Monte Carlo

Modern Dilemma: There are two types of Liberals, aren't there? The 19th Century classical Liberal (free economist, small government, lassez-faire approach to stuff) and the 20-21st Century illiberal Liberal (tax and spend, big centralized government, uptight politically correct approach to everything). I'm referring, of course, to the second. Cheers MC

Okay. Double Okay. That's true. Online porn is just one outlet. But unlike other types of material, it's instantly available at the click of a mouse. Hey, I know! 'Cuz people are gonna get their "fix" one way or another let's legalize heroin, murder, incest and every type of wacko taboo-breaking porn EVAR! Problem solved. Remember, folks, a Liberal is somebody so open-minded their brain fell out. Did you actually visit the website Mr. Teatime linked? It's a voluntary service for people who think they need it. The only control under discussion is self-control. So hold your horses, Mark. And, FWIW, yes we bloody well can write laws for the people who refuse to behave responsibly. In fact, the penal code in every society on the planet was formulated to deal with that very eventuality when you think about it. Duh. What on earth this has to do with anything under discussion here is beyond me. Point Not Found.

Have you, seriously, not considered the link between pornography in a very small but dangerous minority of men and their gradual progression to become sex offenders? On a lesser level, men who suffer from what tabloids like to call "sex addiction" end up leading pretty destructive lives as a result. Again, this sort of fixation with porn can be an early indicator. OK, there is also the religious angle here too, but there are men who are literally addicted to this sort of material. People can suffer from mental illnesses like compulsive-obsessive disorder that fixate on any number of stimuli. I ain't a shrink, but I know a few psychiatric nurses and cops, and they'll tell you that an unhealthy obsession with porn is often Step One on a career as a sex offender. Personally, I think people can have a perfectly healthy and interesting experience with graphically erotic pictures, art and literature on all sorts of levels. Ditto alcohol. Or exercise. And so on....but there will always be people who fixate on something to the extent that they begin to threaten others. I'm an atheist, but if one man who rationalises his sexual problems through religion as a result of that site then the whole exercise will have been worthwhile in my humble. Cheers MC

Yes, back to counter-factual history puh-leez. I blame Sawyer, anyhoo.

Well, I think it is fair to say that many historians find CF history a tiresome parlour game. However, I don't think it's entirely irrelevant. You have to be able to have a sound grasp of an event and it's variables to extrapolate a credible counter-factual scenario in the first place! Considering these might in fact help you understand, reconsider or re-evaluate something you thought you already understood. Take World War One and the numerous counter-factual scenarios that are discussed about it. The mobilization scenario and the "what ifs?" surrounding it can only enhance our understanding of the economy, technology and politics of the period. When you factor in some comparative history it gets better. For example, compare (A) the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, (B) The Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland and © The Nazi invasion of Poland and consider them in the context of crisis management, diplomacy and what would have happened if none of them had occured? I think a meaty discussion on that one would require, and probably develop, bags of understanding of the events! Cheers MC

Sawyer, who cares what type of Empire it is? It might not be the prosletizing Christian version of the late British Empire but if it looks, walks and smells like an Empire then it is. The reference to Rome was deliberate. The British Empire depended on trade and and a complex network of relationships with client power groups within the different countries it administered. Rome, on the other hand, used a much less elegant model....very much like the US. As Ferguson points out, the US divides the world into military protectorates (CENTCOM for example), talks of "full spectrum dominance" and has mind-bogglingly powerful force projection using nuke-laden carrier battlegroups. The remarkable thing is how discreet all this is, as the real schwerpunkt is the dollar and globalised consumer culture that people generally seem to want and enjoy from Iceland to Georgia to Hong Kong. The US model is far removed from the British Imperial modus operandi, until Iraq, of course. Which the US ballsed up royally because it stubbornly refuses to accept it's imperialistic obligations. US politics, both Democrat and Republican is still too tied up in some cheezy Minutemen-in-the-woods-shooting-at-the-nasty Redcoats myth (which is why you were so comprehensively suckered into supporting terrorists like the IRA in the 70's, 80's and early 90's) to face up to reality. Before anybody says, "hey, Monte, I didn't realise you were a fully signed-up member of the Michael Moore theory of US hegemony" let me say I'm not. I think an America that finally accepts the responsibility of post-superpower flagbearer for liberal democracy would be a Good Thing. Not an uber-hawkish, neoconservative "bomb 'em back into their mud huts" flagbearer, but a thoughtful, benign power that trod carefully and took it's power seriously. Give two men a rifle; one could be a mature, thoughtful hunter who only took (with respect) his prey only when he needed to. The other might climb up into a clock tower on campus and go nuts. Which one is America at the moment? My interesting counterfactual point, therefore, might be this; what would have happened had Bill Clinton developed some testes during his second administration and developed a pro-active, unashamedly interventionist foreign policy that took the threat of Islamist terrorism and failed states seriously in the mid-late 90's? For me, Clinton was the apogee of smug, insular, head-in-the-sand American foreign policy. I know it's fashionable to knock Dubya, and bejaysus I think Iraq is royally buggered, but I think retrospectively he'll be seen as a tough, smart (that's right, sport fans!) statesman who finally pulled back the joystick marked "US foreign policy" and started getting to grips with the post-superpower 21st Century. Cheers MC

