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I could drag out a few quotes of your own about just this issue. Being lazy I'm not inclined to, but we've talked before about the "wimpish" behavior of this Administration in situations such as the mess in Fallujah awhile back, constant vacillating and half-steps. We capture terrorists and send them to Cuba, where we give them a new Koran and Muslim-approved food. This isn't exactly instilling fear in the heart of the enemy.

Since I don't get invited to the Super-Secret Meetings (just the Hush-Hush Meetings) I can't say exactly. But it seems reasonable to conclude based on the way it was initially conveived and the acceleration toward democracy that the objective is to create a nominally democratic, partially Westernized Arab state in the heart of the MidEast for the purpose of destabalising other hostile regimes in the region. In that regard, it's actually working. Syria is slowly but surely caving, Iran is getting a little blustery but it's just that, even the Saudis are beginning to feel the internal pressure building.

On that most basic, long-term level, it's working.

The problem here is that some participants see "mistakes" where none exist. This Administration has made a ponderous list of errors but many of the alleged mistakes are primarily propaganda. It's a mess, but it's not FUBAR.

Correction, we need more Iraqi security forces. More US troops would be counterproductive unless we have some big places to stomp. As it stands, most of the stomping needs to be done on a smaller scale than the US military is prepared for.

Soldiers are not cops.

So we need to get Iraqi forces up and running. There have been setbacks in that regard. It's one of the cases where we would have been better served by seizing control of the entire military structure from the get-go but we didn't, that ball's been dropped. As I and many others have said before, where do we go from here?

In short, we need to find ways to better recruit Iraqis, we need to provide them with training and equipment up to the task, and we need to let them fight for their own country instead of using them as auxilliaries.

Sending more US or foreign troops is not the answer unless we plan to kill a bunch of people, take over and colonize. American Mesopotamia.

Which I'm up for if you are, but that whole "strong Roman" thing requires a strong stomach and we're talking about American voters here.

Reality matters as well. While I agree that bin Laden wanted a response, which he did not get through the '90s with ever-escalating attacks, his gamble hasn't paid off. There is no pan-Islamic unity against the US. As Jihads go this one is a joke. Afghanistan is recovering well and most of the population prefers the course they're on now. Most Iraqis are becoming increasingly hostile to the terrorists by all accounts I've received.

If we take action, people die. If we don't, people die.

To clarify again, neither I nor anyone else I can think of is advocating we blindly lash out. However, when we do incur civilian casualties all the wailing, second-guessing and self-flagellation that accompanies it helps no one but the terrorists themselves. Bringing us to this:

There's a difference between making excuses and accepting reality. What serves bin Laden most is collateral damage accompanied by our self-loathing over it.

Which assumes that they would be a unified group themselves. I see no reason to make this assumption. It may well turn out that the first signal received from extraterrestrials will be from a specific group of them, a nation-state or rough equivalent. All this "unified species" stuff may turn out to be total bunk.

So we could have some "peoples" of Earth communicating with other "peoples" of another world, neither truly representing their entire respective species.

To point out that people in other parts of the world see every action undertaken by the US government as a collective American action is not the same as demanding lockstep from the American people. You know this.

Osama bin Laden is not sitting in a dank hole saying "kill Americans, but not the whiney liberal ones because they'll cave to us and leave us alone."

And the point is? Sure, invading a country but doing it halfassed is closer to what I would advise than not invading and doing a halfassed job of security while pretending we can appease and negotiate with religious wackjob fanatics. So what?

Unless we now think it makes sense for Righties to say things like "the country is already more like what you socialists want than it was meant to be so shut up."

Yeah, sounds kinda silly when you look at it from the other angle doesn't it.

If we hadn't alienated the entire Iraqi military and driven them into the arms of the insurgency we could have used them. If we regularly struck at budding opposition we wouldn't have the problems we do. Example, we'd have done well to snuff out Sadr and his militia at the first sign of trouble. We would not have required more troops to do this, only by wasting time negotiating ceasefires with terrorists do we allow them to grow into a greater menace.

