+1 to every post in this thread.
davely, extraordinary shit that’s happening in your neck of the woods. power to the people.
Governor is removing local police from the situation. Not sure if this means we are getting State Police now or the National Guard.
I really hope you will all tell your friends. We need as many eyes on this nationally as we can get, or we will never get justice and accountability.
When white people get mad, they become isolated and then go on a shooting spree.
When black people get mad, they organize and go on a looting spree.
When white dudes get mad they go on a shooting spree.
When black dudes get mad they go on a looting spred.
When wives get mad, they go on a shopping spree.
Feelings on the Middle East conflict:
I’m Jewish. Not religiously, but culturally. I don’t give a shit about the Old Testament, the Torah, the Talmud, or shellfish and pork dietary restrictions. But I was raised among Jews, went to school with Jews, and studied enough of my own people’s history in college to know that until we began thinking long-term, we were getting our asses kicked. We were isolated, ghettoized, and shunned by the rest of humanity.
Speed up to the middle of the 20th century, when we got Israel. Our homeland. A place to rest. Between Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine… just over yonder to Iraq and Iran. Some gift, but it’s got religious attachment to the faithful, so ok, we’ll take it. Then comes a series of small wars that almost pushed us into the sea. So Israel started taking shit very, very seriously, to the extent that their hyper-defensive posture and war-mongering make my Gentile friends equate them with the Satmars of Williamsburg (don’t get me started) and say things like “They’re ruining Judaism for the Jews.”
I don’t agree. To me, this is a matter of the bullied kid getting revenge. They’re not doing it indiscriminately; they’re just killing Muslims.
So: we go to the second side of my argument, which posits that Muslims are basically like the Klingons from Star Trek: loud, war-like barbarians who can’t even manage their OWN shit but want to conquer everything else. If that sounds racist, you can stop reading this right now. I’m all for religious and cultural tolerance; when the Muslims grow up and start reflecting my attitude, maybe I won’t be so down on them. But until then, what have we got? A group of people who want to set back the clock thousands of years. A group of people whose primary means of communication is terrorism. A group of people who are okay with stoning to death rape victims who, through no fault of their own, must have “committed adultery.” So you’re female and you want to go to school? A faceful of acid for you. I don’t even know where to get acid, and I live in a First World country where EVERYTHING is for sale. But these pricks are riding bikes over the desert, and they can get acid. Why don’t you apply the energy you’re squandering on hating women and, I don’t know, contribute to scientific or cultural achievement. A couple of skyscrapers in Dubai aren’t cutting it.
So, fuck the Muslims. Israel is in the right. If I had my druthers, I’d see the US fund a huge, Israeli-led war of conquest throughout the Middle East. Get rid of the Muslims (I stopped short of suggesting extermination - BUT THE MUSLIMS HAVEN’T), conquer Iran and Iraq, and put the world’s dominant oil supply in the hands of people who know how to manage things (i.e. Jews).
And I consider myself a liberal. JEE-zus Christ. In the meantime, I keep watching on CNN as Hamas manipulates the cameras and plants their weapons inside hospitals and schools. I don’t usually tally up the dead on either side like it’s a sport… but the Israelis are so good at it, and the point spread is BEAUTIFUL.
- LY
Have been gone from here for a couple of days. I want to comment on some of the stuff here, as Lowelly’s last post alone is going to take me about 10 posts to properly debate. I’m happy - and not really all that surprised - that everyone is getting along well for the most part and even spreading some very educational information. I was worried after I hit the initial “post” button that I was just going to set off another Battle of The Prongers.
For starters, though, the situation in Ferguson is absolutely insane to say the least…a no-fly zone which seems geared specifically towards keeping “hostile” media helicopters out of the area, roads being blocked off, flash grenades being thrown DIRECTLY at reporters’ vans etc.
Normally I would call such a domestic issue “off-topic” when writing a thread about foreign conflicts, but maybe not when the Pentagon is actually supplying police with their means of crowd control.
I skimmed through and left after “Muslims are like Klingons”.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAA!!!
I’ll probably go back later and read the rest.
Oooookay here are some select responses to Lowelly:
The conflict in Israel is a tricky subject for me, because I’m critical of all the different strains of monotheism. I dislike all the Abrahamic religions’ worship of a psychotic god who, although all-powerful, still created humans with the ability to rebel against him so that he could throw a cosmic temper tantrum and condemn them to eternal torture for this insult. Seems that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are all complicit in believing some variation of this nonsense. I really have no dog in this fight if it’s defined as a religious conflict. And, unlike Noam Chomsky, I don’t believe that U.S. / Israeli actions are the main reason that Islamic militancy exists, and that there is no precedent in the Koran itself for expansionist violence.
