When you think of the vast percentage of Americans who can’t be bothered to come out and vote…and that musicians develop an overwrought campaign called “Vote Or Die,” which really doesn’t mean much of anything, as opposed to the “Vote And Die” message being spread by Iraqi terrorists…
It’s just pretty dámņëd impressive, the Iraqis turning out to vote in their first election. Make no mistake, it’s still a horror show, we still shouldn’t be over there, Bush lied to America, and Bush’s List continues to grow. But at least Iraqis are braving all manner of risk to vote, as opposed to many Americans who are so cavalier about a right they never earned or had to fight for.
PAD
• 
Jim:
>Your right PAD the Iraqis are brave to vote. I’m glad you were able to pay that a compliment without letting people think you actually thought there was some success to efforts our government and soliders. And I like the way you were able to cut Bush at the same time. (PAD you really do come across as bitter sometimes…just think about it).
Before we start congratulating ourselves, let’s wait to see about this “succss”. I’ve already heard about initial counts from the voting as showing about 60% backing an Iranian-affiliated party and some possible voting irregularities. We won’t begin to know anything for a bit now, but one would hope that steps were taken to protect and ensure the integrity of this process. Too much rests on the purity of this process (Regardless of the results) for both Iraq, the U.S. and the rest of the world at this point.
Fred
engaging in horrific acts of violence like beheadings (see public exocution via guillitine)
apples and oranges. decapitation comes in many fruit.
the swift blade of the guillotine was not as slow or agonizing as somebody getting his head sawed off.
The videos have people screaming and such. That’s. not. quick.
“but no one campaigned and the names were kept under wraps until you got to the voting places.”
What the heck was that story on NBC about the other week… the one about the husband and wife both running their own seperate Presidential campaigns… under distinct issues, both approved by Sistani?
They were campaigning…. I remember! Campaigning. I guess they weren’t. Ðámņ that right-wing NBC! or left-wing. or whatnot.
Bladestar,
“So you support the use of torture?”
Yes. I remember saying that. Oh, no, wait..I said nothing of the kind.
“Our troops did it in Iraq at the orders of their ‘superiors’.”
You’re right! Just the other day I read about how Bush himself was caught on videotape ordering Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs to torture Iraqis.
No, wait…that hasn’t been proven either..or even given any credibility. But keep believing your negative fantasies, it’s what you do best.
“I can easily support the troops while pointing to the áššhølë who sent them to die there for NO GØÐÐÃMN GOOD REASON quite easily.”
Seeing as how your first statement was to bring up our soldiers torturing people, and since you have yet to state one positive things our soldiers have done there, and since you obviously don’t support their mission your statement is QUITE EASILY refuted.
“Bush is a war criminal.”
See, here’s a perfect example of the illogical indignation many have when told they do not support the troops.
If you truly feel Bush is a war criminal, that means are troops are committing war crimes. If you truly feel they are committing war crimes, how can you then claim to support their actions? If you claim “they’re just following orders”. that still doesn’t mean you give their mission much nobility and glory. Which is your opinion. But you cannot credibly say you “support” the troops while then saying they are doing something that ranges from unworthy to war crimes.
“I pity the military”
They don’t need or want your pity.
“Many of them joined to protect their country, but instead they’re being misused”
Most don’t feel they’re being misused at all. And they’re the ones doing the work. I’ll take their word for it, thank you.
“and slaughtered for something that does NOTHING to protect America.”
John McCain supports this war wholeheartedly. Is he a war criminal in your opinion, too?
Does John McCain have the power to send them to their deaths?
No, he doesn’t, does he.
He’s just expressing an opinion. Bush is killing our soldiers, not McCain.
Karen wrote, You can hardly compare Saddam to Hitler. Hitler actively went about invading other countries and torturing those captured without letting them have any rights. Saddam was not capable of invading others.
Yes, he was just killing his own people. He hadn’t invaded any other countries in, like, years.
Seriously, there were good and principled reasons to oppose the Iraq War but “Saddam was harmless” isn’t one of them. The man was a butcher. Always has been a butcher. Would have continued to be a butcher until someone stopped him. He wasn’t butchering us, and we can have an intelligent argument about whether that makes the war unjustifiable, but don’t try to pretend he was something he wasn’t: harmless.
Not at all. When a boycott is targeting some action a sector of the public disagrees with, ad that action itself is not protected under free speech, I don’t see any conflict. But when the point of the boycott is to get someone else to essentially shut up, then there is a conflict.
It’s admittedly a fine line, and maybe I’m not expressing it clearly. Raucus protests outside a GNP rally aren’t really a boycott. The protesters just want to be heard, they don’t want to silence the GOP. Well, ok, maybe some of them do, but overall, it’s more about getting heard.
