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US Marine Ty Ziegel poses with Renee Kline before their wedding in Washington, Illinois, in July. Ziegel was severely wounded in a suicide bomb attack during his second tour of duty in Iraq. He was blinded in one eye, had a shattered skull, and most of his skin was burned off. The couple were engaged following Ziegel's first deployment in Iraq. After Ziegel was injured, Kline lived with him for over a year while he recovered at a hospital in Texas.
Those voices here who are so blinded that they are unaware of real situation with regards to the battle between Islamic Fundamentalist rhetoric and the west, are the same voices who condemn the west for causing 9/11, Bali, Spain, 7/7 and over 12,000 other attacks by said fundamentalists.
We will make this damn thread a sticky and keep it alive every day until all of you see things my way. If you refuse, we will turn this site strictly into a Vocal Booty Trance forum!
ok maybe not.
peace out.
support the troops - get them the hell out of Iraq and bring them home safely!
hahah. yeah, i agree. support the troops, get them out of iraq and all the other foreign bases we have.
no compromise? Good. don't ever compromise. compromise allows for the good to be diluted and evil to prevail. When two viewpoints are in conflict, reality plays out as the final arbiter of the appeals.
I honestly laugh at that...you are Israeli and I am Serbian.
My fellow country man have quite possibly an equal if not greater level of hate for all Muslims (as Serbia was under Ottoman rule for 500 years and we just lost our "holy land" to our Muslim neighbor and the radical Muslims they have spawned - our monuments and our heritage are being destroyed everyday while Serbians living there fear for their safety)...I just don't tend to agree with peoples prejudices and think that I should judge each case independently rather than dismissing all Muslims as radical Islamists.
IMO you should try and keep a level of objectivity about all issues rather than allowing your personal feelings to get involved
p.s. the US probably funded and trained more Islamic terrorists than Iraq or Al-Quaida put together
Nice little diatribe you have sprouted off there, well done - its relevance is what exactly?
My only prejudice is aimed at those who try and do away with others liberties in the name of religious fundamentalism, in the instance of the article that relates to Islamic fundamentalism, but my dislike of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists is also high.
You claim that I have dismissed all Muslims as radical islamists - maybe you would like to point out in my original message where I actually did that?
And as for your bs keeping a level of objectivity - i wonder whether you had actually read what i posted, or just made assumptions because of my nationality - either way your comments relate not one iota to my original post.
We will make this damn thread a sticky and keep it alive every day until all of you see things my way. If you refuse, we will turn this site strictly into a Vocal Booty Trance forum!
ok maybe not.
peace out.
support the troops - get them the hell out of Iraq and bring them home safely!
well, in the interest of totally hijacking this thread...
A number of factors, chiefly among which was the US's long-standing decision to embrace a fundamentally capitalist rather than a socialist (or, God forbid, a communist) system. The system has its drawbacks, but it is a key reason that the US was been "on top" in terms of economic power for most of the 20th century, while most of France was continuously on strike (still is) and other nations like Russia and China were busy terrorizing their own people. The Chinese, among others, are now finally figuring all this out.
The US doesn't set its own oil prices; they are fundamentally set by global market forces. Alternative energy will be developed now that it is finally economically feasible for business entrepreneurs to take on that investment risk, but this is a process that will take decades to develop and implement.
What I had in mind were the conditional agreements that dictated the post war world that we live in today...i.e. "free markets" end of the empires etc,etc...
As for the oil prices I meant subsidies and taxes...
this thread is obviously greatly influenced on all sides by our backgrounds...no middle ground to be found.
This is my last post here.
p.s. chunky I was being sarcastic...
n.b. the point I was trying to make wasn't anti-American....All nations are shit IMO, the US just gets grilled more than others because its more powerful and therefore more involved in IR + its the most powerful and therefore interested in keeping others below it...so naturally "hated" by most others.
Put another way: Google and Microsoft were organizations started by individuals, but there is a reason why things like this tended to be created in America and not in various other countries.
To some extent you are correct. But ideas are not inhibited by geographical boundaries. I think you're mixing up creation and effect. Microsoft and Google flourished here b/c of the market system we use here. But the ideas that founded these businesses could have been concieved anywhere, even on a plane. Bill Gates could have easily been in Ghana when the idea to build a personal computer in his garage was concieved. IF there were any person aside from Bill Gates who should take credit for the 'environment' he was brought up in, it would be his parents. And eventually, on down the line, i guess the government.
Yes, i am talking in a literal 'sense' as you have said. What other vantage point would there be? The theoretical viewpoint is where a slippery slope gets involved. But I see your point nonetheless. And I'm glad to see you agree that the individual is the one to take credit or blame.
Let me expand on this for a second. Look at Nikolai Tesla. I used this example above. His national origin is Serbia but consider Croatia his homeland. I find it completely rediculous that members of each side continue to contest whether he was "more serbian" or "more croatian". It's besides the point for each group to take claim to his products, and at worst, persons like him are used as propoganda to support different factions (much like what the USSR was doing back during the cold war). Yet, even when he moved the United States, it was a private banker, J.P. Morgan, who largely funded his work, his best work in fact. Even when Tesla was not in the United States, he was writing down unique ideas (for example, he created the first loudspeaker/amplifier in Hungary). It was who he was. His ability to expand on them, and his risk to benefit all mankind (his prime motive), was largely due to risks taken by private investors (like J.P Morgan and Edison), not national governments.
That said, I think it would make things worse if governments started taking credit for the ideas and successes of private individuals. Alternatively, a government is nothing but a mass aggregate of private individuals who have differing motives and who aren't involved with all processes. To say that the government itself is to be credited would be no different than saying Planet Earth developed electricity, or whatever. I think I've made my point clear. Not to keep pounding away....
sigh. But like i said, support the troops. question the government.
miroslav its no use, these people are brainwashed. what a joke.
this threat can't continue until you can comprehend that one can support the troops while at the same time question the 'stated' and 'changing' reasons why we are in Iraq. that is to say, 'differentiate' between the two.
what is, I think, most sickening, is that you give free passes to the government. how left-wing are you again?
that may be true, but the united states government has done nothing in light of how i formed my view in the above post. it may influence the environment which i form these views, but my thoughts are my own: they are not informed to me by any government, governing body, media personality, or otherwise
Yes, this is true. But in a literal sense, you're always free anywhere in the world with respect to your thoughts. Your societal environment can significantly influence your thoughts, but no one can read your mind and literally control your thoughts (yet...). The real question is: what are you able to do based on those thoughts? Can you act on them and implement them? Can you leverage financial, educational, or civic systems to make it happen? Can you even publicly express your thoughts? The answers to these questions may drastically vary across societies.
Put another way: Google and Microsoft were organizations started by individuals, but there is a reason why things like this tended to be created in America and not in various other countries.
Originally posted by 88Mariner
if what you say is true of all decisions, that the government has a hand in all of it, then where does the slippery slope of credit and blame end?
I wouldn't say it is "government" that has a hand in it all, but rather the society - which is a product of many things, including the government, institutions, culture, etc. By and large, individuals still bear the final credit and blame.
so, now that I have wrecked this thread entirely.....
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