We stomp wherever organized resistance crops up. We could have hit Fallujah early on and it wouldn't have required leveling the place. Sure we can't get every lone RPG toting terrorist, but we can keep them from congregating. Unfortunately any military operation in a population entails some civilian casualties, however it is worth noting that lately the majority of civilian deaths have been at the hands of the terrorists who specifically target them in many cases.

Lone terrorists are hard to stop, but when they start organizing and basing themselves in a city we must deal with that much faster than we have been. No waffling around with ceasefires or worrying how an attack will make people feel. Go in, kill the bad guys, try not to spill the blood of civilians and don't quit if it gets hard.

This can't be stated enough. If this enemy perceives us as weak and unable to keep up a fight they'll only be encouraged to hit us harder.

Yet they persisted as a prime-power entity for a vast span of time and are the foundation of much of the dominant culture of the world even today. There's a lesson there too.

While I can't offer you the Right caricature, I can say this:

When I see the specifics of the plan, then I'll comment. It's easy to say "get more troops" and make people clap like seals, but the details. . .

<throws a fish>

Now where'd I put that bucket of bullets and pig blood?  :hm:

Either I've given you too much credit over the years or you're deliberately missing the point.

We invade other nations and immediately after seizing control fall all over ourselves to accomodate them. We immediately try to get them to start thinking about elections, we preach democracy to subjects of despots and take as light a hand as possible in all matters. We conquer a country full of people used to the rule of force and being dictated to by those with power and we start acting like self-conscious wussies. That is a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention.

We raid the homes of average citizens in some cities while negotiating ceasefires with terrorists in others. Again not only irritating the populace but giving an impression of weakness. That latter hurts us more than the former.

We are not torturing prisoners. We do not deliberately target civilians. Nor should we start.

Those who wail over every setback have half the problem right, we need to stop doing things that piss off the average Afghan and Iraqi. But they utterly fail to grasp the simple fact that we must also deal with the terrorists harshly, swiftly and with overwhelming force. Fallujah for example, we should have rolled in there and seized it, executing terrorists along the way. But instead we negotiate, then start to go in but back off, then talk some more, then finally go in but try to do it "nice" so we don't cause too much damage. Bad call.

Felt glove and steel gauntlet. Each has its place.

Edited By Cobra Commander on 1121277433

Certainly we shouldn't issue magazines full of pig-blood ammunition to every infantryman, that would be a PR disaster as well as causing the price of bacon to fluctuate wildly.

<holds back snicker>

While the whole "bullets dipped in pig's blood" thing might be a bit weird, the general idea behind it is valid. We need two prongs in how we deal with this. For average non-extremist Muslims we should be as tolerant and accomodating in their countries as is practical. But for the terrorists, a little bowel wrenching fear is in order. If they believe that they either die in an attack and go to paradise or get captured and go to, forgive my using a Limbaughism, Club Gitmo for a temporary stay there isn't much deterrent there. If we can convince them that the end result will be much less agreeable. . .

Right now we're trying so hard to not offend that we're not only ineffective but we don't command much respect from the general population. We need to find a balance between "friend of the oppressed" and "scourge of suffering to the oppressor".

Such praise.  :laugh:
But if I were that good. . .

The real question is what approach is taken to misleading a psychologist in an adversarial context. If a mentally ill person wants to appear sane they probably can't pull it off, just as a sane person trying to portray some illness will usually botch it. The trick is in carefully manipulating subtleties. Little gestures, how you say things, what you convey about motives. Consciously or not every subject gives away certain clues that add weight to certain aspects while running interference for others.

Which is a prelude to more tests. Unfortuantely in this case, none of the tests measure anything directly. We simply don't know enough about the hows and whys of human personality to devise tests whose results are anything more than suggestive.

Indeed. Not only that, but a statistical correlation doesn't necessarily mean there's a causal connection.

For example, I've seen crime statistics that show that people with satellite dishes are much less likely to have their car stolen.

Point being, a psychological profile showing a set of traits that statistically correlate to certain ailments/behaviors may be entirely coincidental given the small sample.

Is that clinically damned? 

Wait, don't want to end on that.