I very much disagree with you about that last part. (I disagree with you to some extent philosophically about the other parts too, but on the latter statement I think you’re flatly wrong.) The natural objective of a protest is to silence your opposition. If the objective were to be heard, there are a variety of other options available. Let’s stick with my example of the Republican National Convention. The would-be protesters could hold a rally away from the convention site. The opposition party could hold its own convention with national television coverage– which in fact it did. The tactical choice to protest at the convention site, harangue Republican convention-goers in the city, hold marches during the convention time, sneak people into the convention to shout “No Blood for Oil,” and to object loudly to the “Free speech zone” restrictions, all combine to tell me that the ultimate goal of protests is to get their message out while minimizing the ability of the protest targets to communicate their own message in peace. The First Amendment enshrines a series of rights, one of which is the right to peacefully assemble, and that right along with the right of free speech were the obvious targets of protesters.
Going back to my original point, I don’t believe this makes the protesters First Amendment hypocrites. When you have dueling rights, there’s nothing wrong with competition. Markets have winners and losers. I believe the concept of a “marketplace of ideas” allows for one idea to become the dominant force in the market, and I believe that the proponents of that idea are perfectly free to use whatever legitimate tools they have available to promote their positions. Some ideas belong on the dustbin of history. Feel free to point out– loudly– that your opponent’s position is one of them. That’s not hypocrisy any more than an aggressive prosecutor is hypocritical when he says the defendant is entitled to a fair trial at the same time he’s trying to convict the miscreant.
He wasn’t butchering us, and we can have an intelligent argument about whether that makes the war unjustifiable, but don’t try to pretend he was something he wasn’t: harmless.
And nobody is arguing that.
However, Bush sold this war on Saddam having WMD, on being an immediate threat to us, and, in a series of insinuations, that Saddam was behind 9/11.
He was none of these things.
And our government, oh so quietly, has admitted these things, but nobody has listened.
But there are many not-so-harmless people in the world, but you don’t see us targetting those that are committing such genocide NOW.
So I can only conclude that how many people Saddam killed in the past isn’t the issue. It was a matter of revenge, or oil, or Bush needing a scapegoat to get another four years in office.
David, somewhere in your last post is the key to my point. I’ll try to bring it out.
The key to free speech is that you have to take the good with the bad, and even occasionally the ugly. All three, in a free speech society, can discuss, talk, even shout at one another. But once they start calling for the silencing of one or more positions, the concept of free speech vanishes, and is replaced with a market controlled by those in power, with the ability to prevent newcomers from entering the market.
I don’t necessarily see raucus protests as trying to close down the opposition. Engage in a shouting match, yes, but not silence. When the protest starts to disrupt, it does start to interfere. Although I still don’t see disruption how injection of a contrasting viewpoint translates into an attempt to silence.
Granted, there are less disruptive ways of expressing your message. But I don’t see the free speech market as only one engaged in discourse through news and other media outlets. At its heart is the direct exchange of ideas, and the concept of a “free speech zone” is a blatant attempt to regulate and control when those market exchanges occur. Raucus protest and disruptive convention crashers are a natural result when one body feels that their message is being regulated out of the market. This administration has demonstrated a lack of willingness to hear contrary views, which in turn creates an impetus for desparate measures in order to *make* the administration hear opposing views.
I’d bet that Bush would receive less of a volatile reaction were he to truly open his administration up to considering alternative views and ideas, and to respond to them. Not in slick, pre-packaged and one-sided speeches, but in true discourse.
Well, this thread is dying out, but I thought I’d post something from Yahoo right now. This isn’t the entire article, but enough to show that our invasion hasn’t done squat:
”
Iraq Shiite leaders demand Islam be the source of law
Sun Feb 6,11:48 AM ET
NAJAF, Iraq (AFP) – Iraq (news – web sites)’s Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and another top cleric staked out a radical demand that Islam be the sole source of legislation in the country’s new constitution.
One cleric issued a statement setting out the position and the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites made it known straight away that he backed demands for the Koran to be the reference point for legislation.
The national assembly formed after last month’s historic elections is to oversee the drawing up of the new constitution and Sistani is the figurehead of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance expected to become the largest single bloc.
The role of Islam has been at the heart of months of debate between rival parties and factions as well as the US-led occupation authority which administered Iraq until last June.
Sistani leads the five most important clerics, known as marja al-taqlid, or objects of emulation, who had portrayed a more moderate stance going into the election.
The surprise statement was released by Sheikh Ibrahim Ibrahimi, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ishaq al-Fayad, another of the marja.
“All of the ulema (clergy) and marja, and the majority of the Iraqi people, want the national assembly to make Islam the source of legislation in the permanent constitution and to reject any law that is contrary to Islam,” said the statement.”
