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  1. #61
    rank sentamentalist
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Illegitimate use of drones is not all that different from the illegitimate use of a crossbow
    Maybe not in principle. And in principle, not according to its words but according to its deeds, the united states has been a rogue bullying state since its very inception. So yes, drones don't change that fact, they merely reinforce it.


    But forget that because we'll be here for months. The sameness you describe is that they can "kill at a distance"... which is a fallacy in its own right because it ignores everything else and reduces the comparison to a single totally inane factor.

    The difference you dismiss can be easily understood in terms of precision, and consequently, in terms of collateral damage. The probability of innocent bystanders in foreign countries losing their lives increased between the crossbow and the introduction of the rifle, just not by very much. Even more so with the machine gun. Major "progress" was made as tanks and missiles came on the scene. Air campaigns. Remote controlled missile launches or whatever, I dunno the military jargon. Drones happen to be the next step. And they're different from goddamn crossbows because they're WAAAAAAAY different from goddamn crossbows. Think about the line of argument you've taken here.

    Additionally, maybe you've noticed the parallel and inverse correlation inherent to the technological progression. As foreign civilians come closer and closer to incidental harm, American soldiers move further and further away. That's because while compassionate Americans care very much about foreign civilian casualties, ALL Americans care about lives lost on their side. A democratically elected government is compelled to care about what their own nationals think. Not so much with dem ferners.

    As it happens, and this is where it gets really weird, scary weird and obtuse to say the least; the carelessness with which the United States treats civilian casualties around the world inevitably engenders the very antagonism it uses to justify its war games.

    All of this absurd imperialism comes part and parcel with "The War on Terror". A war with no clear aims, no clear enemy, no clear territorial borders, and most importantly, no clear end. The post-911 authorization for use of force provides legal grounding for the executive branch of the government to murder anybody associated with an organization that happens to work its way onto the "terrorist list", a list with the most appalling history of inconsistency and double standard and subject to the most stringent interpretation of realpolitik you could imagine.

    And if that wasn't bad enough, to come around full circle, it also legitimizes the murder of any innocent bystanders who happen to be unfortunate enough to have wandered within the vicinity of somebody associated to somebody involved in an organization on that list, or "disposition matrix" or random terrorist generator. I don't care how retardedly sophisticated they say it is, it's demonstrably arbitrary.


    How can you ignore the clear continuum running between Holder's acknowledgement that the us government can assassinate its own citizens, whether on American soil or not, with its current and very much actualized ability to indefinitely detain whomever it chooses... in either case without even offering so much as a facade of due process? How can you defend the rhetorical garbage and ambiguous legalisms, alongside consistent backtracking and misdirection, that this administration has been feeding the American public the past few years? Why can't you see the heinous cycle that has for a dozen years perpetuated the justification for "use of force in certain circumstances" as you so maddeningly put it?



    the whole thing is a goddamn farce. Good for Rand Paul to force the real issues, or as close to them as your country's gonna get, into the national discourse. I salute his courage, if not his actual convictions and the policies that follow.
    Last edited by RidonKs; 03-13-2013 at 12:24 AM.

  2. #62
    ______________________ Balla_Status's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Comparing a crossbow to a drone.

    You are the biggest tool on this board Kevin. Jesus.

  3. #63
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by RidonKs
    As it happens, and this is where it gets really weird, scary weird and obtuse to say the least; the carelessness with which the United States treats civilian casualties around the world inevitably engenders the very antagonism it uses to justify its war games.

  4. #64
    good scorer Rose's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by KevinNYC
    I wanted to make a new thread just to discuss drone stuff, but I'm super busy at work these days and I know I won't get around to it. However this is the the fallacy I was referring to
    The fallacy is acting like this is new.
    Ridonks basically gave a way more wordy reply than I would have so I'm eager to see what you have to say to him about the issue.

    But in my original statement it was in context of "why it matters now" which I said because now the american people KNOW it CAN happen to them, will it? Probably not. But they definitely didn't give a shit a few weeks ago before the white pages came out that every time the drones were striking we were doing so to non-Americans. Who are affected by our Bill of Rights. Constitutionally, we can't/shouldn't be using drones against countries we're not at war against. Especially when we're killing innocent people. That's how I meant my response.

  5. #65
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Obama put Medicare, SS, and Medicaid on the table. But...but... Obama is a liberal.

    Progressives are pisseed. Obama fooled them again.

  6. #66
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...cb4_story.html

    Democrats are slow to back Obama's Medicare and SS cuts.

  7. #67
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Rob Portman who was very nearly the guy Romney picked for VP has come out in favor of gay marriage. His son is gay and told his parents two years ago. Portman did tell this to Romney. Now I understand why Romney picked someone from Wisconsin instead of Ohio. If Portman was VP, this issue would have come to the surface

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...lican/1991593/

  8. #68
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by longhornfan1234
    Obama put Medicare, SS, and Medicaid on the table. But...but... Obama is a liberal.

    Progressives are pisseed. Obama fooled them again.
    At this point, there's no details about anything right? I just tried looking for them and couldn't find anything.

    This would be part of the "grand bargain" the Obama has been talking about. This would require Republicans to vote increase revenue. That is tax increases. So Republicans would have to willing to move as well. It's like when you tell your girlfriend, that you're willing to drive across town to take her to that restaurant she's always talking about and sounds really expensive, but you offer to do it on a night when she is tired and has an early business meeting.

