countries, and not other parts of the world. Nations do not (usually) do things out of humanitarian kindness.
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Sep 15, 2012 00:34
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rudatron posted:Wrong. Osama bin laden and the phenomenon of modern islamic terrorism is a conflict rooted in the secularisation of the middle east, first and foremost. It's a conflict not of values being forced on them but of contemporary Jahiliyyah within muslim societies. This secular force is seen as having origin in the US, but it's very much a conflict over local power, between secular reformists and religious conservatives in arab countries. Anyone who thinks Islamic Radicalism was created by the interference of Western powers in Islamic countries just needs to read some writings from the 19th century to realize how very, very wrong they are. The clash between the West and Radical Islam is more of a clash between two growing powers than a simple cause-and-effect.
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Sep 15, 2012 01:04
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brakeless posted:A cuople of things about the drone/"collateral damage"-chat a couple of pages back: Exactly. Really, people need to stop talking about drones specifically, and start talking about why the United States shouldn't continue with this war. War inevitably causes civilian casualties. All wars are stained with innocent blood. In fact, I'd argue that the expectation that war can go on without civilian casualties lessens the dread that everyone should feel at the prospect of it. Sure, nations can avoid using tactics like indiscriminate bombing to lessen causalities, but making war between the US and the Taliban sound like something that can be carried out with minimal innocent lives lost just makes things easier for the war's advocates. Rather than discussing how people are "murdered with drones" (as if a slow-burn war wasn't going on) we should be discussing: 1. What the long-term prospects are of continued NATO presence in Afghanistan 2. Likelihood that the Taliban can be defeated 3. What would be the likely results if the US and allies were to pull out of the country right now, and if it would even be any worse than doing so after a few more years of NATO, Taliban, and civilian deaths
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Sep 15, 2012 01:16
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nvm
Sucrose fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Sep 15, 2012 |
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Sep 15, 2012 01:20
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New Division posted:Do you really think an anecdote like that refutes anything? On second thought, no, I don't. Don't know why I typed it. CIA involvement in that coup is thought to be minimal anyway.
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Sep 15, 2012 01:23
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Karl Sharks posted:How so? I'm not aware of the human rights violations committed by the Allende government. The dude I was chatting with said Allende "wiped his rear end" with the constitution and was impeached and refused to leave, but as New Division very rightly pointed out, this is an anecdote from one person and really means nothing.
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Sep 15, 2012 01:27
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Augure posted:That would probably be because a) Saddam was a brutal tyrant who oppressed his own people with the help of the US, and b) the US embargo killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children for literally no reason. Guess the US is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't.
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Sep 15, 2012 01:43
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Augure posted:No, Saddam didn't kill the half-million children who died under the sanctions regime. ....But he was busy killing at least 100,000 Iraqi Kurds and invading his southern neighbor at the time the UN voted to enact sanctions against him. But tell me more about how the sanctions weren't really Saddam's fault.