Craig’s news article is the reason why democracy as we know it is doomed to fail over there. This has been repeated by a huge number of political and religious “experts” since before we went in.
Craig’s news article is the reason why democracy as we know it is doomed to fail over there.
It’s also why I keep saying that they have to want it for themselves, and that we can’t force democracy upon them.
Craig:
>>Craig’s news article is the reason why democracy as we know it is doomed to fail over there.
>It’s also why I keep saying that they have to want it for themselves, and that we can’t force democracy upon them.
Are you reading the rest of the threads? You aint the only one here saying so. :p
Take a walk around and ask your neighbors.
Are you reading the rest of the threads? You aint the only one here saying so. :p
Yes, I know. But I was given some rather amusing responses when I mentioned that a few weeks back on one of these threads (may have even been this one).
It appears that many here in the US believe, including the Bush Administration, we can force them to have democracy, and that they’ll willingly accept it.
Maybe some day the hard-core Bush supporters will listen to the rest of the sane, civilized world.
When the protest starts to disrupt, it does start to interfere. Although I still don’t see disruption how injection of a contrasting viewpoint translates into an attempt to silence.
Try injecting a right-to-life essay into NOW’s next newsletter and see if they feel it’s an attempt to silence.
Raucus protest and disruptive convention crashers are a natural result when one body feels that their message is being regulated out of the market. This administration has demonstrated a lack of willingness to hear contrary views, which in turn creates an impetus for desparate measures in order to *make* the administration hear opposing views.
Not to be flippant, but since when does anyone have a right to be heard? I’m not kidding. Everyone in this country has a right to attempt to get the message out, but nobody is entitled to an audience, particularly not the right to subject the audience of their choice to a particular message, whether the audience is interested in hearing it or not. That’s really what you’re suggesting (if not quite openly stating) here; that if an audience has the temerity to want nothing to do with the speaker, then the speaker, up to a point, is entitled to take invasive measures to be heard. The RNC had no real interest in hearing what the protesters had to say, and in fact were so uninterested as to cordon off areas where the protesters could do their thing without getting in the RNC’s way. The RNC doesn’t have to listen to opposing viewpoints. It may be a good tactical move to do so; President Clinton listened to opposing viewpoints after his party had its collective ášš handed to it on a platter in the 1994 midterm elections, hijacked some of the better opposing viewpoints, and managed to be the only Democratic President to serve two terms since Franklin Roosevelt. It was a smart move, but not a morally imperative move, because every speaker has every right to ignore, oppose, or outmaneuver any opposing speaker.
If you were right about one body being genuinely regulated out of the market, you might have a better point. The fact is, though, that no political viewpoint in this country has been eliminated from the market, certainly not by governmental regulation. The government in this country seems to spend infinitely more time regulating dirty pictures in comic books than it does in suppressing political dissent. Thank God. (I’d rather it did neither, but surely if we had to choose one of them to be stifled it would be this one.) The entire Dean campaign and moveon.org were premised on the ability of low-funded speakers to get their messsages out. The left weren’t regulated out of the market; they lost because the “consumers” (i.e. voters) in this country are generally center-right. The left got its message out and managed to win over the second largest number of voters in American history, which would have been more impressive if the largest number of voters in American history hadn’t simultaneously lined up to support an obvious conservative. The problem for the left wasn’t market access, it was the composition of the audience.
I maintain that the example of the protesters is not a bad parallel to the Marvel Comics boycott hypothetical: a writer is not entitled, in any meaningful sense, to the forum of his choice for the airing of his work. He can self-publish, he can start a blog (and if he’s masochistic enough let people like me post on it), he can seek various publishers, but he’s not entitled to have one specific publisher risk losing business in order to facilitate his writings, or to have a member of the public refrain from communicating his views back to the publisher. Make no mistake, I believe the boycott to be fairly slimy (Not to mention absurd; I mean, seriously, basing a COMIC BOOK BUYING DECISION on national politics? Get a grip. Hëll, I bought a “Rock Against Bush” CD.), but it neither deprives the writer of something to which he’s entitled, nor takes cynical or hypocritical advantage of the First Amendment.
The RNC doesn’t have to listen to opposing viewpoints.
“[A]s you know, these are open forums, you’re able to come and listen to what I have to say.” – President Bush, Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2003
The RNC just doesn’t want opposing viewpoints at all, regardless of who they are from.
The RNC just doesn’t want opposing viewpoints at all, regardless of who they are from.
Yes, well, it’s hard to compete with the DNC’s legendary tolerance for any viewpoint… that comes from someone in a blue state.
Yes, well, it’s hard to compete with the DNC’s legendary tolerance for any viewpoint…
Really? I don’t recall people being coroned off miles away from Bush at his inaguration, at the RNC convention, at many stops Bush made early on in the campaigning for reelection.