    You make her an offer you know she's going to turn down, but you get credit for making it. This could be one of those. Where Obama gets to keep his reputation for being reasonable while it portrays the other side as being intransigent. The more they are seen that when, the more the lose the public and the more they lose political capital.

    So it's a negotiating ploy and it's hard to know how to judge it since no specifics are attached yet. However, when he was on TV the other day Obama didn't sound too optimisitic they would reach this grand bargain.[QUOTE]Right now, what I

  9. #69
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    I think it's good to hear Obama talking about the fact we don't have an immediate debt crisis. The truth is we are going to have deficits for the next decade until the economy takes off in some crazy way. The point is that deficits are coming down and will become affordable if the economy keeps growing. This is what happened the last time we had debt to GDP ratio this high. We didn't pay down the WWII deficit to zero, the economy grew so much that the debt was became a smaller and smaller percent of the GDP.

    We are not going to see a yearly deficit of less than $300 billion in the next 10 years. We have two things driving this. The aftershocks of the financial crisis and the bulge of baby boomers moving though their senior years. This means our debt will $20 trillion soon.

    However, Obama and others are starting to recognize that growing the economy is a much bigger nearterm problem that balancing the budget is. Balancing the budget and paying down the debt is a long term problem is not the crisis we are in. Also growing the economy helps with the deficit and debt issues.

  10. #70
    Roy Hibbert Super Star InspiredLebowski's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Three dozen Indiana kids are being dumped from Head Start because of the sequester starting Friday. By the end of it potentially 1000 kids will lose their spot.

  11. #71
    NBA Legend Jailblazers7's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    The problem isn't really deficits or debt. The problem is future obligations to SS and especially Medicare within the next 20 years. All this "balance the budget" talk means nothing because Republicans have come up with zero policy ideas to address these problems.

  12. #72
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Jailblazers7
    The problem isn't really deficits or debt. The problem is future obligations to SS and especially Medicare within the next 20 years. All this "balance the budget" talk means nothing because Republicans have come up with zero policy ideas to address these problems.
    Paul Krugman has these phrase he uses when people talk about government spending. Since so much of the spending is military or healthcare. He says that the government is basically a military with an insurance company.

    To get a handle on spending, you have to deal with the big chunks of spending, the other programs don't have much to spare.

  13. #73
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    Default Re: The BigAss 2nd term thread

    Quote Originally Posted by KevinNYC
    At this point, there's no details about anything right? I just tried looking for them and couldn't find anything.

    This would be part of the "grand bargain" the Obama has been talking about. This would require Republicans to vote increase revenue. That is tax increases. So Republicans would have to willing to move as well. It's like when you tell your girlfriend, that you're willing to drive across town to take her to that restaurant she's always talking about and sounds really expensive, but you offer to do it on a night when she is tired and has an early business meeting.

    You make her an offer you know she's going to turn down, but you get credit for making it. This could be one of those. Where Obama gets to keep his reputation for being reasonable while it portrays the other side as being intransigent. The more they are seen that when, the more the lose the public and the more they lose political capital.




    So it's a negotiating ploy and it's hard to know how to judge it since no specifics are attached yet. However, when he was on TV the other day Obama didn't sound too optimisitic they would reach this grand bargain.
    You must have missed my second post on this page. Here's some details.

    Quote:

    Obama got few complaints about his deficit-reduction plan during a lunchtime meeting Tuesday with Senate Democrats, administration officials said. But 107 House Democrats — more than half the caucus — have signed a letter declaring their “vigorous opposition to cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.” And the complaints are likely to grow louder as Republicans press Obama for more details about his proposals to charge wealthy seniors more for Medicare coverage and to implement the Social Security inflation change, known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI.

    That process is just now getting underway. In his meeting Wednesday with GOP lawmakers, Obama again outlined the offer he made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and more recently to more than a dozen Senate Republicans.

    That proposal would replace $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester, with $1.8 trillion in alternate policies over the next decade, including roughly $700 billion in fresh tax revenue. An additional $400*billion would come from reforms to Medicare, and $130*billion would come from applying the chained CPI to Social Security.

  14. #74
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Politics is rough in NJ

    http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf..._say_they.html

    3 women were paid to falsely claim they had sex with Menendez, Dominican police say
    Three women were paid to falsely claim in videotaped interviews that they had sex for money with U.S. Senator Robert Menendez in the Dominican Republic, a spokesman for the police said today.

    The women, whose claims generated media attention in the United States, were hired by a Dominican attorney to make the videotaped statements, spokesman Maximo Baez told reporters. Two of the women received about $425 and the other was paid about $300, he said.
    This allegation got shopped around to several news outlets, but only The Daily Caller published the story.[QUOTE]In the days before November

  15. #75
    Perfectly Calm, Dude KevinNYC's Avatar
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    Default Re: Politics is rough in NJ

    Here's why ABC wouldn't publish this story.
    Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as "Bob."

    Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named "Bob" was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name "Bob" into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.


    Now we'll see if the real stuff on Menedez brings him down.
    Last edited by KevinNYC; 03-18-2013 at 08:19 PM.

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