Maybe I just don't like bullies.

Post #95,043 by mmoffitt 4/8/03 12:50:18 PM Reply	Maybe I just don't like bullies. Anyone who has read anything I've posted in the War forum understands how I feel about what is happening in the ME and here at home. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, we had friends from Indiana come and visit us. They stayed with us in our blue collar neighborhood for a couple weeks on a couple of occasions. I was thus forever known as the neighborhood "nigger lover" and was routinely beaten up on my walk home from school as a consequence. My hatred of bullies began early. What I see now in this country is very disturbing to me. I see far too many parallels between "The Department of Homeland Security" and the Gestapo, far too many between our invasion of Iraq and subsequent "they'll love us when we win" propaganda and the Nazi propaganda about the invasion of Austria, far too many between our tanks rumbling through Baghdad and Nazi tanks through Paris, our unprovoked attack on Iraq and the numerous unprovoked attacks perpetrated by Nazi Germany, ... I could go on, but you get the point. We have had our vote disregarded, our liberties infringed, the Bill of Rights shredded before our eyes and not a single whimper from the populace. Yes, we "kicked ass" in Afghanistan and we "kicked ass" in Iraq. But the events leading up to the war caused us to become, as Nelson Mandella so precisely put it, "the world's greatest threat to peace." We are no longer "Ugly Americans" we are "Hideous Americans". The tragedy of that is that it might not matter. Because we are also the biggest bully on the block and what the bully wants, he gets. bcnu, Mikem The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice and always has been...We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. - Mark Twain, "Monarchical and Republican Patriotism"
Post #95,089 by Ashton 4/8/03 5:14:38 PM 4/8/03 5:19:42 PM Reply	Bully will do, in summary [oops -meant link --> Warz R'Us] of a situation ugly enough to be sobering, to anyone who doesn't just like to stay drunk on Power. Note the 'Triumphalism' of The Press (once deemed the Fourth Estate of our government!), a Glorious Victory.. by the world's most powerful military machine, over a gnat. Pure crack; \ufffdRally Round the Flag, Boys. Now the difficulties really begin 'Over There'. How did 'we' get to this advanced stage of corrupt-thinking? Corrupt?? What else can you call, the means justify dissembling, tissues of overt lying and intricate obfuscation of underlying motives? [Transl] The ends justify the means. I suppose each of us has a personal list of, how / what things have gone wrong - even those who express support for all or part of the latest-war events right on through today. Just a hunch. To me, and forensically: the "means, method and opportunity" has been the intentional corruption of Language: precisely! as described and warned-against by Confucius, in his little parable which concludes... ... thus if language goes astray, justice will go astray and the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence it matters above all else that language be correct. Our case has taken this form IMO: The rise and acceptance of institutionalized daily lying; hucksterism of every -thing and -Principle which we can give a name / the place of value in a world with a price-tag on Everything - and our giving high social status to the perpetrators of Premeditated Language Murder. Our advertainment has made the political debate now an impossibility, as slogans are equally acceptable in lieu of actual thought -- just as these are acceptable in the endless purveying of merchandise. And various -isms. If I am even near-correct in assigning causality on this scale - language successfully rendered corrupt -?- then there can be no popular pharm-chem Magic Pill to cure the disease. No War on the War Mindset, nor Attack on the Attack-Dog psyche can erase sloth and cupidity, ignorance of history and disdain for the duties of citizenship. (Like informed voting + non-$corrupted legislators.) We'd have to earn back the rights already tacitly surrendered to the Corporatocracy, now in the hands of the religiosity-driven - a cabal of theocrats with a Mission. The Mission has little to do with the Constitution or our illusions about blab words like 'Liberty'and 'Freedom'. Newspeak all. We are the new Isolationists: US vs [Them] -- because We Can / because our military spending is >> the sum of all Other Nations' (soon to rise at the expense of the long neglected infrastructure, Social Security, Health Care, Education). (I don't see any EZ way to get a I'm #1-addict off of a decades long wallow in the crack den.) Rehab will be long, hard and humiliating: anathema to the soft, oblivious and smugly self-Righteous. Cant is now embedded, like the 'reporters'. 'Yes I am a bully; but today I won't bully..' My Gramma was a harbinger of the New Cant. But it's the Same Old One as hers! Ashton The Country I was a citizen of - left me. I didn't leave it. Edit: pity.. can't delta-Forum expostfacto Things to Come -- an old, interesting, Idealistic naive movie about 'progress' from such a mindset. We all missed it, the first time around. And the second and - Edited by Ashton April 8, 2003, 05:19:42 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #95,291 by dmarker 4/9/03 2:27:07 AM Reply	My phrase for this war is from the press 'The chick got in the way' What else can one say. So many women, children & men just got in the way !. Spectres from our past: Beware the future when your children & theirs come after you for what you may have been willing to condone today - dsm 2003 Motivational: When performing activities, ask yourself if the person you most want to be would do, or say, it - dsm 2003

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