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POPSCocoon of Denial So the Obama administration bans the use of the word “terror” and at the same time, broadens the definition of “torture” so that it can investigation and ultimately prosecute CIA officers who worked to extract crucial information from terrorists (oops, sorry, oppressed Islamic freedom fighters). The evil Dick Cheney has the audacity to question the wisdom of this strategy and is castigated by Left-leaning media and the Whitehouse. But what if Cheney is right? That's the question Douglas MacKinnon of The Baltimore Sun asks when he writes: The health-care debate? Cash for clunkers? Rising unemployment? None of that will matter if we lose an American city to terrorism. An intelligence operative told me that if terrorists successfully detonate a nuclear weapon on our soil and kill and wound hundreds of thousands of Americans, "the thin veneer of civilization will be ripped from our nation in an instant, and we could very well descend into barbarism. Neighbor against
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POPSLet’s Go To Prison The author says “Generations from now, our treatment of criminals will be looked at with the same disgust and horror that slavery is viewed with today, and our society will rightly be condemned as cruel and barbaric for it.” I don’t fully agree with this statement, because there can be no comparison between prison and slavery. I do however, believe that rape is cruel and barbaric and we take on some of the responsibility for allowing it to continue. What ever happened to the idea of no “Cruel or Unusual Punishment”? You might be inclined to be unsympathetic of prisoners plight because after all they broke the law and deserve to be where they are, but do they really deserve to have this form of torture brought down on them?
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POPSLeft in Dark Times, Bernard-Henri Lévy Maybe the most important book of our time! I think I will move this to the top of my list MORE: The neoprogressives believe "liberalism is the source all the planet's evils," Lévy writes (p. 90), so they must declare innocent those Third World despots who "meddle with their citizens and treat them like cattle," because in the neoprogressive dogma "the System, and the System alone, bears full responsibility." They reject that the great revolutions, including the British and the American, were explicitly liberal, and used liberal thought in their struggle against absolutism (p. 92). The liberal market-based republics can more easily be portrayed as Evil, when liberty, which might be thought their finest aspect, disappears from view.
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POPSEXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Air Raid Victim Tells Obama to Leave Afghanistan We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat. We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl's face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.
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POPSWhy the Caged Bird Sings What is he up to? 1) he truly believes that torture actually works and that using it doesn’t dehumanize the user 2) he is defending the legacy of an administration he ran single-handedly for eight years 3) since he is no longer in the WH he can now speak as freely as he wants So he is either 1) selling himself to the GOP because, you know, once you have tasted power you don’t want to give it up. Or, 2) as the author states, he is scared of the public damnation that will come out against him if the public learns the extent of the barbarism that took place at Abu Ghraib. So, from his point of view, waterboarding is very minor in comparison to what he ordered take place there. Which means Obama has now allowed himself to become a party to the disgrace that has been brought upon the U.S. by simply refusing to prosecute.
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POPSMichael Ramirez gets it wrong again That's actually 2974 reasons to increase spending to law enforcement, since its cops that really stop the terrorists, not soldiers and torturers. That was a nod toward switching away from bullshit wars and turn to good, solid police work instead. Despite the memos from compromised officials that said torture works, the actual statistics show that all useful information was gained from prisoners before they were tortured, not after. 24 is just a work of fiction; torture has never produced any useful information in the so-called "Ticking Timebomb" scenario in reality. Torture is nothing but barbarism.
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POPSAfghanistan Made Easy
Years of reporting from combat zones in Bosnia, Uganda, the Sudan, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea have convinced Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, The Coming Anarchy) that Thucydides and Sun-Tzu are still right on the money when they wrote that war is not an aberration and that civilization can repress barbarism but cannot eradicate it. Reminding readers that “The greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future,” Kaplan conducts a brisk tour through the works of Machiavelli, Malthus and Hobbes, among others, to support his advocacy of foreign policy based on the morality of results rather than good intentions. From those classics, he extracts historical models and rationales for exploiting military might, stealth, cunning and what he dubs “anxious foresight” (which some may regard as pessimism based on disasters past) in order to lead, fight and bring adversaries to their knees should they challenge the prevailing balance of power.
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POPSIndeed... Why would we heed the bible on MOST topics... If you actually bother to read it, most of it is bronze and iron-age barbarism...
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POPSAnti-Death Penalty Editorial "It's a shame that America is almost the last pro-death democracy, ranking alongside brutal dictatorships such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the like. America was tainted, for example, when former Texas Gov. George W. Bush set an all-time record of putting people to death - and mocked one woman about to be killed." From Editorial
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POPSThe Special Sting of Personal Terrorism - Mumbai Update "But what slowly became clear was that this was an attack of especial barbarism, because it was so personal. It was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards.They seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made."
