lord of flies

There aren't any secret anti-capitalists in my country. There are very few anti-capitalists, as well.

Divorcee? I thought they stoned women instead in those parts. Yes, and they run around naked, yelling "Oogabooga" too.

It is good to see the oppressed peoples of the world developing through capitalism towards the socialist dream. This sort of cooperative economics will lay the foundations for a genuine socialist economy. I only hope the people of Somalia can see past the Russian and Chinese examples and move towards a better world.

Malaria too. They didn't make these things, they just profit from them. Both these diseases are hardly fatal for someone lucky enough to be born white, yet despite the fact that they could fix this, the first world twiddles its thumbs. Do you think we in the first world are left to want for money? Do you think that nobody could spare some cash for this enterprise? Do you think that the US could not single-handedly carve these diseases into the dust if it dropped its rampant, pointless aggression and moved its military budget into aid? And yet.

Yes, I actually stated this before but apparently my post was too good and the moderators deemed it unpublishable. Ah well.

The Pope. Like many people in the world, I do not follow your backwards pope. The problem is that the first world is using AIDS as a kind of biological weapon against the third world, as well as a way to improve their self-righteous imperialist savior complex. Newsflash: Uganda has managed to stamp out AIDS all on its lonesome, and is a pillar to the African community. AIDS is virulent and deadly without treatment, and the first-world is not readily supplying treatment.

You're not even trying. It's cute how you justify as "understandable", the mass deportations, purges, summary executions, show trials, russification etc, that constitute as a whole the largest centrally organized genocide effort in history, but dismiss out of hand other authoritarian regimes on grounds that they are "right wing". I already gave you Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship as an example of a practically bloodless regime that worked well. Your rhetoric (for a lack of tangible arguments) is destroyed with a simple counterexample. Can you put down the hammer and sickle for a second and look at things from a factual perspective? The whole "no war but class war" schtick may be cool, but you can only do so much with it. It's cool how you pretend like the Soviet Union ever engaged in genocide. Newsflash: aside for war crimes during WW2 (for reasons which should be very obvious), the USSR never engaged in anything like a genocide. Ever. Counter-revolutionaries isn't a race or ethnicity.

Iraq never devolved into civil war, unless you consider violence against an obvious American puppet regime to be "civil war." It is also not "better off," since the American empire has proven it shares that dictatorial quality of brutality and murder. The Soviet leaders suppressed reactionaries who were making running the Soviet state impossible or very difficult. Occasionally, things got out of hand and non-reactionary scum was killed. That is regrettable, but understandable. There is a very big difference between what the Soviet Union did (persecute class traitors, crypto-fascists and other reactionaries) and what right-wing authoritarian regimes did (kill any citizen preoccupied with civil rights).

I'd like to know if you think this is always true, though, and why. Hate and oppression are older than weapons deals. Interahamwe mobs were armed simply with machetes, and they were scary effective. A freer world may be a better place to live in, but it's little good if you are, in fact, dead. For example, with Saddam Hussein, oppression prevented Iraq from spiralling down into civil war. Mexico could use some old fashioned military repression around some places. Colombia, where druglords and pseudo-marxist guerrillas "coexist" with democracy, is another good example. In Pakistan, chances are they are starting to regret they pressured uncle Pervez into resigning. Primo de Rivera's military dictatorship brought good things to Spain, if only for a short time. Examples abound, really, where more freedom isn't such a good idea. It's a complex issue, so I'm always looking for more opinions. The relation between fear, repression and peace and order isn't fixed and depends on who, where and when you're looking at. This is quite possibly the most disgusting opinion I have read on these forums in a long time, if forever. Good job. Saddam Hussein - brutal dictator, or misremembered leader? Could military dictatorships do good for Latin America? Find out this and more, on tonight's episode of Atrocious Opinions No One Should Unironically Hold - But Do.

Weird, when I say this everybody cries their eyes out. Ah well, such is life.

Don't forget that until the West (i.e. you, us) dismantled the Ottoman Empire, nobody gave much of a **** about Sharia law and Wahhabi-style fundamentalist fanatics.

The only reason Wahhabi and other "fundamentalist" beliefs (actually a pretty recent break from "traditional" Muslim thought, such as ijtihad) have spread so far is because the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, destroying the center of the Muslim world and leaving a hole for radicalism to fill. Besides which, you know as well as I do that there are Muslim countries with religious freedom. For example, Indonesia.

Perhaps I mean that haphazard attacks which kill no Israelis should not be responded to with the carefully planned and executed murder of over one thousand Palestinians, and hundreds of civilians, even by the IDF's statistics? You know, what I posted before? Do you really believe that Hamas' "capability" to "launch attacks" against Israel is in a) any way a serious threat to the continued existence of Israel or b) going to be dismantled by unpredictable and disproportionate attacks? When these attacks happened while there was no cease-fire because the Israeli government is unwilling to offer even the most basic concessions. Gosh, they wouldn't just run along telling everybody they don't control their own territory? Why I never.

Hmm, except that Switzerland is one of the most ethnically mixed countries in Europe?

So it's OK for the Palestinians to attack Israel, as long as it's just "a little"? I was under the impression that the first thing needed for negotiations to take place is a functional ceasefire. Proportionality. Look it up. Besides which, the Palestinian government was attempting negotiations, but was clearly not capable of holding back all the Palestinian militants properly. Hmm, the government which Israel takes every opportunity to attack and destroy has limited power in the territories it controls? Impossible, surely.

