Monte Carlo

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

Agreed. Well the socialists would use the attack for their political advantage: they are politicians after all. And Aznar's Popular Party also tried to use the possibility of it being ETA (a left-wing bogeyman to many middle-class Spaniards) to boost their vote too. As to if it was smart or not, well I tend to agree with you to a point. My feelings are mixed...one one hand the PP were scheduled for a narrow but not uncomfortable winning margin, but on the other 90% of the Spanish public were against Spanish involvement and support for the USA in Iraq. A political and symbolic victory indeed. But Spain's withdrawal of it's 120 peacekeepers is hardly likely to keep the US high command awake at night, sweating. If the entire contingent had been killed in action it would still be less than perished in Madrid. You are absolutely correct. I supported military action against Iraq but was sorely disappointed by the tardy and haphazard approach to post-war planning and reconstruction; Spain's decision hardly helps. Also, as I said before, the peaceniks of the "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" Left seem to have conveniently forgotten that 9/11 happened at a time where the USA was military inactive in the Arab (and indeed wider Muslim) world. LIke I said, I'm broadly conservative but even I don't buy the retrospective neo-con view that Iraq is now drawing every jihad-crazed terrorist to the killing zone of Iraq like "squirrels into the wood chipper." I think Madrid put paid to that idea, didn't it? An error, but their perogative. Spain's support is political, not military. The USA and the UK made the decision. The USA and the UK took action. The USA and the UK have the lion's share of lucrative reconstruction contracts and enhanced influence in the region. Natch, the two countries must also shoulder the burden the most. The governments of most mainland European countries view the USA with a mixture of condescension, fear and loathing. The Germans and French want a superpower counterbalance to the USA in Europe but will never get it (not least because they don't want to invest in defence spending, a prerequisite for true superpower status). They are quietly pleased that Spain has given George Bush a bit of a bloody nose. They also seem to think that a softly-softly approach to the problems of the Middle East will deflect terrorism from their borders. They are like the appeasers of Hitler in the 1930's. That strange little man with his odd followers might not be our cup of tea, old chap, but if we leave him alone he'll leave us alone, won't he? Well, in Bin Laden's case, no he won't. If, god forbid, a bomb goes off in Berlin or Paris will the public there blame the USA or Al'Quaeda? Will they wake up and see that their government's mendacity regarding the issue is partly to blame? Only time will tell. Scary, interesting times. My wife gets on a commuter train to London every day. And it scares me at the moment, I can tell you. More than the IRA, a hell of a lot more. I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy. Hit me and I hit you. If we have to commit to a fifty-year campaign of low-intensity warfare in godforsaken third world countries to rid the world of the scourge of this new facsism and to protect our families then so be it. There is no other way. No peace conference, initiative or hand-wringing will resolve this one, I'm afraid. And liberal European governments seem to have no other solution. Now please carry on. Nothing to see here. Cheers MC

Not rich, just childless (so far). What other people are hoarding to pay for their kid's college fees I'm blowing on travel, fast computers and German sports cars. It's called S.K.I.'ing (Spending the Kid's Inheritance). Cheers! MC

Agreed 100%. It didn't look or feel like ETA unless it was (as you point out) a "Look at me Ma! I'm on top of the world!" moment. Aznar's opportunism (or denial) of the facts was astonishing, and he deserved to suffer politically for it. Personally, as a small "c" conservative I find it unpalatable that the Spaniards gave in and elected a lacklustre socialist administration at the behest of Islamist terrorism, but hey, it's their country. Unfortunately, I think Osama and the boys are sitting in a cave rubbing their hands together over this one. Now the Spanish have folded and are withdrawing their (albeit token) contingent from Iraq, who's next? What other democratic processes can be swayed by blowing up train stations? Scary. Cheers MC

