|
Mr Plow posted:The price that reflects how much of something we have left and how much we can expect to have in the future is the "natural" price and the price that reflects supply and demand. A price that didn't would be insanity and would represent a gross mismanagement of resources. This is true, but it's only a price that reflects that when the market is responding to reasonable concerns and projections about future situations. Instead, what you usually have is the situation like a few years ago, where what people were actually expecting were based on ideas like "climate change means we're going to have refinery-seeking super-hurricanes every summer forever", or "Yeah, Bush is going to invade Iran next any moment, just watch", together with a good heavy implication of "running out of oil is just like running out of beer, you know, reach into the cooler and there's none there." With billions of profits to be made from amping that fear up. For all that oil is a finite resource with huge demand with little short-term flexibility, the situation still has got a lot in common with Glenn Beck selling gold futures on the grounds that the dollar is going to be worthless any day now while gold is going to keep going up forever, or that guy on the shopping channel telling you that these Star Trek: Enterprise commemorative plates are selling fast and they're not making any more.
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2011 02:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:42 |
|
|
quadratic posted:Did you just pull that number out of your rear end? Pulled it out of Ham's rear end, actually. Or rather, Ham was saying that the vote was looking like it was going to be really close in polling before the MB people chimed in on the religious duty, and then we got the results we did. I don't know how much of it was due to MB statements and how much was due to the early polls being off, but haven't seen anything to really discount either.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2011 23:59
|
|
|
waffle posted:Preserving purebred animal lines is literally the opposite of promoting genetic diversity It's not that cut and dry: one form of losing biodiversity is when individual, genetically distinct populations become irrevocably blended through human action. A great number of surviving bison are interbred with domestic cattle, and wildcat populations have their genetic distinction threatened by interbreeding with domestic cats. A lot of effort is currently undergone in zoos to keep distinct breeding populations of different tiger subspecies, and the Barbary lion is largely considered extinct because, while there are a number of part Barbary lions in zoos and maybe some full blooded ones, there was so much careless breeding that no one knows for sure. How important this all is, that's another question, but when you have a number of distinct populations of an organism it's generally considered important to keep distinct breeding stocks. Not that the article lacks for crazy. Seems to be beating the overpopulation drum like it's 1970 again, and did you notice he carefully places "we're at peak water because processing water takes energy" before and on a different page from "we're nowhere near peak energy if we play our cards right"? Even if I'm dubious of his wave power buoys example.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2011 06:54
|
|
|
Young Freud posted:Well, not only does it have a low melting point, but it's also a very reactive element. I forget the whole chemistry behind it, but there's some reason aluminum can actually catch fire and burn. I think it has to do with that it reacts to a base just as does to an acid. Aluminum is very reactive and burns very hot - thermite is aluminum powder and an oxidizer, after all. Normally it's hard to really light on fire, though, and the bulk metal really isn't going to burn even if you subject it to a lot of heat, just melt into a puddle that quickly crusts over with aluminum oxide like the bare metal itself. On the other hand, conditions in warfare can easily involve a high temperature fire combined with explosions cutting the base metal into much more combustible ribbons or molten droplets, and there you might be able to spark something self-sustaining. It's definitely more susceptible to heat-related dangers than iron though, whether it burns or not, and in modern combat that's a valid concern.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2011 04:59
|
|
|
Brown Moses posted:"Unless you're offering a socialist utopia I'll just keep my mad dictator, thank you very much!" This is the thing that gets me. It's reasonable to not want to blindly back anyone who isn't the existing regime. It's reasonable to insist that those taking power be expected to uphold rule of law, human rights, and other principles of moral and ethical government. Still, I've seen it going back at least to the Egyptian protests, with "do we want to give these people democracy? They'll just vote for anti-americans/Islamists/capitalists/bogeyman-of-choice!" Add levels of "those brown savages clearly aren't ready" to taste. That part. That's not cool. Wanting to be sure that a population's shift to self-determined government is actually fair and transparent is great. Damning the idea because those crazy kids might make a bad choice, or one you don't support, not so much.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2011 11:16
|
