That is not a a good argument. Sure there was still racism after the end of the civil war but no one was able to buy and sell others. The same way you don't have to worry about the government tracking you down and executing you in front of a mob in Iraq now that is it illegal. People not liking you isn't as bad as the government killing you.
I'm certain that the consequences are far graver than "people not liking you." After slavery blacks were still being harassed, beaten, oppressed, jailed and publicly executed by the establishment. The situation for homosexuals won't differ in Iraq because there is a law saying it's okay. It's not as if someone can come out and publicly be gay and expect to live a normal life. Their tribe will kill them. No one will take them in and they won't be able to find a job.
It is still not the same as the government trying to kill you. Social exclusion is not nearly the same as illegality. It will still suck to be gay. I'm not saying it won't.
Yes it is. Either way you have to hide your sexual orientation if you want to survive. The government won't care if gay people are hung on a daily basis.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-19570870
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19557895
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-19570870
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19557895
Last edited by 13/f/taiwan (2013-04-24 21:26:36)
If you don't understand how big of a difference there is between the government trying to kill you and not trying to kill then I can't help you.
Yeah, Washington. In your face, California.Macbeth wrote:
FWIW it is no larger a crime to be gay in Iraq
You voted for that I assume. Did you also vote for legal pot?unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Yeah, Washington.Macbeth wrote:
FWIW it is no larger a crime to be gay in Iraq
Yes, and I partake of neither. I just didn't see the point of the state gov't wasting its time giving a rat's ass about either.Macbeth wrote:
You voted for that I assume. Did you also vote for legal pot?unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Yeah, Washington.Macbeth wrote:
FWIW it is no larger a crime to be gay in Iraq
um, how dense are you? did you cheer when george bush emerged on the deck with "mission acccomplished" in the background, too? it is almost unanimous in places like iraq (and in newly 'democratizing' places like egypt) that the living standard and social situations for its residents is worse than ever. either sectarian conflicts have been brought to the fore, new strains of radical-conservative islam have taken a footing, or in general there has been a break-down in administration and law and order. i have seen countless interviews with iraqi youth and women (and an interview with an egyptian woman that, again, comes to mind) who will all say "the country is 'free' now, but things are worse than ever for us". most iraqis in a recent poll said they preferred their country under saddam. they prefer living under a tyrannical dictator - yet one who achieves order and a semblance of peace - rather than in their current state. so the new government of iraq have declared it 'okay' to be a homosexual - you really think that matters a shit to the new ideological interests that have been given free reign in the country? you are dumb as shit, man.Macbeth wrote:
That is not a a good argument. Sure there was still racism after the end of the civil war but no one was able to buy and sell others. The same way you don't have to worry about the government tracking you down and executing you in front of a mob in Iraq now that is it illegal. People not liking you isn't as bad as the government killing you.
taiwan is totally right on this matter. america in iraq has been an unmitigated disaster. even your western allies and people ideologically on-side with you regard it as a total failure and money-sink. the moment that saddam's head was in that noose on live television, the western world shuddered at what they had done. and now the country is systematically fucked, and its people are nostalgic for a mass-murderer to be back in power. iraq is an embarrassment for the US (and the UK too, blair should be tried for war crimes with his fake WMD lies to the public).
if you don't understand the difference between a stability and order forced by a dictator and a total lack of all order and state-'safety', then your political science degree clearly isn't helping you. most iraqi people preferred saddam. period. at least under saddam the military kept the police and other armed militant/radical groups in order. now there is almost no 'fear' of order or accountability in that state.Macbeth wrote:
If you don't understand how big of a difference there is between the government trying to kill you and not trying to kill then I can't help you.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-25 03:57:41)
A well written summary of the past couple of weeks. I shortened it a little.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_bos … argain/?ok
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_bos … argain/?ok
We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers. We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects. (He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)
We’ve watched elected officials and political commentators struggle to twist every nubbin of news or rumor toward some perceived short-term tactical advantage. It was as if the only real importance of this horrific but modestly scaled terrorist attack lay in how it could prove the essential rightness of one’s existing worldview, and — of course! — how it would play in the 2014 midterms. On the right, people were sure the Boston bombings were part of a massive jihadi plot – no doubt one linked to al-Qaida and Iran and Saddam Hussein and all the other landmarks in the connect-the-dots paranoid worldview of Islamophobia. (In fact, many people are still convinced of that.) On the left we heard a lot of theories about Patriots’ Day and Waco and Oklahoma City, along with the argument that it would be better for global peace if the bombers turned out to be white Americans rather than foreign Muslims. (I sympathize with the underlying point David Sirota was making there, by the way, but the way it was phrased was deliberately inflammatory.)