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POPSU.S. Supports use of Cluster Munitions Cluster munitions are large weapons that release up to hundreds of smaller submunitions. "Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems and risks to civilians," writes the Cluster Munition Coalition. 1-their widespread dispersal means they cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians so the humanitarian impact can be extreme, 2-many submunitions fail to detonate on impact and become de facto antipersonnel mines killing and maiming people long after the conflict has ended Why does the U.S. want to continue the use of these inaccurate, indiscriminate, and unreliable bombs? We have 'smart' bombs and we use 'surgical strike' technology. Why do we insist on employing such barbaric weaponry? For a country that prides itself as a democratic and humanitarian state, how can the U.S. ignore the overwhelming mandate of such a large number of nations?
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POPSFaroe Islands Barbarity abounds on the beautiful islands of Faroe. Can we excuse the bloodthirsty slaughter of these intelligent creatures on the basis that animals in food production also suffer, or that it's part of their culture, as some people do? Of course not! Quite apart from the fact that two wrongs do not make a right, if we justified this barbarity on the grounds of culture we'd also have to accept the practice of child marriage, suttee, clitorendectomies etc. Note too that the meat is not eaten...the animals are left to rot because heavy metal contamination renders their meat useless for human consumption according to EU standards for for human food. Aren't we a wonderful species - NOT!
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POPSSmall town loses it's government How will they survive? Under conventional wisdom these poor under governed people will resort to barbarism and all slay each other due to their "anarchistic" state. Let's hope government gets there to rescue them in time.
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POPSHistory of Western Civilization lost in Iraq "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing." And US invaders stood by and watched as irreplaceable world history was hauled off by unarmed looters.
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POPSAmerica: State of the Nayshun
the real cost of America's hate-affair with knowledge is paid by children, for whom words like "learning" and "wisdom" sound biblical and words like "intelligence" elitist and judgmental. Those of us old enough to remember the sixties well remember that every classroom had at least one kid (usually an immigrant from Canada or Pakistan) whose father (usually an academic or ACLU attorney) had turned the television set into a planter. But those of us who have survived The Love Boat, Three's Company and Charlie's Angels to enter the world of Rap and shows about whinnying wannabe Britneys celebrating million dollar Sweet Sixteen parties have survived to witness the reversal of culture—a new barbarism and a vulgarity that, unlike the old vulgarity, incoherently accepts political correctness while exploiting and expanding every stereotype, every dumb opinion, every rude form of discourse. It's a barbarism fueled by technologies made available to the know-nothings by the know-hows, free speech
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POPSJudicial Barbarism Although I am an opponent of the death penalty, I think this was the wrong decision. Why? Because it enshrines barbarism in our legal system. By saying that the death penalty is not warranted unless the victim of the crime was also killed, the justices have defined our legal system as an instrument not of justice but of vengeance. Justice is the protection of the weak, and the assurance that wrongs, once committed, will not be repeated. Justice should not spring from vindictive passion, but instead from a love for all those in society. Our legals system is there to protect us from henious individuals who menace society, not to torture them for our own sadistic satisfaction. If we merely revisit their own crimes back on them, we are not just, but savage, not civilized but barbaric.
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POPSBush made the world a safer place Bush was the right man for the presidency, at precisely the right time. I shudder to think of the mess we would be in had Gore or that other idiot been at the reins on 9/11.
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POPSIsrael: Perpetrator of a Holocaust Yes, these people are sick. Seriously sick. Criminally insane. Yet they REQUIRE pomp and circumstance and myopia among any and all politicians of the entire western world. The state of Israel is the scourge of humanity which will lead the humane race to extinction.
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POPSTony Blair: Nutjob Some people, when they retire, stop wearing a tie, stop putting on a suit - unless it is of the jogging variety, stop waking up before dawn, stop worrying about deadlines, and just put their feet up. Other people go abso-freaking-lutely nuts when they retire. Guess which one Tony Blair is? Tony apparently is nostalgic for the time of the Crusades. He might have converted to Catholicism, but his rhetoric is straight up "White Man's Burden" from Victorian "Muscular Christianity." I mean, he begins with the implicit supposition that the west has always dominated the world and that the East is just recently rising above the level of savage barbarism to "challenge" the Christian West. Then it goes down hill from there! He actually sounds nostalgic for brutal imperialism. He also sounds frighteningly ignorant. I certainly hope this kind of madness doesn't prefigure Bush's up-coming retirement.
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POPS"Rule, Britannia!" - A sense of imperial mission Continuation: A sense of imperial mission characterized the outlook of many of the imperial proconsuls of Curtis's age—men like Lord Curzon, the unbending viceroy of India. ‘To me the message is carved in granite, hewn of the rock of doom’, Curzon wrote, ‘that our work is righteous and that it shall endure’. Such sentiments would have seemed as absurd to earlier generations of British colonial governors as they do today. ‘Our object in conquering India’, Sir Charles Napier wrote in 1840, ‘the object of all our cruelties, was money … Every shilling of this has been picked out of blood, wiped and put into the murderer's pocket … We shall yet suffer for the crime as sure as there is a God in heaven.’ Yet Napier himself went on to conquer Sind, with great loss of blood; and as governor did much to wipe out suttee, thuggism, and infanticide (all in the name of righteousness).
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