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Sep 15, 2012 03:46
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Narciss posted:On the other hand, it is pretty sick that you can send 1/3 of the world into a tizzy by putting up a 5 minute amateur vid on youtube I'm starting to believe that the same people responsible for making the video were responsible for tipping off the Egyptian media about it. They might have tried to time it to coincide with 9/11, too. One of my main reasons for thinking this is that one of the producers himself apparently put up an Arabic dub of the trailer on the web. Of course, what the Arabic dub does is hide the fact that the actors aren't saying anything about Muhammad in the movie, and that those lines have been dubbed in, as would be obvious to an English speaker. That, and the whole bit about blaming the Jews is what makes this whole thing incredibly sketchy. This was all planned from the start, somehow. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Sep 15, 2012 |
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Sep 15, 2012 03:56
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waffle posted:But I agree with you. What mystifies me is that this is what many suggest is What Did It, and to me, it just doesn't add up that one video could cause this sort of chaos. I agree that this may have been a pivot point, but my thought is more that it's baffling that the media appears to be treating this as The Video That hosed The World, when it's clearly, at worst, the pivot point for many to act. My disbelief is, more than anything, pointed towards the media for implying that this video is the primary cause of everything, especially having actually seen the video. I think arguments like this are recasting the real attitude of the people involved into one that's more relate-able to a left-wing Western audience. Yes, decades of US policy have led to a very poor reputation for the US in Islamic countries, but at the same time, the attempts of some people in the thread to claim that these protestors aren't ACTUALLY angry about a film ridiculing Muhammad are completely ignoring the massive cultural issues behind this and what the protestors are actually saying. Perceived American imperialism is cultural as much as physical. Islam isn't a sideshow in this situation. As the radicals see it, Islam is under constant attack by the West (and Jews), and a film released in America that portrays The Prophet as a murderous, homosexual child molester is worth killing to stop. They see it as an attack on their very identity. Keep in mind that this entire region has never been inundated with potentially offensive material openly displayed like the West has, and that like SentSix has said, many countries where until recently, all films had to be created with state approval. Everyone who's trying to claim these protests aren't really about a movie or can't believe this would happen over a movie are missing the massive culture clash that's occurring. For God's sakes, actually look at the signs the protestors are holding up. Do you think they're lying or covering up the true reasons they're there?
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Sep 15, 2012 05:15
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Myrdhale posted:This is it exactly. The videos are an excuse, this has been building up for years. With the results of the Arab spring still fairly fresh, the region, though it's now free of the terrible hands of many dictators, the are is inherently unstable now that the existing power structures are either crippled if not torn down altogether. This is an act of anger that has been building for awhile, anger that, although not justified because nothing ever justifies murder, is not impossible to understand or conceive of. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The videos are not an excuse, you're projecting your own thoughts on protestors halfway around the world. Why don't you actually look at what the protestors are saying rather than trying to put words in their mouths? They're almost uniformly all protesting against these assaults on Islam and the prophet Muhammad. Most of them don't even know that the video is amateurishly made and wasn't actually shown in theaters in America, they think it was a full-fledged production just to smear Muhammad.
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Sep 15, 2012 05:19
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Al-Saqr posted:A) these are his own kooky thoughts and opinions, remember the guy's a salafist so it's not strange at all that he has anti-women tendencies, welcome to the gulf. Let's see if he can get any of his ideas passed in an actual, functioning parliament where he has to compromise with every other part of Kuwaiti society. Give me a goddamn break. Someone who wants to disenfranchise half the electorate isn't "fighting for democracy" under any definition. That's not hypocracy, that's flat-out the opposite of pro-democratic. And the idea that a radical should be supported because he couldn't really turn his ideas into law is ludicrous. Anyway, some Kuwaiti guy I was listening to on another forum was saying that he hates the autocratic government, but the Salafis in charge of these protests are even worse, and Westerners should do some research into who they're cheering on before they look like fools.
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Nov 6, 2012 05:24
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Kaal posted:Nope there's plenty of those as well. The Lancet study figure was high because the guys they hired to conduct the study went door to door in some of the hardest hit areas of Baghdad, asked if anyone in the family had died (Iraqi families are massive because the culture of the tribal family remains very strong) and then applied those results to the entire population of Iraq. There's also been some suggestions that the samplers may have been personally motivated to collect high stats. Anyway, the end result is that the study came up with a figure that was 10 times as large as the other counts and estimates of overall deaths, and they didn't have any explanation for how all these folks supposedly died without being noticed. That sounds like a pretty poor way of estimating war deaths, really.
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Jan 19, 2013 23:07
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BCR posted:An interesting article I read. I really never put two and two together with the Algerian civil war and returning jihadists from Afghanistan. An extremely informative article, even if I don't agree with all of its points. I think the use of excessive realpolitik thinking by the experts during the Cold War rather than naive "noble intentions" that the author decries are what got us into a lot of problems in the first place. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 05:31
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Adrastus posted:Yeah, it says in the article that Sentencing 21 people to death for rioting is pretty terrible, even if the riots did cause dozens of deaths. And now they're in one of those situations where they won't rescind the sentences because then they'll look like they're rewarding violence. And so the protests will continue and......that's how revolutions start. Doesn't look good at all.
