Black Irish
Wise Guy
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Damn, I am too. I meant apostrophe, not comma. My wife noticed after it was too late. Joke's on me.
Damn, I am too. I meant apostrophe, not comma. My wife noticed after it was too late. Joke's on me.
BobD
Can't get no satisfaction
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Mamma always said "stupid is as stupid does" : )
M
Me2SouthBend
Guest
Couple of things. First, MGriff thanks for your service to our country, we owe you a debt of gratitude. My nephew is about to be deployed to Afghanistan (Zerot? Spelling could be wrong) and I hope and pray that he is able to come home and be a part of discussions like this. I do not want this country to be engaged in wars, not just for my own selfish reasons (see above), but for all the obvious reasons that have been brought up throughout this thread. I wonder how you and others feel about the article I'm posting below. I read it tonight on the Boston Globe site. It's about the CIA in Yemen foiling a plot by Al Qada to blow up a US Airliner using a new, better version of the underwear bomb (seems like an inappropriate time to insert a joke about underwear bombs). If we weren't involved in Yemen, might this dipshit been able to get this onto a plane? I don't know, perhaps none of us really do. We may be getting into chicken v egg territory here, no? If we aren't there, are the terrorists less likely to strike because we aren't treading on their holy land, or are they more likely to strike because they have decades (or centuries) of built up hatred and we aren't there putting the screws (or drone missiles) to them? Anyway, here is some more food for thought or fodder for discussion if you will.
US: CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot - Boston.com
US: CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot - Boston.com
Black Irish
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You raise a good point. How far do we extract ourselves from these countries that hate us because we are there "meddling?" If we have no presence & no resources than we likely will not know what the hell is going on. Our military ran into intelligence problems when they were first deployed after 9/11 with regard to not knowing the lay of the land. Remember Donald Rumsfeld saying "we don't know what we don't know"?
notredomer23
Staph Member
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This thread is missing something I think we can all agree on
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G
Grahambo
Guest
Ben E.
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I can honestly say that as long as my life is good I don't care about what's going on in armpitistan. I'm not naive enough to believe that people don't get hurt due to our foreign policy , I recognize it's a nessesity. Enjoy our way of life cause face it, none of us would make it very long living the way they do.
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Old Man Mike
Fast as Lightning!
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I have no solutions for such historically-deep and culturally-imprinted macro-problems. There is only one "insight" if it even deserves that term, which has occurred to me. None of these problems which reach deeply into the ethnic or cultural divides between people ever really get resolved [and there the "resolution" is often phoney, but at least non-violent] until the common man decides that he personally has too much to lose by making an extreme/violent decision.
This is what some see as a solution but a long, slow one at least in some parts of the world. For the disintegrating Yugoslavia, those peoples' proximity to the European Union and for the most part European culture, made the adaptation to relative peace quicker, even if some there still hate one another's guts. The common man there sees that opportunities exist for his family and himself, if he'll just stop killing the other guy and killing himself, while destroying all of the economic infrastructure around him.
In a way, this is what all "counterterrorism" is. That is an often misunderstood concept, thought by some to mean covert infiltrations and "midnight strikes", but although those things are probably necessary to thwart "underwear bombers", that is another only stopgap measure in the search for a genuinely safe world. Counterterrorism is rather the aid in creation of a true economy for the average citizen to participate in, and there is both pragmatic [how-to-do-this-job] and general education [literacy for all, without which the body politic remains ignorant and can never approach Whiskey's Internet Power democracy booster].which runs alongside the aid to basic economy building.
Some of this was having some success in Afghanistan, mainly riding on the volunteerism of several non-profit charity groups. It is my understanding that the efforts took a backwards step by unintentional [i.e. in good will] involvement by the military, when payments began getting made to everyday folks to attend their programs, thus sucking the populace away from the other programs which were making progress. Everyone had good hearts; improper coordination sunk the ship.
When the common man can see a good future without destruction, it is much harder to recruit him towards destruction. Whatever prejudices he has are submerged beneath his common sense. Even on the Macro-economic scale, places like China [still no great friend] are far away from contemplating war, just the next monster paycheck from the USA consumers. Russia, with its new trade ties to Germany is going exactly the same way, no matter what Putin might still feel that he has to say in public. Morals are what Jesus preached, but this sad old world is still mainly about "following the money", which in the end is why we fight stupid wars in the Middle East.
Helping make life livable at least for the common man in these countries-of-interest [and with glimmers of further opportunities] is the ultimate solution to these horror stories. It is a slow solution, but every positive act towards that makes friends, just as every negative act makes enemies. We need to get to the point where when some insane Kohlberg Type Four fanatic strolls into a village and exhorts the men to drop what they're doing and join the ranks of life-sacrificing "warriors" for some poorly understood cause, the men look at him and say: "You mad, Bro??"
By the way, the grass-Roots work of the Catholic Church has probably been, over the last century or so, the most active "counterterrorist" influence on the planet. Not because that is its intent, but that its message of a Gospel of Peace and Community heals and brightens souls.
This is what some see as a solution but a long, slow one at least in some parts of the world. For the disintegrating Yugoslavia, those peoples' proximity to the European Union and for the most part European culture, made the adaptation to relative peace quicker, even if some there still hate one another's guts. The common man there sees that opportunities exist for his family and himself, if he'll just stop killing the other guy and killing himself, while destroying all of the economic infrastructure around him.
In a way, this is what all "counterterrorism" is. That is an often misunderstood concept, thought by some to mean covert infiltrations and "midnight strikes", but although those things are probably necessary to thwart "underwear bombers", that is another only stopgap measure in the search for a genuinely safe world. Counterterrorism is rather the aid in creation of a true economy for the average citizen to participate in, and there is both pragmatic [how-to-do-this-job] and general education [literacy for all, without which the body politic remains ignorant and can never approach Whiskey's Internet Power democracy booster].which runs alongside the aid to basic economy building.
Some of this was having some success in Afghanistan, mainly riding on the volunteerism of several non-profit charity groups. It is my understanding that the efforts took a backwards step by unintentional [i.e. in good will] involvement by the military, when payments began getting made to everyday folks to attend their programs, thus sucking the populace away from the other programs which were making progress. Everyone had good hearts; improper coordination sunk the ship.
When the common man can see a good future without destruction, it is much harder to recruit him towards destruction. Whatever prejudices he has are submerged beneath his common sense. Even on the Macro-economic scale, places like China [still no great friend] are far away from contemplating war, just the next monster paycheck from the USA consumers. Russia, with its new trade ties to Germany is going exactly the same way, no matter what Putin might still feel that he has to say in public. Morals are what Jesus preached, but this sad old world is still mainly about "following the money", which in the end is why we fight stupid wars in the Middle East.
Helping make life livable at least for the common man in these countries-of-interest [and with glimmers of further opportunities] is the ultimate solution to these horror stories. It is a slow solution, but every positive act towards that makes friends, just as every negative act makes enemies. We need to get to the point where when some insane Kohlberg Type Four fanatic strolls into a village and exhorts the men to drop what they're doing and join the ranks of life-sacrificing "warriors" for some poorly understood cause, the men look at him and say: "You mad, Bro??"
By the way, the grass-Roots work of the Catholic Church has probably been, over the last century or so, the most active "counterterrorist" influence on the planet. Not because that is its intent, but that its message of a Gospel of Peace and Community heals and brightens souls.
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