The mobilization issue is very important. I think we find it difficult to imagine a world where policy-makers make decisions based on telegrams and hand-delivered letters. Making important strategic decisions must have been like steering a big heavy boat....look at a point in the distance then start turning the wheel a while before and hope you're pretty much on target. So the domino-effect of mobilizing armies (Germans look at the Russians who look at the Germans) explains a lot. However, the Tsars in 1914 were in no shape to fight a coherent war of European domination; it was a virtually medieval country with a Victorian monarchy bolted on top of it. It seems that they mobilized out of (A) hubris and (B) the fear that the Germans were mobilizing. So August is important. In January, for example, the bulk of the Russian army would have been sewn into its clothes for the winter, shivering in its villages. In August it was up and about ready to manage the harvest. Had Princip decided to do the deed at Christmas there would have been little realistic thought of mobilization until Spring, and by then diplomacy may have bought the necessary amount of time. My contention is that the Kaiser would then have despatched his agents to seek new causes of discontent to justify his expansionist tendencies, delaying WW1 by six months. Cheers MC

Ah. Americans. Your perspective on Empire is so....cute. Especially as you're the biggest friggin' Empire-saurus since Rome. You just don't care to admit it. I recommend Niall Ferguson's Colossus as a tremendous read on the subject. By 1914 the European powers had more or less carved up the readily available world. The Germans were left with, er, Angola. And a few other bits that really didn't chime with Germany's power as a European super-state in waiting. Look at the Belgians. A tiny country with the military power of my little sister dominating the whole bloody Congo! Ditto Holland. So it wasn't an issue of nasty, evil Imperialists. It was simply an issue of the Kaiser wanting toys commensurate with the size of his pram. As for the Boer War. Hmmmm. A war between (A) a colonial power and (B) settlers from another colonial power. If you'd pitched the Zulu wars instead I'd have given you a C+. Cheers MC

He'd have nuked everything East of the Urals, sued for peace with the US and settled down to many years of quasi-Cold War with the Americans, basically replacing Stalin. Hitler's War Aims were pretty clear; define Germany as the crucible of a radical new European power with a "racially appropriate" population, create living room in the East for the growing Aryan race, create amicable terms with the British Empire and destroy world Jewry. Atomic weapons would have allowed him to do all of this and more. Of course, he also believed (as did Trotsky) that War was a constant dynamic for a revolutionary regim so before long he'd have kicked it off again with the US and/or China. Now that is interesting, imagining a world where China and the US were close allies in a world war.... Cheers MC

This is a favourite of counter-factualists, for obvious reasons. I think the broad consensus is that WW1 was inevitable for a variety of reasons and the spark would have occurred elsewhere. Of course, my history professor always argued that the Autumn of 1914 was a crucial factor because of the factor of mobilization of armies during the period....i.e. in January none of the protagonists could have possibly deployed, and the Germans couldn't have embarked upon the Von Schlieffen Plan. This would have given the great powers some time for negotiation. So, technically, perhaps WW1 would never have happened and therefore the reparations issue that boosted the NSDAP and Hitler wouldn't have happened either......hmmmm. Yet German imperial ambition was insatiable at that time. The s*** was going to hit the proverbial fan and Princip merely lit a cigarette in a foreworks factory waiting to go off. Or not. This is a good one I've not encountered before. Well, there are several interesting "what ifs" here, aren't there? * Does the hardline Soviet regime under Andropov stagger on for another decade or three, head-butting the hawkish Reagan/ Thatcher agenda? :: BOOM :: * Had the disparate strands of radical Islam not mobilized under the banner of the anti-Soviet jihad would there have been an al-qu'ada? Would Osama be building motorways in the UAE instead? * Most crucially, Rambo 3 would have never been made. Well, American history isn't quite my bag and I'm sure some of our colonial friends here might have more to say on the subject. Would it have meant that the Civil War as the defining moment in US history might've instead become an intractable issue that meant a permanently divided continent, with the South going it's own way? If so, our history would be utterly different, with no significant power to intervene and stop Europe tearing itself to pieces for the first fifty years of the twentieth century.... I'm sure you could. Cheers MC