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:But by that reasoning people fighting for human rights in Belarus, Iran, North Korea, China etc etc are pro-american imperialists. That's the problem - if the only defining property of a state is its attitude to America, then the crimes of that state are irrelevant and anyone pointing out those crimes is simply a shill for the opposing side. Such a worldview means that it's allright for a state to opress the poo poo out of its population as long as the state itself opposes the western imperialists. The extra irony is that often the people taking such stances name support of brutal authoritarian regimes for sake of realpolitik strategy as one of the great evils of the US, then happily speak up for brutal authoritarian regimes just because they oppose the US.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2011 21:46
|
|
|
schadenfraud posted:I couldn't agree with you more and that's the real problem I have with organisations like Stop the War. I supported them on Afghanistan and Iraq, but their 'stop colonising Libya!' schtic is a load of old crap. Gaddafi was killing his own people completely at random. The people of Libya wanted us to intervene - they asked for our help. I just don't see how people can justify their opposition to the intervention in Libya when you hear and see what was going on before we got our arses in gear and decided to stop an absolute massacre. Sometimes when you have a good argument, you want to start using it in places where it doesn't really fit. So a lot of people just dust off the good reasons they had to oppose Iraq and figure it's good enough for any US involvement in the Middle East, or anywhere. Similarly, with Mubarak you saw the standby "he was just a US puppet from the day he went into power" argument, which maybe had some teeth if not as much as some wanted, but then the same people said the same thing without thinking when things heated up in Libya. Or who said, "We're only supporting the rebels so we can get the oil flowing!" when the status quo was Libya selling happily to the West. Those more ridiculous standbys got dropped or refined after a few weeks, but they show the mindset: make mind up first, figure out reasons later.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2011 08:44
|
|
|
Brown Moses posted:This piece from the Telegraph is about the progress of the conflict, and why people need to stop worry about how long things are taking: It's really interesting how many people expect a whole civil war to wrap up faster than the typical fresh Youtube sensation.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2011 09:54
|
|
|
Young Freud posted:This could have happened, but buying boxes and boxes of ammo means that Qaddafi buys one less fancy robe or makeup for his bodyguards. Seriously, Qaddafi was cutting corners with his own army. The guy had maybe 6 working Mirages early in the war, with most of his air force being cannibalized prior to continue working. It stands to reason that Qaddafi was buying new weapons and hoping that would iron out any neglect in training or maintenance. When you're budgeting a military, shiny new weapons seem even more appealing compared to training when you realize that the less training you do, the longer they'll last. When you just want your military to keep people from getting ideas and don't plan to see much use, it can be pretty cost effective to make sure you only take out those tanks and planes and fancy new rifles when you know there's someone to see you have them.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2011 23:07
|
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:I was thinking along the lines of a dirty bomb. Which. you know, lacks all military purpose. And for that matter, it's not all that effective even for that. More strongly radioactive materials, or for that matter just more toxic non-radioactive heavy metals, would be better even if you were assuming some mustache-twirling supervillainy.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2011 07:26
|
|
|
J33uk posted:One of the big issues surrounding the intervention and this thread is that there's not a great deal of visibile progress made. The rebels are gaining ground, slowly, but that big break out that always seems just over the horizon isn't getting any closer. Gaddafi hasn't faded away and the TNC still seems fragile, meanwhile every day the country's infrastructure just gets weaker and weaker. With things like the mercenary army that only existed on Twtitter not being revealed, it's becoming more apparent that the NATO plan was to save Benghazi (as they well should have) and that there wasn't too much more thought put into what to do next. We're 3 months into this and there isn't an end in sight, so it's not surprising that people are starting to become more and more skeptical or disinterested. That's really the lingering problem of this. Since WWII I understand the average civil war has lasted about four years, while as long as the Arab Spring has been going a common sentiment of internet commenters has seemingly been "well after I read news about Tunisia/Egypt/Syria/Libya/wherever I went to bed, had lunch with some friends, AND marathoned S3 of The Wire, and there still isn't a new government in place? This is a hopless stalemate that will never end!" While it's certainly reasonable to expect foreign air power to shorten the war in Libya, it only goes so far, especially given that when that intervention started things were looking like it was going to be a rout of helpless underequipped rebel forces. Turning that around takes time, and just since we live in a day when news comes out instantly by Twitter doesn't mean everything will happen fast.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2011 01:41