Er, yes, actually. I've lived in the US (San Diego, CA and the O.C.). I've done business there. I've travelled extensively in the "Flyover" states. Most of my American friends happily acknowledge that I've travelled over more of the country than the average US citizen. I've been to the Bayou, wandered around Napa, gotten drunk in NY, SF and all points inbetween and got snowed in for a week in Colorado. I've signed the book of Mormon in Salt Lake City and lost my shirt in Vegas. I've been hunting in Maine and whale-watching in Cape Cod. Been there, done it, got the T-shirt. There was even an incident in Houston which we won't discuss right now. Furthermore, I'm an unashamed Americanophile. I adore the place. Which doesn't change, one iota, the bald fact that the average American isn't wildly bothered about things going on much beyond their own state line. The parochialism of Americans is all part of their charm. The irony of 9/11 is that it finally made the sleeping giant wake up and wonder why large sections of the world didn't care much for them and wanted to kill them. Cheers MC

:: shrug :: The defensiveness is understandable. I've been travelling to the USA annually for over, what, twenty years? I keep up with what's going on there via satellite TV. Trust me, I'm more than aware of the general knowledge level of the average US citizen vis-a-vis anywhere East of New York or West of San Francisco. Which isn't terribly good. Cheers MC

Yes, Americans seem to think that Terrorism began on the 11th September, 2001. Not to (in any way) belittle those dreadful events but apart from perhaps some disgruntled anarcho-leftists (say the Unabomber or perhaps the Weathermen) the USA hadn't experienced any significant terrorism prior to the mid-1990's within it's own borders. Europe, OTOH, has had plenty. ETA in Spain, Baader-Meinhof, the IRA and it's various incarnations and splinter groups, the last round of European-based Palestinian/ Islamist terrorism in the 70's and 80's, Italian far-left and far-right nutcases... the list goes on. So, I would posit, "Europe" gets on with it just like anywhere else. The French subway network has been targeted by Islamists. They'll get on with it. So will the Spanish. In the UK, where the Media seems to be convinced that "We're Next" , we'll get on with it too (I remember well the continual IRA bomb alerts as a young man living in London up until the mid-90's when they blew up Canary wharf). Not getting on with it, of course, is precisely what the terrorist wants. What is interesting, in my opinion, is how terrorism will impact on domestic European politics (as opposed to the consensus, albeit rough, we see in the USA as a consequence of 9/11). People seem to "blame" their governments for supporting the invasion of Iraq (a craven attitude as far as I'm concerned). Whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, the Islamist extremists we're coming for us anyway. You can't negotiate with them. You cannot satisfy their demands. You either submit to a twisted and unrepresentative version of Islam or die. As a keen student of Arabic language and culture I genuinely don't recognise the Wahhabi-inpsired fascism of Al-Q'aeda as representative of most Arabs and/ or Muslims. Will European voters elect flabby, liberal appeaser governments who will try to assauge the Death Cult of Bin Laden? Or will they instead turn to strident, right-wing authoritarian solutions? Or will mature democracies achieve a balancing act? This is a problem particularly for post-Franco Spain. Nobody knows. And it's the classic Chinese curse of "May you live in interesting times." Hey, stay safe. I mean that. Cheers MC

???

Then you don't want it badly enough, bud. My wife works in journalism. Jesus, people will rip off your arm and beat you to death with the soggy end to get a staff gig in the Media in the UK. How d'you do it? Well, roughly the same way, in principle, as the way the developers here describe breaking through into another popular and over-subscribed creative field. That includes a stint as a runner: the unpaid dude who grabs coffee, sends emails, works the photocopier and generally dogsbodies to get their face known and learn the basics of a cut-and-thrust industry. Except, of course, the kids of the early 21st Century. They want their dream jobs, but heck they also know their rights. Minimum wage. Health & Safety. Blah balh blah. They still don't get their dream jobs, the narrowing number of bright sparks who realise that all these rules are created to make inadequates feel better do instead. But they're a minority. I suggest public service might be the way forward with somebody with your work ethic. You really don't want it badly enough, I'm afraid. Cheers MC

...and with the current UK

Yes. Oh yes.

Is this the best gaming rig...I'm so tempted to buy it today. The risk of divorce is high, but I'm going in! Tekkies, dweebs and propeller-heads...I need you! Is this the gaming system you'd buy? Is this an act of utter folly? Note: I'm not going for the lime-green "Ankheg armour" version, though. Cheers MC