Well, (A) They could have conceivably re-scheduled the assassination, "et tu tomorrow at eight, Brutus?" (B) Rome could have steered a more conservative course, and the Fall might not have happened as dramaitcally as it did...meaning that early Christianity might never have caught on (discuss!) and gone the way of any other cult/ fringe religion of the time. © A less spectacular but steady development might have seen Rome go the way of the Byzantine Empire...i.e. a slow but inexorable decline leaving behind the seeds of all sorts of ethnic and religious discontent that might have re-defined utterly the way we view Europe today. (D) Ceasar's Rome might have acted as a booster for a super-civilization that survived well into the Renaissance, leading to the development of technologies hundreds of years before they were actually developed (I once read a counter-factual argument that specualted Romans landing on the Moon in the 1700s). Cheers MC

Here is what I posted on the "Ask Ender" thread: Counter-factual history is one of my favourite time-wasting activities. It's fun because you can't really lose, although there are a few basic rules. For example, you can't really invent wacky variables to "escape" the original question or issue. So, in the above example, you can't say "Well, on June 7th Hitler choked to death on a sandwich and the German High Command sued for peace, so there was an Armistice in October 1944." However, you could ask, as a totally separate question, Hitler choked to death on a sandwich on 7th June 1944. What happened next? Of late, I've been wondering about these: 1. What would have happened if Martin Luther had recanted, as requested, by Rome? 2. The Germans persuade the Mexicans to open a second front against the US in 1943. Discuss. 3. Eisenhower agrees with Churchill that the Allies should take Berlin before Stalin, in order to prevent the dictator carving up huge swathes of central Europe. Would World War 3 have been inevitable? You don't have to discuss these, they are only there to give a taste of the sort of stuff I mean. You could ponder questions on any aspect of history; social, cultural, religious, even sport. Cheers MC

Vol, you really don't have a bloody clue what you are talking about:. hitting any area in urban warfare leads to civilian casualties. What do you think the insurgents go? Helpfully paint a line around the buildings they occupy? The zeal with which the US armed forces deploy overwhelming force is a matter of record. Go away and grace another thread with your ignorance.

Stop strafing civilian areas with AC130 gunships, then all the stuff this GI is talking about will be worth something. As somebody who broadly supported the War, I'm disgusted by the total post-conflict balls-up engineered by Messrs. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. You can't machinegun people into supporting you. Seriously. Cheers MC

"Anti-Hero" Cheers MC

Hmmm. It's an open field, ladies. The Green Berets: Sixty-something and fat John Wayne leads intrepid commandos liberating put upon natives from Commie Menace . The Eagle Has Landed: A complete disaster, inexcusable since it's based upon a really decent adventure yarn by Jack Higgns. A c0ckney Michael Caine* stars as a German paratrooper colonel and tries to knock off Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, Larry Hagman chews a cigar and does one of the most hackneyed gung-ho Yankee army officer turns ever. Escape to Athena: MC makes his Arcana: Lore: Esoteric War Movies skill check with a natural twenty here! Take Roger Moore as a Nazi archeologist-****-POW camp commander, the usually sublime David Niven as an absent-minded professor interned in said POW camp, Tele Savalas (really) as a Greek resistance leader hiding out in a brothel then add Elliot freakin' Gould as a comedian who finds himself captured along with Stephanie Powers ("an' this is Mrs. Hart...she's gorgeous!"). To this improbable bouillabase of nonsense add a plot about a German superweapon hidden in a monastery with some priceless loot and you have a genuinely dreadful 105 minutes of celluloid. Anything By Mel Gibson: He can't act and he wouldn't understand a thing about historical veracity if it smacked him in the face. Objective: Burma: Yet again, our American cousins manage to offend every single ally they have by suggesting that Errol liberated Burma single-handedly in this ridiculous slice of WW2 proaganda. I'm going to nominate, in similar vein, a movie that hasn't even been made yet! The Few: Tom "Scientologist" Cruise plays a US Eagle Squadron pilot who single-handedly wins the Battle of Britain for the RAF and thus saves the UK and the ENTIRE WORLD from the Nazi jack-boot! Huzzah! Of course, the gentleman that Tom plays in this "True Story" only shot down two German planes in the real battle. Cheers MC * gotta love this language filter!