And that was today's reminder that you Europeans are exactly as horrifically racist as (if not more than) the United States, except all your borders are drawn on ethnic lines so nobody notices. Please enjoy tomorrow's reminder; I suspect that some eastern Europeans will beat someone to death for being too Russian! Or perhaps your RIRA will be forced to resort to violence to free their Irish brethren from the English yoke? Anything could happen with your inbred nobles in charge! Thank God the wall fell, otherwise I couldn't say out of hand that all European governments are racist.

It demonstrates nothing more than the fact that Israel does not respect the Palestinian people, their government, or their sovereignty. If Israel engaged in honest negotiations with Palestine (pfft), there would be a non-zero chance of things coming together. But when the entirety of Israel's policy seems to be "stop shooting us, even a little, or else," that creates an atmosphere where nothing will ever be solved without depopulation of one area. And we're back to where we started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_count...ry_expenditures Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan all spend more GDP on their militaries. I had to look it up. Per capita, not by % of their GDP. You can't give me a nation with a higher per-capita spending than Israel, because there isn't one.

Except that the cease-fire agreement only expired a few days prior. And those two Palestinians were the only ones killed by rocket attacks between December 19 and December 26 (Israel commenced operations on December 27).

There would be diplomatic consequences - quite serious, I imagine - if British militants fired rockets into French territory. However, barring some sabre-rattling, there would be no serious voices calling for an actual war. There is a very big difference from "people who live in Palestinian territory," and "the government of Palestine (i.e. Hamas)." People in the middle east love nothing more than an anti-Zionist Jew. It's the old "loving the convert" psychology; nothing convinces you you're right so much as someone from the other side joining yours. Destroying the state of Israel does not mean killing all the Jews, any more than destroying Saddam Hussein meant killing all the Iraqis. Question: can you point me to an existing nation which spends more per-capita money on its military than Israel? Can you point me at an existing nation which regularly violates the territorial sovereignty of its neighbors like Israel?

Perhaps it is because being stationed on the border is different from being a member of a controlled, defined offensive with a clear military goal? Just perhaps.

On December 26, 2007, Palestinian militants fired a few dozen rockets, which succeeded at killing two Palestinians and wounding a third. As a reasoned and proportionate response to this attack, Israel began a three-week long military conflict which claimed the lives of over one thousand Palestinians. What is the half-way bargaining position for a nation of invaders to get off the land they've stolen? What is the half-way bargaining position for a country which does not respect its neighbors borders or sovereignty to stop? The Israeli state is illegitimate and aggressive. It shouldn't continue to exist. That does not mean "kill all the jews." Anti-zionism is not the same as anti-semitism.

My opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel is committing a thinly-veiled depopulation of the Occupied Territories, piece by piece. They use the slightest terrorist attack as a "causus belli" to invade them, killing thousands and destroying cities. They are engaging in the most barbaric of roman-era tactics, "kill one hundred of them for every one of us they kill." And it is not working.

Hello, "Emma," if that is your real name. Let me make a little recommendation here: content. Content keeps people reading your posts. Content keeps people responding. Be fresh! Know things! Learn a little, improve yourself! Posting on the internet is a bit like dating; if you aren't getting positive responses (and, let's be frank, you aren't), the problem probably lies with you! So here's my recommendation: read about a particular subject, extensively. Use this bit of information that you know fairly well (I'm rather educated on Marxism and the early Soviet Union) as a lure to get people to read your posts. If all you ever contribute is short, one-line posts and images, people will begin to become exasperated whenever your user name graces their screen. I know that I sigh every time Purkake's avatar scrolls past. It's not really worth posting about, since I know he's a troll who posts crap. I, on the other hand, am I high-tier poster, who gets real responses from those rare people on this forum who don't enjoy posting images in response to thought-out, well reasoned posts. I guess what I'm saying is, you need a gimmick. Your whole "I hate trolls" thing might've been good, but where is it? It's gone, that's where! No war but class war. lord of flies out.

I agree that most likely, barring some sort of extreme introduction, mutants will find themselves filtered into other appropriate roles in our society: entertainers, cult leaders, special forces soldiers, et cetera. The most likely scenario is that they are filtered into the third world very violently, but the first world adapts alright. So let's presuppose an extreme introduction to put people off: the first mutant which the public becomes aware of is a teenager who inadvertently explodes in the middle of his school. Now when people think mutant, they think "bad, dangerous." How does this filter through? What are the justifications people give?

I've been musing on the "hatred of mutants" trope in things like X-Men. How would anti-mutant sentiment develop, and as a corollary, how would pro-mutant sentiment develop? For example, pro-black sentiments have often been channelled into rejection of things identified with the white power structure: see, for example, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam. But mutants, as generally portrayed, have no cultural legacy; and on the other hand, neither do their foes. Gays can look back on Rome or Greece; homophobes can call forward centuries of church dogma. The same goes for sexism, "religionism" and racism: these are traditions centuries old, and hated communities which are similarly old. To take a particularly outlying example: european racism towards the native americans. While the europeans had no prior contact, they could build their racism on the old molds of religious hatred: thus the idea of the Aztecs as members of an insane human sacrifice culture. On the opposite end, the native americans could build their anti-racism on their millenia of unique history, which it is still predicated on. Mutants have no cultural legacy. They do not smoothly fit in or correspond to any previously hated group, as "native americans" fit into "heathens." One could make the comparison to witches, but that kind of "fear of the supernatural" is mostly restricted to the third world in the modern era. Perhaps some small towns might get really afraid of a local kid who glows in the dark, but most people nowadays view the world through a particular, secular spectrum. I can see a certain justification for mutant racism, as wrapping into that anti-"dangerous people" cypher, but surely there would be something deeper? I mean, this kind of reactionary discrimination generally has a motley crew of explanations which serve to disguise "I don't like it because," and so does the anti-discriminatory movement.