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Jan 28, 2013 00:36
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VikingSkull posted:I'd bet money that there's already American and other Western boots on the ground this very minute, so guessing they'll be there by years end is kind of silly. Intelligence services are a sneaky lot. When people say "boots on the ground" they don't usually mean spies. Those are a given.
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Apr 25, 2013 21:13
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McDowell posted:So the Assad Regime is to al Nursa what the Federal Government is to 'Al Qaeda' - sounds plausible. What, now you're following 9/11 "Truther" theories? Tell us more about how the Federal Government created "Al Qaeda."
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Jun 1, 2013 11:43
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There is no good solution to this conflict whatsoever. But saying "I hope Assad wins!" is pretty terrible because the result would be a guaranteed massive bloodbath followed by even more repression, torture, and clandestine executions, if it were even possible for Assad to regain control over the entire country, which is doubtful. Assad doesn't even seem to be trying to appeal to or recruit Sunnis anymore, the conflict seems to have gone almost entirely sectarian in nature. The best thing that could possibly happen is if Assad dropped dead tomorrow, and that's about the only thing which I can say with confidence would actually be good for Syria. Things are going to be terrible and bloody no matter who wins.
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Jun 11, 2013 06:28
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I've still got to see partition as the second-worst result, and as the best solution only to avoid more of the first-worst result, genocide. Any partition of this size is going to have to involve mass population transfers/ethnic cleansing for it to work out. The idea that the new nations will treat their minorities well to avoid reprisals against their kin across the border seems pretty tenuous. Additionally it opens the door to conflicts over the new borders, since hard-liners in all the new states are going to claim they got screwed out of territory that's rightfully theirs. But, what do I know, I'm just a random poster on the internet. Edit: like Pieter says, the Roma are treated like garbage everywhere in Europe, even in very stable countries. Unfortunately how those nations treat the Roma isn't going to tell you much about the success or failure of Balkans partitioning, since it's probably not any worse than elsewhere. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Jun 12, 2013 |
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Jun 12, 2013 09:45
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Throw me in with the group who has no idea why Obama is deciding to arm the Syrian rebels, and if someone could come up with the correct geopolitical explanation for it, I'd be happy. The US gov. is clearly not going to let Assad win and would prefer to instead send arms that will clearly end up in the hands of jihadi rebels...why? What is Obama so afraid would happen if Assad re-gains control?
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Jun 16, 2013 03:36
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Cetea posted:It would mean that Iran gains a proxy state in the region, and the Russians would benefit due to them actually helping the winners. The USA gains a new enemy who can now refocus on the US instead of the rebels. Of course, one could say that the US of A already has plenty of enemies, and one more wouldn't really make a difference, but the key here is probably to prevent Iran from becoming stronger; besides, every little bit helps. Mmm. Okay, I think I understand. If Assad re-gains control, he'll be even more in Iran's pocket than he was before, and stopping Iran from expanding its influence is at the top of US goals. An Assad win would also make the US look bad and Russia look good, but I suspect that's a lesser reason, since the US doesn't want to tangle with Russia too much anyway. The US is hoping a post-Assad Syria will look more like Libya (if that can even be considered a good result) and less like Afghanistan, and that the threat of Jihadis taking over is a risk worth taking. The government may be badly miscalculating on that last one, in my opinion. Yet, they didn't want the rebels to win so much that they would be willing to arm them, until Assad actually winning started looking like a distinct possibility. Correct? Volkerball posted:Edit: What's funny is that if they had committed and done this a year and a half ago, it wouldn't be anywhere near as uphill a battle as this appears to be. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. I'm guessing that so long as Assad looked like he was on his way out, the US gov. preferred to publicly keep its hands out of it, even if that meant the jihadi rebels were getting more arms than the seculars. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jun 16, 2013 |
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Jun 16, 2013 04:08
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Vernii posted:Regarding the Iraq war defeat topic that dragged on the last few pages. Looking at it in terms of victory/defeat is absurdly binary because wars aren't that black and white. It would be much more accurate to break down the conclusion of conflicts into four categories: losing badly, losing well, winning badly, winning well. I think someone earlier in the thread got it right when they said something along the lines of "Is it even possible to have a 'victory' when the entire thing was a bad idea to begin with?"