Rampaging out of the steppes, wielding a reflective halberd, cometh Monte Carlo! And he gives a vengeful scream: "I'm going to flog you so forcibly, I will be high on life for years to come!" In reality, it would be: Ambling across Sloane Square, carrying a soft leather satchel, cometh Monte Carlo! And he says suavely: Fancy a cup of tea? Cheers MC

Chirac crushed Le Pen in the second round of the 2002 presidential election, winning over 80% of the vote. The French Left couldn't advance any of their candidates beyond the first round, but they did rally behind Chirac to ensure that Le Pen and his Front National got no further. Not that Chirac depended on a belatedly, relatively unified Left to win -- their influence has been pretty negligible as of late. But there was still no way in hell that Le Pen would have won that election. That's not what I meant. Read my post. The fact that Le Pen made the final round showed how unpopular Chirac was and only won votes because of the opposition in the FN. I know Chirac won a landslide because M. Jospin's people had no option but to vote for Chirac.

Paragraphing, please. For the love of god.

Here we go again. I think that the main problem here is that we are all taking the bits of the issue we choose to discuss and not consider it as a whole. Look, Iraq is, to a certain extent, a red herring. So is Palestine. Bin-Laden's call to Jihad in 1998 (I think) was unequivocal in it's objectives. Nothing less than a phased campaign to remove non-Muslims from the Arab world followed by a highly ambitious phase two, the establishment of a world-wide caliphate based on fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. It's so outrageous it's almost laughable. Except for the fact that Al-Qaeda are deadly serious about it. Objecting to the Iraq war is a totally laudable political stance. Not one I agree with, but hey that's democracy. The fact is that the Left are so annoyed that they couldn't stop it that they are fighting their own rearguard action to punish what they see as nothing less than a neo-conservative, pro-globalization conspiracy that's as bad as Al-Qaeda itself. This is where I part company completely with them. This is a war of ideology. Choose your side. It ain't fun, because liberals might have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people they loathe. But the alternative is a dozen rucksack bombs coming to a railway station near you. Wrong. Bush junior is like Reagan: a turnip-ghost for the Left but a man of strident action. In much the same way that Reagan faced down the Soviet Union in the 80's, in a way that probably hastened the implosion of Communism, Bush (or more likely his neo-con policy wonks) have done some blue-sky thinking. After 9/11 they identified failed states that might, in future, facilitate those who would threaten the US in such an outrageous way...and take them out. Iraq was No. 1. Is it right? I'm not sure. Is it working? Too early to call. Is it a bold and unambiguous reaffirmation that targeting the USA is akin to putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger? Hell yes. Gadaffi mysteriously decided to reveal his WMD programmes and disable them soon after Saddam was captured. MYSTARY? I think not. The internal cogs of repression in Syria and Iran are beginning to slowly turn the other way. Yes, but as phase one of a wider plan to make where you live part of their caliphate. As I said before, it might be laughable to us, but they are deadly serious. We all stand or fall together in the Western democracies on this issue, but people don't see it. Yet. I fear that the cost of a wake-up call will be rather high. I am an unabashed admirer of the arabic language and culture. I've read the Koran and found much wisdom in it. It doesn't mean that I wan't to live in Osama's idea of Utopia. Yes, mainly because I refuse to indulge in relativism on this issue. AQ threw the gauntlet down here. They never usually do, and when they do it's too late. Fully agreed. I was talking to a very old and wise friend who is now in his late 80's. He remembers the build up to WW2, and tells me that today reminds him of then. People thought that they could do deals with Hitler. Or Stalin. Or Mussolini. The Americans thought it had nothing to do with them. Many British policy-makers couldn't care less what happened on mainland Europe as long as the Empire wasn't threatened. The Left and Right blamed each other and so it went on. And the world went up in flames for five years. Are we there? This is new territory. A war where the enemy doesn't roll tanks into the Sudetenland, but where he bombs railways stations to bend elections, where he flies passenger aircraft into buildings simply to make a nihilistic point and where there are no uniforms or flags to identify combatants. Do we continue to blame George Bush because that's more accpetable in the coffee house or campus? Or do we build a consensus of sorts then vote Dubya out if we don't like him? I genuinely don't know, but I do know that the liberal left in the West is playing "useful idiot" to Osama's tune. Cheers MC

Check this story out, seeing as we're on the subject. I'll bet the new Spanish PM is really, really proud to have won the favour of AQ on the back of 200 civilian dead.