So, myself and most people I know against this “war” are against it for the simple reason that the violence is so completely disproportionate, and the current winners of the game so childish, cruel, and undignified in their lopsided victory against a trapped and pathetically armed enemy. And this would be the case if it were any two other nationalities at war; it’s nothing to do with some kind of latent anti-Semitism. Refer to the videos of Israelis cheering on bombing campaigns from their lawn chairs, the videos of unarmed children being killed on the beach seemingly for fun, and the t-shirts printed up that show a pregnant Palestinian woman in crosshairs with the slogan “one shot, two kills.” No Zionist has any leg to stand on when accusing Muslims of medieval barbarism and simultaneously gloating over the deaths of children.
So, speaking of documentation - if you’re going to mention Hamas deliberately throwing children into the flight path of missiles to win the war of public sympathy, then I think the onus is on the accuser to prove that they’re doing this.
And the U.S. [political elite] IS funding a “huge, Israeli-led war of conquest through the Middle East.” It’s by U.S. military technology, blank checks from U.S. Congress (read: yearly $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer money), not by some “miracle” of Israeli resolve, that Israel is where it is today. Well, wait, that’s only half-true: there was also some honest-to-goodness terrorism that helped in the formation of Israel, courtesy of groups like [url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_political_violence]the ‘Stern Gang’ and Irgun (the former group was ALLIED with Nazi Germany against Britain until 1942!!!)
Muslims are basically like the Klingons from Star Trek: loud, war-like barbarians who can’t even manage their OWN shit but want to conquer everything else.
From what I’ve gathered about the extreme end of the culture, this is a pretty apt description.
[reply][reply]Fuck the U.N. too. Nothing but a bunch of corrupt whinny assholes. May a bullet find all those members as well.
The UN. Thats that organization of countries set up so that hitler never happens again? Of course they need a bullet.[/reply]
Dithering feckless bureaucrats at the U.N.
Just a few from the top of my head that the U.N. ensured didn’t happen.
Idi Amin
Augusto Pinochet
Sadam Hussein
Francois Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc” Duvallier
Mengistu Mariam
Pol Pot
Mao Zedong
Any North Korean leader in my lifetime
Robert Mugabe
Slobo Miloscovic
You might be onto something there grmps, I couldn’t think of any German dictators since the implementation of the U.N. Maybe it does work.
Send in the B-52s.[/reply]
While horrible, yes, no where near the scale of the damage done by Germany are the people on that list.
The video of Israeli citizens cheering in the street after a school in Gaza had been bombed, killing loads of kids, didn’t show them in a good light. They were chanting “there’s no school in Gaza because there’s no kids left alive”. There was also a smaller counter demonstration by other Israeli people who were calling for an end to the horrendous and disproportionate violence, so good for them for not believing in the media whitewash. Definitely bullied child syndrome, but now they’re doing, on a smaller scale, pretty much what was done to their people in the past. Some politician in Israel actually called for extermination of the Palestinians quite recently.
Nobody can criticise Israel without being accused of hating the Jewish people as a whole, which is ridiculous; there are Jewish people there who disagree with what their government is doing, so the govt doesn’t represent all Jews even in Israel, never mind worldwide, so basically criticising Israel isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism. No person or state is above criticism. The US is in a tough position where they feel like everyone else, can’t denigrate Israel’s actions or we’ll be accused of hating Jews. So they support them militarily and never really try too hard to reign them in. I read something recently about Netanyahu warning America not to ever second guess him again. What kind of ally issues a warning like that?
Anyway, fuck Netanyahu, and Hamas, innocent people are being murdered by their one-upsmanship and nobody is doing anything about it.
Muslims are basically like the Klingons from Star Trek: loud, war-like barbarians who can’t even manage their OWN shit but want to conquer everything else.
This.
Times about a thousand.
It’s such a fallacy of the fuckhead left at the moment that “poor old Muslims” are the victims of a global genocide movement, spearheaded by “evil” Israel.
It’s bullshit and the freakin’ Greens Party Down Under should be crucified for their malignant demonising of the Jewish peoples - whose right to defend themselves against palestinian aggression is entirely justified.
Islamics are taught from birth to “hate” jews. They are taught that Jews are their enemy and that the only good jew is a dead one. Hatred against the jews and against western civilisation is blasted out from loudspeakers in Tehran, Palestine and Kabul on a daily basis. Hated and mistrust of anything that is “against the will of Allah” is drummed into the largely ignorant masses.
There was a program on a news program during the week which showed a Palestinian children’s program in which a two little girls are discussing the murder and torture of jews with a “cute” little sock puppet thing.
And they call Islam a “peaceful” religion.
Peaceful my ass.
And the Jews have to put up with all this - and are demonised when they retaliate.
Jews are successful in business and have close ties with America, the “Great Satan” - making them a perfect target for shitkicker, commie left wingers like the hated Greens party.
It’s about time we opened our eyes to this…
Nobody can criticise Israel without being accused of hating the Jewish people as a whole, which is ridiculous;
unfortunately this is the truth.
Peligro, olde chap, you are my homie, but -
It’s such a fallacy of the fuckhead left at the moment that “poor old Muslims” are the victims of a global genocide movement, spearheaded by “evil” Israel.