|
|
|
King Dopplepopolos posted:There was something of an armed insurrection, in the latter part of the Gulf War, but we stood by as they were virtually annihilated by Saddam's forces. Also, no one asked us to go into Iraq the way the rebels did with Libya, which seems to be a nontrivial distinction. That's really it. If the US had supported the armed resistances in Iraq, if it had done so when they were being crushed, if it had worked through them rather than just sending its own invading force, and if it had not made WMD claims and Al-Qaida links the primary justification for war, Iraq would be a lot more comparable to Libya. However, if these were true, Iraq would have been a much different conflict, and many of the arguments used before or against would have been different both in claims and underlying truths. The mindset of "This argument worked really good when I made it against Iraq, so now I'm going to make it against every other potential foreign intervention" is simply a lazy one. Though I will grant that this time the spurious AQ claims have migrated from the pro-intervention to the anti-intervention side, so people at least are switching it up a little.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2011 21:54
|
|
|
Jut posted:You mean 1 incident confirmed by NATO? It's entirely possible there are others, but if there was much to speak of I imagine that loyalist forces would be parading them in front of reporters, instead of the steady stream of car accident victims, unexploded Soviet-era munitions, and molotov cocktail damage we've been seeing. The quality of the evidence against NATO precision has been a pretty good argument for it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2011 21:34
|
|
|
Jut posted:The key thing that's missing here is evidence. It's probable what NATO have been fudging numbers, and also probable that CQ has been lying in some cases. To dismiss all of CQ's claims as lies based purely on hearsay (i.e. "some guy said a doctor passed him a note") and faulty appeals to reason ("who's more trustworthy huh?") is just as blinkered as someone making their decisions based on politics. This is the key thing, but not in the way you're saying: the fact is the lack of evidence says a great deal. No matter what motivation NATO has to play down its collateral damage, CQ's regime has a far greater one, to the stake of its own survival, to do the opposite; it must establish that such indiscriminate damage to civilians is in fact being done, and that the war being waged against it by both internal rebels and outside forces is both illegitimate and harmful. It's a motivation of NATO avoiding a couple of small black marks vs. the existing regime's entire existence: the stakes are as unequal as the sides. This doesn't mean the regime is lying: if it's in the right, it would have no need to, and even if it decided to embellish the truth there would still be truth in there. What it does mean is that it has an absolute need to push its enemy's wrongdoings, and push them hard. Further, it has control of its territory, and a ready supply of journalists to show around. Instead, it has given a mix of flimsy, doubtful, and easily disproved claims. This says a whole lot, in the way that when you tell a UFO enthusiast to bring out his best evidence he'll have some unsubstantiated reports, a few blurry flying saucer photographs with visible wires, and the "Alien Autopsy" video. The more bad evidence that gets not just carted out, but headlined, the clearer a sign it is that the good evidence simply is not there.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2011 06:50
|
|
|
Chortles posted:Jut, I believe that Ham, one of our own goons who was protesting during the January 25-February 11 period, said that at one point upper brass did order suppression of the protesters but that US-trained junior and mid-level officers disobeyed these orders. I remember this too. There was some talk of that vertical divide between the US trained younger/lower officers and the Soviet trained older officers who knew Mubarak before he even took power (and let's note that early on he was pretty widely popular as I understand it), and also a horizontal divide between some of the top brass, so that the lower ranks were getting conflicting orders, and chose to go with the ones to keep out of it, alternatively to outright disobeying a unified voice from above. In any case, the point is Mubarak didn't have the control of the military he wanted, and this (if perhaps not only this) kept crackdowns from being more severe.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2011 10:17
|
|
|
Slantedfloors posted:Why the hell do dictators fake elections/referendums, and then give themselves or their position 98% of the vote? What the gently caress? Do they not understand that if they fake only a close victory, people might actually believe them? I've wondered this too. Maybe since if you make it close you have to admit you have a lot of actual opposition, rather than a handful of malcontents and foreign-owned puppet groups. Or maybe it's just the swelling of the ego.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2011 20:45
|
|
|