France has suffered from significant terrorism problems as a result of it's colonial heritage in North Africa. The Paris metro was attacked by Algerian extremists in the late 90's, and to be fair the French were warning the rest of the Europe about expanding Islamist terrorist networks long before 9/11. The attitude of the French government has less to do with other domestic issues than it's disdain for President George Bush. The French are capricious, haughty, self-interested but utterly ruthless when protecting their own interests. They will not be soft on terrorism. France needs to stop trying to be so sophisticated and trying to fit the whole issue of Al'Qaeda into some wider game of three-dimensional political chess with the USA. Their dream of a European superstate is so totally off-the-wall now that they might as well stop dreaming and get real. And that means some sort of less confrontational dialogue with Bush and Co. Of course, the Spanish affair will goad them onto even more fanciful ideas about building a "progressive bloc" in Europe to counterbalance the USA. Remember, though, the current French government is right-wing and only squeeked in by a narrow margin to avoid Jean Marie Le Pen winning the last general election. Le Pen is, of course, the ex-leader of the deeply unsavoury far-right Front National. Germany is a different story. Joschka Fischer, the foreign secretary, is a hard-left member of the Green Party. He is stuck in a late 60's neo-Marxist time-warp. Under Herr Schroeder's government there is no chance of Germany doing anything other than pandering to the strong pacifist tendency in the German public (but as any neighbour of Germany will tell you, the fact that they now have astrong pacifist tendency isn't necessarily a bad thing). The Christian Democrats used to show a bit of respect for the US, remembering the astonishing charity shown to the country after WW2...but the socialists have no such intentions. And, yes, the high-tax European model German economy is struggling. It's difficult seeing Germany doing anything other than trundle along in full denial and hand-wringing mode. I see Schroeder's struggling government as a prime candidate for some Al'Qaeda "Semtex Persuasion" prior to a general election, even though it would usher in a CD regime! As I said before, the Franco-German bloc is deeply antipathetic to the US and the UK. Both want to he the helmsmen of a united Europe. Both are living in a fantasy land of their own making. Cheers MC

Hmmm. I suspect that even AQ recognise that the resolve of the US public is a different beast than that of European countries. Even Sen. Kerry has stated that if he wins in November he will keep troops in Iraq....the Pax Americana is too strong for either a Democratic or Republican president to reverse at this point in time. Oh yes, AQ will target the USA, but simply out of murderous loathing than any realistic expectation that they could usher in a malleable government there. Europe, OTOH, is something completely different. I'm genuinely worried that a strategy of deliberately pin-pointed violence will be used to attempt to manipulate European democracies. There may very well be a general election in the UK in 2005, for example. The British public are pretty much 50/50 on the war (with a slim majority in favour) but nonetheless I think the risks are obvious. France and Germany are already on the appeaser's side of the fence. It will be interesting to see if this spares them attacks in the medium term. I doubt it, somehow. Cheers MC

Just as an aside, HERE is an interesting article on the subject courtesy of the BBC. AQ is mutating. Anyone with a nihilistic, anti-Western vendetta can "be" in AQ. And HERE is another view from the inimitable Mark Steyn. Cheers MC

Indulge me, please. What does this actually mean? Yes, he does. Not an unrealistic expectation for a democratically elected politician in an advanced first world country, is it? Yes, sleepy head. With AQ you are unequivocally for "them" or against "them". Unless you are prepared to accept the Sharia and a frankly psycopathic interpretation of Islamic theology then you're toast. Simple. Yep. It's tragic that Islamist militants have put us in this position. Lazy sniping and hand-wringing by liberals will of course prolong the agony. But, hey, what's a few thousand innocent lives when the credibility and conscience of the Left is at stake? The Left's position on this is quite strange. If you wanted to create a stereotypical liberal nightmare then Bin Laden and his homophobic, mysoginistic and religiously hyper-conservative agenda is almost too spot-on. Yet theycan't quite bring themselves to loathe him as much as they do Dubya, Don and Condi. Oh, and McDonalds. When will they grow up? Cheers MC