I maybe didn’t touch on this enough in the last post, but I do not believe there are any “good guys” in the war of monotheisms. I don’t doubt that any of the anti-Jewish propaganda you mention exists in Muslim countries.
All I want is for Israel to stand on its own two feet and fight its own wars, without the endless infusion of U.S. cash and killing gear to help them to this end. I’m sick of being seen as complicit in these campaigns merely because I hold a U.S. passport. If Israel was to win in this manner, then so be it.
However - as it stands now, I find myself wondering what will happen if, cheered on by the U.S. establishment, Israel finally annihilates the Palestinians. Then what? Can we trust a country with 100+ “undeclared” nuclear weapons to simply be content with this? Or would Israel maybe decide that, hey, while we’re ahead, why not achieve a little more lebensraum? Where military conquest is concerned, I don’t know too many historical precedents where the victors just said “ok, let’s just stop here” and didn’t go on to concoct some more excuses for expanding a globe-spanning empire.
I guess what I am saying is that an Israel given free rein to do whatever the fuck it wants is not going to be fun. I imagine that, were the Arab world totally destroyed, the guns would then be turned on the so-called “self-hating Jews” in Israel and the U.S., and then who knows what else. It’s not encouraging when texts like the racist “King’s Torah” of rabbi Yitzhak Shapira are floating around - this states that the Old Testament prohibition against murder applies only to Jews murdering other Jews (in fairness, though, even the Shin Bet [Israeli intelligence agency] have been trying to shut him up.)
For the record I’m not what you’d call a “leftist,” maybe anarcho-libertarian or something…most “Left” creeds have this valorization of “labor” (read: compulsory production) that I find authoritarian and pointless, so, no, I’m not that.
Went down to the protest tonight… That was the greatest display of humanity I have ever witnessed in my life. We drove down W. Florissant to go to the QT, parked off of Highmont and as we hit W. Florissant on foot, here came a march of hundreds of people, so we walked with them all the way up to Chambers and then down a few blocks to this church where they were passing out refreshments for kids. We walked back to our car to grab our drinks we brought, then walked down to QT. There were a few St. Louis City cops walking around on foot talking to everybody and being super super cool. There were no cop cars anywhere. Tons of media. Cars nonstop rolling through honking with people hanging out windows and sitting on roofs and everybody chanting and cheering. Nothing but props for the Panthers who were taking care of business keeping order and directing traffic. At one point a County SUV came up the street with berries on, followed by a Highway Patrol car, they got to where the Panthers were and the crowd closed in and they couldn’t drive anywhere, got real tense for a minute, somebody threw a cup of ice at the SUV, a couple cops got out and talked to the Panthers and this guy in a suit who I am not sure who he was, might have been with them or someone local, but he was clearly and confidently in control of the situation all night. Then the cops got back in the car, the guy in the suit grabbed his bullhorn and said “everybody back up so I can get them the fuck out of here”, and the police turned around and drove off and we never saw any of them again the whole time we were there, just the cool City cops. Everybody was talking and real friendly, it was simply amazing. High fives and handshakes the whole way down the sidewalk while we were walking. Congratulations Ferguson, it’s your home again. Let’s keep it that way.
Peligro, olde chap, you are my homie, but…
No worries!!
I was in a shitty mood when I typed that and I really let fly…
Yes, there certainly are “grey areas” on both sides. Idiotic of myself to think this whole, sloppy, murderous mess can be summed up in a few, neat paragraphs.
[blush]
[reply]Peligro, olde chap, you are my homie, but…
No worries!!
I was in a shitty mood when I typed that and I really let fly…
Yes, there certainly are “grey areas” on both sides. Idiotic of myself to think this whole, sloppy, murderous mess can be summed up in a few, neat paragraphs.
[blush][/reply]
Indeed - no worries. I have skin like a rhinoceros now, Prongs is simply benign compared to other (mostly face-to-face) forums where I’ve been called everything from a ‘homo’ to a ‘woman-hater’ to a ‘Nazi’ to a ‘milquetoast liberal’ to…damn, amazing how I can embody ALL these contradictory attributes!!!
I expect high emotions in these situations. My rebuttal isn’t directed at you so much as any lurkers who may come here for some “edu-tainment” so to speak.
Davelybob -
So are there still any of these beefed-up military units out there, with H + K submachine guns, gasmasks and - cough - “desert” fatigues?
If nothing else, can I just ask what the tactical usefulness is of wearing freaking DESERT camoflauge in an URBAN area?
Even Throbbing Gristle knew you have to wear proper gray and black camo to blend in with the urban blight, sheesh.
Prongs is simply benign compared to other (mostly face-to-face) forums where I’ve been called everything from a ‘homo’ to a ‘woman-hater’ to a ‘Nazi’ to a ‘milquetoast liberal’ to…damn, amazing how I can embody ALL these contradictory attributes!!!
Yeah, we are pretty sedate here, now that you mention it.
“Milquetoast” eh. Now that’s an American term if ever I heard one.
.