Tiny posted:Is he on suicide watch? Is this the hospital / cronies BS'ing trying to garner sympathy by making it look like he's lost the will to live? Word is he has stomach cancer: went to Germany for surgery last year, but it's back and progressing. If there's any real refutation of that, I haven't heard it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2011 08:35
|
|
|
Does it even qualify as a derail this time? As sure as the sun rises, every couple pages a troll or genuinely clueless poli sci student will pop in to cargo cult more sensible arguments wiser people have made about totally different conflicts. Aside from that, whoa. I wasn't expecting things to light up in Tripoli anywhere near this fast. Let's hope we're near a resolution. And yes, I hope it doesn't collapse into further bloody infighting. Revolutions often don't end gracefully, even if I don't subscribe to the  IMPERIALISM! and  NEOLIBERALS! panics. But a chance of something better is more than they had under a deeply entrenched personality cult dictator.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2011 06:43
|
|
|
Sir John Falstaff posted:That would be this Lizzie Phelan (random but representative quotes): Wow, that is great. Lizzie's Liberation posted:LIBYA/ENGLAND, WHICH IS THE POLICE STATE? Don't get me wrong, the British government is pretty heavy-handed about some of this, but some perspective here. Past that, the way every single post on the blog has the "Anti-Imperialist" tag. How the rebels are unironically called "counterrevolutionaries" because obviously the forty-year entrenched dictator really embodies revolution in Libya. The claims about how the full force of NATO (as if they were using it) isn't able to make any effect against Libyan resolve, and the "rats" are losing ground to the true believers at every turn. It's just weird thinking that people read this stuff, and believe it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2011 11:43
|
|
|
Another shot of this guy! He is still my hero.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2011 05:05
|
|
|
Walldo posted:There are a few things in that article that raise enough flags that make me wonder. I've tried to keep up with the Libyan situation and I've done a fair amount of reading and this is the first I've heard of Libyans or Intelligence Agencies doubting Gaddafi's daughter died in the attack (this could just be chalked up to me somehow missing this fact). Up until this, the main doubt I'd heard about Hanna Gaddafi was not whether she was still alive, but whether she had ever existed. Since she was never mentioned by anyone before the 1986 bombing, there has long been speculation of a posthumous adoption where he just found a dead girl and said it was the bombing that killed "his daughter." Her existing, and being alive, and having been doing things under her name all along, that makes it a really bizarre claim if true.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 26, 2011 11:33
|
|
|
Zedsdeadbaby posted:What's the point of extraditing a comatose and dying man? I am one of those who think he shouldn't have been released from Scotland but what's done is done now and it genuinely looks like he's living out his very last days now. I'd imagine the people who want him extradited again even now are the same who have been doubting how sick he really is since the time of his release. I agree with you that extradition is pointless now, but given the guy had "three months to live" two years ago I'm hardly astonished at rumors of deceit in it all.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2011 11:31
|
|
|
Brown Moses posted:I've seen several condoms on the end of gun barrels in various photos. That's an old trick too, not just for sand but for damp conditions.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2011 08:12
|
|
|
ecureuilmatrix posted:One for the "Crazy Frenchmen" file: The French have some amazing helicopters these days.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2011 06:31
|
|
|
Dr. Video Games 0055 posted:Yeah, the only reason this civil war didn't drag on longer is because NATO pounded Gadhafi as hard as they did. I'm just glad it was kept as limited as it was. While it's always impossible to be sure, I'd say it's more likely that NATO is the reason the rebellion wasn't swiftly crushed, given what the momentum was before airstrikes started.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2011 21:57
|
|
|
Bolivar posted:Did Gaddafi travel a lot, or spend time in other countries? With 200 billion dollars it would probably make sense to not spend most your time in a lovely country like Libya. Of course, keeping the dictatorship running and the money flowing requires a certain presence in the country. That's the whole point of being a dictator. When you can afford to build luxurious palaces, wall off enormous compounds, and make people who bother you vanish in the middle of the night, it's no longer a lovely country you're in. At least for you.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2011 11:31
|
|
|