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Jun 16, 2013 08:58
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Actual CNN headline: Putin warns US, West against arming organ-eating Syrian rebels Putin's words, not CNN's, but still.  One guy licked a heart on video and it's "organ eating rebels" to their detractors.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:43
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Volkerball posted:Oh boy. Gunmen stormed a hotel in Pakistan and murdered 11 people, all but one of them foreign tourists. I don't quite understand the Taliban mindset where killing Chinese tourists is suitable retaliation for one of their leaders being killed by an American drone.
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Jun 23, 2013 10:40
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Details are still coming in.
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Close... but completely wrong. Wrong. Taliban commanders had been vowing to destroy the Buddhas as idols as early as 1997. Fine, forget the analogy. The motives are obvious. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Jun 24, 2013 |
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Jun 24, 2013 12:44
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:But that's not what happened. Good try there though, ignoring reality for a hilarious fiction. See above. The Taliban had started drilling holes for dynamite in the Buddhas as soon as they took control of the region. You have an odd idea of reality.
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Jun 24, 2013 12:51
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Gen. Ripper posted:gently caress Now Reuters is saying the attack's over, 5 Taliban, 2 guards dead.
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Jun 25, 2013 08:34
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ReV VAdAUL posted:The military were wary to act during the first uprising because they weren't sure they could trust the rank and file. Are the troops more fond of Morsi? Morsi could just be bullshitting.
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Jun 27, 2013 00:12
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"No, I can't provide any legitimate sources for this information, but trust me guys, it's totally true!"
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Jun 28, 2013 12:23
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Putin should step up his game and evacuate Christians to Russia. Or maybe Obama should, I don't know. It would probably be best if they were all given refuge somewhere, but on the other hand I hate to see these shitheads get to successfully carry out their goal of ethnic cleansing.
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Jul 1, 2013 08:04
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EvanSchenck posted:Rape is prevalent in most places, and I couldn't say whether the Middle East is exceptionally bad in that respect. The reported rates for most crimes, including sexual offenses, tend to be very low in Middle Eastern countries (you can check the UNODC). Egypt actually has the lowest reported rate of sexual assault in the entire world with something like 0.1 per 100,000 (as compared to the US reported rape which I think is closer to 30 per 100k or something). This is undoubtedly an illusion created by under-reporting and mis-categorization, probably combined with a deliberate effort by the authorities to discourage reporting and massage the statistics. Especially considering the well-known toxicity of the Cairo street towards women, who I'm told can expect to be repeatedly propositioned and/or menaced sexually any time they leave their homes. It's virtually impossible to gain any insights on the prevalence of rape in a country from statistics, as rape is the one crime where reporting it to the authorities varies so widely that you can't possibly come to any conclusions from looking at the known data.
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Jul 2, 2013 07:34
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OwlBot 2000 posted:That sounds like a sign women are terrified to speak up for fear of being hurt, shamed or raped again. Anonymous self-reporting in surveys is probably the only way to do any kind of meaningful comparison. Or simply that the stigma of being raped is so great that a woman would never go to the police, since if word got out it could greatly damage her future prospects and her reputation. Awful as that sounds.
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Jul 2, 2013 13:54
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The spokesmen for the Egyptian Presidency and Cabinet have apparently resigned, I don't know how significant that is. (Probably not very)
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Jul 2, 2013 13:57
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The Egyptian health ministry says that 16 people were killed at a pro-Morsi rally yesterday. Things don't look good at all  .
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Jul 3, 2013 08:16
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