Hëll, the war in Iraq and Powell’s not coming back for Bush’s 2nd term should tell you enough about what Bush thinks of opposing views.
Yes, well, it’s hard to compete with the DNC’s legendary tolerance for any viewpoint…
Really? I don’t recall people being coroned off miles away from Clinton at his inaguration, at the DNC convention, at many stops Kerry made early on in the campaigning for reelection.
These are all things Bush did. Btw, this might’ve been posted twice, so this one is a correction… still early for me so thoughts sometimes don’t type out the way my brain intended this early. 😉
Hëll, the war in Iraq and Powell’s not coming back for Bush’s 2nd term should tell you enough about what Bush thinks of opposing views.
David, honestly, of what value is free speech if it’s not heard? I think inherant in the right of free speech has to be access to the public. It’s not a right to be heard, it’s a right to have access. And I’d agree with you, that liberals do have access to the free speech market. But that access is being limited. Designated “free speech zones” are like concentration camps for ideas. Let’s put all the undesireable concepts that we don’t want to talk about, think about, or react to “over there,” and maybe they’ll go away.
I think I said pretty clearly that sneaking into the RNC proper and shouting out your disruptive message goes too far. You suggest trying to “inject” a counter message into someone’s newsletter. that’s not free speech, and private publications are under no obligation to open their pages for anyone to publish. I know that you are aware of that, so I’m kind of a little surprised that you’d raise it as an example since it doesn’t go anywhere to advance your point.
It is absolutely true that the liberal message has valid entry points to the free speech market. I think it is also absolutely true that many liberals felt that their access has been restricted over the past few years. The right to be heard may not exist, but the right to access has to go hand in hand with free speech. If access is not included as a substantial part of free speech, then the whole concept is meaningless. What use saying we treasure the free expression of ideas if we’re going to relegate in public where those ideas can be spoken?
Put another way, what use is free speech if the “free speech zone” is over there in the woods? So if a liberal rallies against conservative agendas in the middle of a forest, do the squirrels and birds really care?
Regulation of this kind is a sign of fear and weakness. And maybe an indication that one party has gained too much power. Fear that they can’t counter with reason and ideas alone the ideas of the opposition. Weakness in giving in to the tempation of silencing the opposition rather than letting the ideas compete in the market of free speech. And power, in being able to restrict the opposition’s access to the market.
I think I said pretty clearly that sneaking into the RNC proper and shouting out your disruptive message goes too far. You suggest trying to “inject” a counter message into someone’s newsletter. that’s not free speech, and private publications are under no obligation to open their pages for anyone to publish. I know that you are aware of that, so I’m kind of a little surprised that you’d raise it as an example since it doesn’t go anywhere to advance your point.
Because by the same token, political conventions are private gatherings. The press is invited, because the organizations hosting these gatherings very much want to use them for public relatoins, but that doesn’t mean every Tom, Ðìçk, and Nader is welcome to park on the doorstep and shout at the attendees. I view the protests at the RNC to be identical to pro-life protesters at abortion clinics: obnoxious but engaging in a legal activity. And it’s worth noting that abortion protestors are cordoned off at a distance from the clinic entrances routinely. And for that matter, contrary to Craig Ries’s statement, “free speech zones” were pioneered at the DEMOCRATIC convention… in 2000. When Gore was the nominee. During the bucolic golden age of a Democratic presidency. Before Ashcroft. And repeated at this year’s Democratic convention in Boston. I think that really diminishes your argument that these regulations indicate that one party has too much power, since both of them are doing it. Your beef may be with the two-party system in general.
It is absolutely true that the liberal message has valid entry points to the free speech market. I think it is also absolutely true that many liberals felt that their access has been restricted over the past few years.
Feeling it doesn’t make it true. Honestly, is liberal speech really restricted anywhere but on the O’Reilly Factor? And if it’s “absolutely true” that they have “valid entry points,” what’s the big deal about having slight restrictions on their ability to express themselves to convention attendees? Their access to one audience with no obvious interest in their message is restricted, but only slightly due to the existing legal doctrines that assure protesters the right to be within “sight and sound” range of the target. If liberals feel that their rights have been restricted of late, they need better evidence than this to support their claim. I honestly don’t see a problem here, and I’m not aware of any more valid complaints.
The right to be heard may not exist, but the right to access has to go hand in hand with free speech. If access is not included as a substantial part of free speech, then the whole concept is meaningless. What use saying we treasure the free expression of ideas if we’re going to relegate in public where those ideas can be spoken?
Time, place, and manner restrictions have always been accepted parts of “free speech” jurisprudence. The phrase that traditinoally appears in court opinions concerned with a variety of rights, not just free speech, is “ordered liberty.” How do you otherwise reconcile the speaker’s right to get his views out with the audience’s right not to be bothered?