Here's the basic timeline of the Libyan economy: In the 1950s Libya was quite poor, until the discovery of oil in 1959 caused a massive increase in wealth during the following decade. Under the monarchy the distribution of wealth wasn't terribly fair, had a lot of domination by foreign interests, and also by the fact that the king was Cyrenaican, from the east of the country, and favored it over the western regions. This combined with other political matters at the time led to the coup in 1969, where Gaddafi ended up in control of an already rapidly growing economy in an oil-rich state. This is not a standing start. Almost immediately, Gaddafi saw to nationalization of the oil industry and making a mixed economy. A good amount of money got spent on education, housing, and general subsidies to the population. A good thing, but importantly also helped to consolidate power and to still favor those he found most loyal. Notably, a lot of the east, which had supported the monarchy when they had it good, has been passed up on infrastructure spending for pretty much his entire reign. A lot more went into large amounts of arms spending, military adventures in Chad and Egypt, trying to buy all sorts of chemical and nuclear weapons, funding all sorts of terrorist organizations, and most importantly building the nest egg for that $200 billion he died on. By the late 1970s, Libya was a wealthy country even so. It had a GDP higher than Spain, Italy, South Korea, or New Zealand. This was about when Gaddafi went past nationalizing the oil industry to nationalizing the rest of the economy and strongly curtailing the private sector and property ownership in general, and when he really got into writing about economic theory. Coincidentally, this is when the Libyan economy relatively flatlined. I'm not going to blame the end of rapid expansion on nationalization, at least not alone: big factors were oil prices dropping in the 1980s, and economic sanctions imposed on the country following the terror sponsoring. Still, the economic reforms led to more of the country being run by cronies, more points at which money could go into Gaddafi's pockets, and a notable brain drain of educated and skilled workers who left the country in its wake. While some ambitious infrastructure projects were undertaken (like the irrigation) little progress to this date has been made otherwise toward building any sort of manufacturing base or expanding the Libyan economy past just selling oil, tying the country's wealth to oil production alone for as long as it lasts. Also, as noted, less loyal areas have seen less of the wealth, while Gaddafi's friends and tribesmen get the best of the best. So cut to 2010: Libya is a country doing very well by African standards. This says a lot of how low African standards are, especially once you look past some state media control and see how things are in the parts of the country that got less of Dear Leader's favor. It says a lot of how Libya is pumping more oil per capita than almost anywhere in Africa too, and has been doing so for a rather long time. Its GDP was up to $90 billion. Per capita, that's nearly half that of Spain, Italy, South Korea, or New Zealand. Sum total, it's nearly half of what Gaddafi personally had in the bank. There's a pattern to be seen here. To make a long story short, Libya has long had good living standards for its region, largely on account of being in a pretty lovely region and having really massive resource wealth for such a small country. The economic miracle is a myth: it was a kleptocracy with a little more bread and circuses than some others. The biggest parts of its growth were before any real economic reforms took hold, and planning since has been slipshod at best. Whether or not privatization is a bad idea, "neoliberalism ruined it" is also a myth, since the stagnation and formation of the status quo happened during, though not strictly because of, the period of full nationalization. If Libya had been an economic miracle, or even competently or fairly managed after decades of oil wealth and infrastructure investment in a lightly populated country, we'd be comparing its economic situation and standards of living to Norway, not to Egypt. Throwing some crumbs to the people was nice and all, and maybe more brutal thieving dictators should do it, but I'd rather support just getting rid of brutal thieving dictators in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2011 07:24
|
|
|
eSports Chaebol posted:The issue is that right now there is a prime opportunity to paint Qaddafi with a single stroke, including his economic legacy, in order to reverse the economy in the direction of providing less for the Libyan people, which would be a very bad thing. That's exactly why the myth has to be put to rest. "Gaddafi was a bad man but he ran a good economy" is a lie. The kind of lie that can be debunked by anyone with five minutes and an internet connection. If it is used, it will be called out, and those using it discredited. "The future of Libya's economy must be transparent, and its wealth needs to go to its people rather than its rulers" is a truth that stands on its own, as is "don't break a safety net unless you have a better one."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2011 08:01
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:I don't know if you people have noticed yet, but this whole argument is silly and neither side will be swayed by anything. It's true, but all the same it's hard not to marvel at leftists going all "BOOTSTRAPS!" on human rights issues.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2011 19:41