The supposed tradeoff for that sacrifice was that we would be protected, at least for a while, from the political violence and terrorism and low-level warfare that is nearly an everyday occurrence in many parts of the world. According to the Afghan government, for example, a NATO air attack on April 6 killed 17 civilians in Kunar province, 12 of them children. We’ve heard almost nothing about that on this side of the world, partly because the United States military has not yet admitted that it even happened. But it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.
We are supposed to be protected, and then something like Boston comes along, a small-minded and bloody attack that appears to have been conducted by a couple of guys flying under the radar of law enforcement or national intelligence, pursuing some obscure agenda we will probably never understand. (We have recently learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his family were interviewed by the FBI in 2011, apparently at the request of Russian intelligence, and agents found “no derogatory information.” Is that the right’s new Benghazi I smell?) Not only does it conjure up all the leftover post-traumatic jitters from 9/11 – which for many of us will be there for the rest of our lives – it also makes clear that our Faustian bargain was completely bogus, and the devil never intended to hold up his end of the deal. We surrendered our rights to a government of war criminals, who promised us certainty and security in a world that offers none. We should have known better, and in fact we did. At the literal birth moment of American democracy, Benjamin Franklin summed it up in a single sentence: “Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
if you want to read a real woeful jeremiad about america, check out this upper-middle class harvard-literary jew having a moan.
http://nplusonemag.com/aftermath-and-prelude
http://nplusonemag.com/aftermath-and-prelude
My days are probably least different from yours on occasions of special public horror: another gun massacre, a bombing on American soil, the deadly explosion of a fertilizer plant. And like nearly everyone else I was angry and upset all last week, if not always for universal reasons. On Monday morning I read testimony in the Times from one of the hunger strikers indefinitely detained, so far without trial, at Guantanamo Bay, about his painful force-feeding. A few hours later the Boston Marathon was bombed, most likely, it later emerged, by two brothers, one a permanent resident and the other an American citizen, of Chechen background. The images on TV were among the worst I’ve seen, and I didn’t even deliberately look, just glanced for a second in a bar. On Wednesday, the Senate defeated measures to mandate background checks for gun purchasers and restrict the size of bullet magazines for assault weapons, although gun violence kills about 32,000 Americans every year, a number an order of magnitude greater than the approximately 3,400 deaths in the US from terrorism since 1970. On Thursday, one of several terrible headlines in the Times read: “More Greek Children Are Going Hungry.” Also on Thursday I learned that the perfectly credentialed American economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff had drawn and over three years promoted a misleading causal inference from data they failed to release until last week: this was that a country’s high debt to GDP ratio tends to induce rather than reflect slow economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff’s work has been basic to the intellectual armature of politicians promoting austerity in the US and the EU, Greece with its hungry children included. On Friday, I woke to find out that an American fertilizer plant had blown up, killing at least twelve people. Ammonium nitrate is highly explosive, and for this reason often used by terrorists in truck bombs. The plant in West, Texas had last been inspected for safety twenty-eight years ago. In 1977, about thirty-eight Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors were employed per million American workers; by 2007, about nineteen, or half as many. More than 4,500 American workers are killed on the job each year.
Of all these events, the bombing produced the most nearly universal reaction. Even so, solidarity went only so far. On Friday, with Boston in lockdown as law enforcement agents searched for the surviving suspect in Monday’s bombing, Nate Bell, an Arkansas state representative, tweeted: “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine.” I was in no more sympathy with those words than Bell would be with my views. All week my natural human indignation at murder and maiming had been accompanied by anger over the generally less spectacular damage done by contemporary capitalism. My anger over the inequality capitalism causes, and the hunger, and the fatal deregulation, and the impairment of democracy, and the threat of ecological collapse, runs through nearly every one of my days, alongside a desire not too different from despair to see within my lifetime at least the beginnings of a different order. This anger, amounting at times to real hatred, together with my desire-cum-despair for something better, must have become associated in my mind with mass murder for a simple reason: I know these feelings will never precipitate me into political violence, but at the same time they’re the feelings of mine closest to an impulse to do widespread physical harm. So my worst emotions are mixed up, deeply, with my most humane ones. From the standpoint of any value of mine, the commission of slaughter would be worse than useless. Still, the attraction of violence, except for sadists, is the mirage of effective action, and I have seen that mirage shimmer in my mind’s eye. A similar illusion of efficacy belongs to most anything you or I might say about politics, our species, the planet, and the more so inside a defective democracy.