The same can be said of placemats at Chinese restaurants.

There, that's better.

Yesterday on the drive home I saw a white van pulled over and being searched by the police. They'd removed a desk and several boxes. Next to the vehicle stood three people. . . in black hooded cloaks.  ???

Still stranger, I recognized one of them.  :laugh:

Not attending a black mass when the invitation was extended has always been one of those minor regrets.

But then I went to a Democrat Party rally once, so it all works out. 

Quite right. Just determine what sort of persona you want that day, get it straight in your head and go for it.

I recommend it for all aspiring actors, politicians and criminal types. 

A big weakness shared by many if not most shrinks is they believe that A) everything means something and B) they're smarter than you are. Both of those things can be used to plant ideas in their heads when the relationship is adversarial.

Bah, it's all just phrenology without the glass head anyway. 

That would be Gennaro. While he and I don't always agree on things he is a very intelligent and reasonable individual. I'm inclined to believe his assessment, an inclination strengthened by hearing the same things from numerous other sources.

Before continuing, I must stress that it is not my intent to piss anyone off or needlessly stir things up, but if we're going to have a discussion of these matters we might as well get to the meat of it.

I don't know but must assume that the problems Gennaro and others mention are not uniform across the countries in question but localized in certain regions. Such is certainly the case here in the US. It's also by most accounts a fairly recent development. Further, and bearing in mind the previous segment, I posit that a Somali Muslim living in Sweden (or Britain for that matter) would not notice such things as described or react as strongly, due to being the outsider. When an immigrant looks around their adopted country they are less apt to notice change and less attached to what was. When a native sees their country declining and can tie it directly in some aspect to the influx of people from elsewhere they get very defensive and I can't blame them for doing so.

Missing a few important points here. European countries could just not let anyone else in. I expect that it won't be long before some of them enact just such a policy. Problem solved. They could force immigrants to assimilate culturally or deport them, problem solved. No nation is required to open it's doors to foreigners. If they really wanted to get sneaky they could sterilize immigrants with "vaccines" to get one generation of cheap labor as needed.

Quoting that last line alone would also miss the point, a few are itching to do so.

See, in any nation nothing demographic exists in a vacuum. Women working tends to reduce the birthrate, which over time thins the workforce and drives up wages. Immigrant workers become financially attractive because they're cheaper. However, introducing immigrants without culturally assimilating them is essentially the same as allowing foreign colonists to reside on your territory. Many European countries are rapidly ceasing to be "nations" in the sense they once were, meaning confined groups of people sharing a common culture, language and heritage. Instead they are becoming a hodgepodge of mutually exclusive ethnic and cultural factions with no real intent to blend contained within a series of now-meaningless borders. For the immigrants this may be all well and good, but the Europeans themselves are watching their homelands metamorphose into something alien and in almost every respect less desireable.

Let me be clear, it is not immigration itself that is a problem nor is it really a question of race. It's one of culture. Increasingly, immigrants from certain areas of the world do not assimilate into their adopted country. When Europeans do it it's called "colonialism" and decried as a great evil, guilt-inducing the descendents of those "colonialists" to accept the cultural invasion of their own lands. Either they snap back in the fiery fashion the peoples of Europe have historically been prone to or Western Civilization sinks under the weight of cultures with less enlightened ideals in many respects and less to show for their tenure. Either way, it won't be pretty and pretending nothing is going on does a service to none.

I know, I'm such a Nazi. 
I'll catch the mud if it makes someone think. <shrug>

Ah, nothing like some pointless internet drama between people one shall never meet in person to make one get up and go outside.   If a lowly spambot can sow such discord I can't wait for the fireworks on the way to Mars.

Time to step out the airlock for a spell.

:laugh:

Granted, the guidelines could probably use a bit more clarification than the current just and wise censor approach.

So to begin, if Cindy complains that someone sent pornographic content to her account I'm inclined to think it should be dealt with. If the member in question is here for no other reason than to post spam, they ought to be banned outright. Very likely this is such a case.

This:

Is just obnoxious, what's the fascination with trying to irritate her?