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:Nobody has proved this is actually true, though. I would say again that signs point firmly to the opposite, but it's more honest to say they point to a situation where only most rather than all of the wealth went to enable the wealthy and targets abroad, and that the most effective parts were the early harnessing of rapidly-growing oil wealth done before Gaddafi developed the rest of his markedly less effective economic policies. Again, while Libya was once wealthier than Spain or Italy, and has an oil-based economy relative to its population that might better draw comparison to Norway, people insist on comparing it to Egypt or Chad. While Gaddafi died with golden palaces and $200B in the bank. Libya's a economy was a disaster that enriched the ruling elite, just leaving more crumbs for the poor than most, and if you say otherwise you had better be one of those people that say "poverty doesn't exist in the US because our poor people have TVs and air conditioners" because you're using the same arguments. Libya by all rights should have West European standards of living after decades of oil wealth, and it's "well, really good for Africa." Which is an estimate that's only been dropping since there's been more view of the country outside of the old regime's press control, and of how neglected places and people not on the "most loyal" list were. The "at least he made the
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2011 00:49
|
|
|
Zeroisanumber posted:Another question: Do they have any industry outside of the oil industry, or is that it? Not really. There's been ample time and money to build some manufacturing base, but I think any momentum that way crashed in the "now let's nationalize all the other businesses" phase of Gaddafi's economic plan followed by a lack of interest from government managers. A side effect of this has been the economy being totally tied to current oil prices, and pretty much sunk whenever it starts to run out. $200 billion probably could have made a lot of difference in all of this over the years, too.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2011 01:04
|
|
|
We get it, yeah. No one's actually defending Gaddafi. They're just establishing that the only people who ever had a problem with him were far worse monsters, with mean spirits and ineffective policies. And no one's saying Libyans don't have a right to rebel. Just that the ones rebelling are uniformly terrible people and/or Western shills, and that even if they're genuinely suffering they don't deserve freedoms that they can't take with their own bare hands. Dog whistle arguments on the left are typically approached a little differently than on the right, but they're recognizable. Especially when the BOOTSTRAPS! part on the end is so similar. As for not conflating communism and dictatorship, I can agree with you in principle but in practice an example of Cuban air support might raise its own questions against fighting dictatorship.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2011 20:01
|
|
|
Jut posted:The Libyan intervention screwed over Syria. Russia and China have been critical of how the UNSCR was twisted from 'protecting civilians' to regime change and have already vetoed a UNSCR concerning Syria for this very reason. Near as I can tell it was screwed even before Libya: it being Russia's only Mediterranean port means they have a lot less desire to rock the boat with the current regime than they even did "just" for trade contracts with Libya.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2011 20:13
|
|
|
Amused to Death posted:Well credit is due where it's due, Caro's videos are pretty good. In one there's a receipt for some type of ordinance I believe that appears to be dated from 1977. Is this in any way normal for a military to hold onto surplus supplies or is this related to Gaddafi not really keeping the military upgraded to ensure no threats to him? It's definitely related. Libya did most of its military buying in the 1970s, and has been largely under embargo since. There's newer stuff from recent years, but a relative minority. Even with it being relatively "dumb" Soviet export equipment a great deal of it wasn't in working order even when the fighting started. That was enough to overpower how lightly armed the rebels were to start, but compared to even solid militaries in the region it was an old and creaky mess with a scattering of new toys.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2011 21:10
|
|
|
ThePutty posted:Considering the massive amount of ground targets NATO took out in Libya, it would also render vehicles useless if they're open. But considering Assad has no problem with genocide against his people, they'd probably start hiding them in civillians areas so NATO won't bomb them. That's a huge part of it too. Even if you want to go past the ground strikes against anti-aircraft inherent in a no-fly zone, Libya made targeting vehicles really easy since waging war there requires long drives and supply chains through empty desert, and there were discernible fronts besides. Syria's a lot more densely populated and the situation more muddled in general. Even with more organized rebels, supporting them from the air would cause more civilian death than Gaddafi ever claimed was happening in Libya.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2011 21:47
|
|
|