For more than four years I lived in Buenos Aires, where as it happens in 1994 a Jewish community center was bombed, probably by Iranian operatives, killing eighty-five people and injuring hundreds, and where the sidewalks of my neighborhood were inlaid here and there with ceramic memorials to Argentines, mainly young and leftwing, abducted and killed by the neoliberal junta of the late ’70s. I hated to see how the memorials were chipped, worn down, and sometimes made illegible by ordinary foot and bike traffic, and it occurred to me more than once that I or someone else should look into getting the ceramic plaques replaced by brass ones.
I didn’t expatriate myself for political reasons. But a part of my reluctance to come back to live in the US, as I did in December, was political estrangement from this country, something easier for me to deal with when I’m abroad.
[cont]
I've heard a few people say they're done with holidaying in the US, if they're really so backward they think 20 kids being killed is worth doing nothing over but a muslim killing three adults is worth locking down a whole city and putting 9,000 troops on the streets for then its a place they just don't want to spend any time in - not least for the risk of becoming a freedom statistic.
Fuck Israel
the risk of being exposed to a dumb society
Good, take yur fanny packs and euros and mickey mouse hats and git out! let the door hit your ass on the way it, faggotsDilbert_X wrote:
I've heard a few people say they're done with holidaying in the US, if they're really so backward they think 20 kids being killed is worth doing nothing over but a muslim killing three adults is worth locking down a whole city and putting 9,000 troops on the streets for then its a place they just don't want to spend any time in - not least for the risk of becoming a freedom statistic.
Good, keep your ignorant foreigner selves at home if you're gonna get butthurt over a terrible bill not passing. I love how it's been portrayed in the media 'I can't believe they didn't pass it'. Did you actually look at it? Did you see all the stupid dripping from it? No, you didn't.Dilbert_X wrote:
I've heard a few people say they're done with holidaying in the US, if they're really so backward they think 20 kids being killed is worth doing nothing over but a muslim killing three adults is worth locking down a whole city and putting 9,000 troops on the streets for then its a place they just don't want to spend any time in - not least for the risk of becoming a freedom statistic.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
uuuuh fanny packs are the negative stereotype associated with american tourists abroad. europeans do not wear fanny-packs.Spearhead wrote:
Good, take yur fanny packs and euros and mickey mouse hats and git out! let the door hit your ass on the way it, faggotsDilbert_X wrote:
I've heard a few people say they're done with holidaying in the US, if they're really so backward they think 20 kids being killed is worth doing nothing over but a muslim killing three adults is worth locking down a whole city and putting 9,000 troops on the streets for then its a place they just don't want to spend any time in - not least for the risk of becoming a freedom statistic.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-25 06:52:47)
That is great. Too bad I was not making an argument in favor of the war in Iraq and was just talking about Fay rights.Uzique The Lesser wrote:
if you don't understand the difference between a stability and order forced by a dictator and a total lack of all order and state-'safety', then your political science degree clearly isn't helping you. most iraqi people preferred saddam. period. at least under saddam the military kept the police and other armed militant/radical groups in order. now there is almost no 'fear' of order or accountability in that state.Macbeth wrote:
If you don't understand how big of a difference there is between the government trying to kill you and not trying to kill then I can't help you.
Last edited by Macbeth (2013-04-25 08:29:15)
uuuh how can you possibly see the official 'okay' for gay rights as a "victory" in iraq, when the current situation is so unstable that the police are basically homophobic kill/torture squads? oh great, they said it's okay on paper, listen up people, your life is so much betterMacbeth wrote:
That is great. Too bad I was not making an argument in favor of the war in Iraq and was just talking about Fay rights.Uzique The Lesser wrote:
if you don't understand the difference between a stability and order forced by a dictator and a total lack of all order and state-'safety', then your political science degree clearly isn't helping you. most iraqi people preferred saddam. period. at least under saddam the military kept the police and other armed militant/radical groups in order. now there is almost no 'fear' of order or accountability in that state.Macbeth wrote:
If you don't understand how big of a difference there is between the government trying to kill you and not trying to kill then I can't help you.
I have personally seen tourists from all over the world wearing fanny packs at disney world. its not an 'American' stereotype, its a senior citizen tourist stereotypeUzique The Lesser wrote:
Last edited by Spearhead (2013-04-25 10:21:54)
havent had to ask for nonsmoking in years
i dont see many people walking and eating
fuck not wearing my camera
i learned the same table manners as the article. .
other stuff...yea
i dont see many people walking and eating
fuck not wearing my camera
i learned the same table manners as the article. .
other stuff...yea