A scenario: Your racist grandmother sends you and the rest of her friends and family an email about a terrible story where this sweet blonde white girl was going for a jog in her peaceful neighborhood when she was attacked and raped by three black guys from the bad part of town. And further goes on about how they "got off on a technicality" and quotes some "left-wing politician" of having spoken up on the criminals' behalf. It might even say something about how and why mainstream news agencies are playing it down. You look into it. Maybe the whole scenario doesn't show up in police records. Maybe the details are wrong or heavily exaggerated. Maybe things are left out, like how the charges were dropped when it became obvious the three didn't do it at all. Maybe, possibly, it even happened just like she said. Which of those is true is secondary though. It's not that it "doesn't matter" because if it's at all real it's a terrible story. But the important thing to address is that how the story is framed, and the circles it's circulated in, are designed to frame a narrative about the terrible threat of black-on-white violence, how it's a dominant form of crime rather than an isolated incident, and how the evil/deluded left-wing conspiracy, guided by millitant black supremacists, is trying to leave us all vulnerable to it. You don't need to establish that the story is entirely false to point out the problems in what your grandmother is doing. The narrative of "rats" and "NATO mercenaries" is the same sort of framing. Even when you filter out the many accounts that are unreliable or clearly falsified, there's a clear attempt to turn (still terrible) collateral damage from targeted strikes at military targets into a narrative of indiscriminate carpet bombing or even eager blood thirst for Arab children as part of a broad scheme conducted for only the most evil of purposes.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2011 23:56
|
|
|
That reminds me, has there been any news on the chemical stockpiles that weren't scheduled for destruction until the end of the year? I recall there were still ten tons of mustard gas or something.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2011 23:46
|
|
|
Megiddo posted:This is the least likely "if" ever uttered in the history of mankind. On what planet do you live where this sentence can seriously come out of your computer terminal? The guy had amassed a wealth of $200 billion dollars - that's the GDP of Israel - that he chose to bilk his people out of for his own ingratiation, not for a military or NBC weapons build-up. Wikipedia posted:In 1972 Gaddafi tried to get the People's Republic of China to sell him a nuclear bomb. He then tried to get a bomb from Pakistan, but Pakistan severed its ties before it succeeded in building a bomb. In 1978, Gaddafi turned to Pakistan's rival, India, for help building its own nuclear bomb, and asked Indira Gandhi to build an advanced atomic power plant. In July 1978, Gaddafi and Gandhi reached a memorandum and signed a Memorandum of understanding to cooperate in peaceful applications of nuclear energy as part of India's Atom of Peace policy. In 1991, then Prime Minister Navaz Sharif paid a state visit to Libya to hold talks on the promotion of a Free Trade Agreement between Pakistan and Libya. However, Gaddafi focused on demanding Pakistan's Prime Minister sell him a nuclear weapon, which surprised many of the Prime Minister's delegation members and journalists. When Prime minister Sharif refused Gaddafi's demand, Gaddafi disrespected him, calling him a "Corrupt politician", a term which insulted and surprised Sharif.The Prime minister cancelled the talks and immediately returned to Pakistan and expelled the Libyan Ambassador from Pakistan. Really he was more interested in buying than developing his own, it looks like. But like with chemical weapons and sponsoring terrorists, once 9/11 happened he realized even that might cross the line from being a center of attention to center of invasion from the West, and settled back with his billions instead.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2011 03:23
|
|
|
Of all the failings and evils I have heard of modern capitalist states, "has disincentives to perform mass invasions, total war, and brutal occupations" is one of the less convincing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2011 12:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:42 |
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:Pretty much just to send a message to the US that Fixed that. Not to say the rest of the world didn't agree there, but it's important to remember, not just with Obama but with every year, that the Peace Prize is the odd one out of the Nobel prizes. Each has a small committee that collects and screens nominations then makes suggestions, while a larger body from an outside organization actually makes the decision. With the Nobel Peace Prize, the same five people handle the whole process, and between that and the nature of the prize itself this makes it immensely shaped by the personal views of a few people, who themselves are chosen by a national parliament and will reflect its current politics. As a result, its historical quality is pretty variable even without taking hindsight into account. I remember speculation from some Norwegians at the time that the committee was like many probably starstruck by Obama and wanted a chance to meet him. Might be exaggeration, but maybe not far off. Brown Moses posted:New Caro video where he explores an ammo dump and breaks into a box of mortar shells When I was a kid I once thought "ammo dump" meant just like a cartoon garbage dump only ammo, rather than any sort of deliberate storage. My child self feels redeemed. Killer robot fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Nov 1, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2011 16:16
|
|