In article <1122268860.848014.159160@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Chris Hayes" <hayes13@fadmail.com> wrote:

Fred Stone wrote:

John Baker <nunya@bizniz.net> wrote in
news:lj38e1lfsf2pspcr4jd9cr2t5amd8hirns@4ax.com:

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:08:49 -0600, " \"- Prof. Jonez=A9\""
<jonez@norcom.ca> wrote:

<snipped for brevity>

It's a waste of time, Prof. The rightards will simply dismiss these
easily verifiable facts as "left-wing propaganda" while continuing =

swallow every last crumb of ***** the Bush administration feeds
them.

If the leftards weren't so good at dismissing easily verifiable facts
your
complaint might have some merit. As it is, you betray your own double
standards in your own comment.

Tell me, do you suck Bush's ***** or wipe his ***** with your tongue?

If this is your idea of responsive comment, have you any clue why you
are taken less and less as worth reading, and more and more as a
petulant child?

In article <1122268860.848014.159160@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Chris Hayes" <hayes13@fadmail.com> wrote:

Fred Stone wrote:

John Baker <nunya@bizniz.net> wrote in
news:lj38e1lfsf2pspcr4jd9cr2t5amd8hirns@4ax.com:

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:08:49 -0600, " \"- Prof. Jonez©\""
<jonez@norcom.ca> wrote:

<snipped for brevity>

It's a waste of time, Prof. The rightards will simply dismiss these
easily verifiable facts as "left-wing propaganda" while continuing to
swallow every last crumb of ***** the Bush administration feeds
them.

If the leftards weren't so good at dismissing easily verifiable facts
your
complaint might have some merit. As it is, you betray your own double
standards in your own comment.

Tell me, do you suck Bush's ***** or wipe his ***** with your tongue?

If this is your idea of responsive comment, have you any clue why you
are taken less and less as worth reading, and more and more as a
petulant child?

John Baker <nunya@bizniz.net> wrote in
news:lj38e1lfsf2pspcr4jd9cr2t5amd8hirns@4ax.com:

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:08:49 -0600, " \"- Prof. Jonez©\""
<jonez@norcom.ca> wrote:

<snipped for brevity>

It's a waste of time, Prof. The rightards will simply dismiss these
easily verifiable facts as "left-wing propaganda" while continuing to
swallow every last crumb of ***** the Bush administration feeds
them.

If the leftards weren't so good at dismissing easily verifiable facts your
complaint might have some merit. As it is, you betray your own double
standards in your own comment.

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:08:49 -0600, " \"- Prof. Jonez©\""
<jonez@norcom.ca> wrote:

<snipped for brevity>

It's a waste of time, Prof. The rightards will simply dismiss these
easily verifiable facts as "left-wing propaganda" while continuing to
swallow every last crumb of ***** the Bush administration feeds
them.

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 22:31:33 GMT, "Morpheus Stormcrow"
<fioeiof@fdgb.com> wrote:

<conners_3@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1122018566.701589.235930@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
So what makes people who support the war lie so often? Weren't you
warhawks the ones on your soap boxes a couple years ago talking about
how "moral" this war is? If it's so moral, why do you have to lie?
It's real easy for you keyboard "warriors" to talk about bombing other
people when it's not your family who is dying:

Of course we could ask why the people who do not support the war have
to use lies to justify their position.

So what makes people who support the war lie so often? Weren't you
warhawks the ones on your soap boxes a couple years ago talking about
how "moral" this war is? If it's so moral, why do you have to lie?
It's real easy for you keyboard "warriors" to talk about bombing other
people when it's not your family who is dying:


http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory80.html


People Die in War
by Anthony Gregory

So what makes people who support the war lie so often?

Weren't you
warhawks the ones on your soap boxes a couple years ago talking about
how "moral" this war is? If it's so moral, why do you have to lie?

It's real easy for you keyboard "warriors" to talk about bombing other
people when it's not your family who is dying:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory80.html

People Die in War
by Anthony Gregory

Before long in any discussion with an apologist for the warfare state
one will hear this simple rejoinder to all talk of the devastation,
calamity, and bloodshed wrought by the latest military intervention:
"Well, yes, people die in war."

It is spoken as though it should shut off all concern for the innocent
life expended in war's barbaric cruelty.

The mere fact that "people
die in war" is supposed to make us all realize that we have been
utterly unrealistic and juvenile in denouncing or even mentioning the
deaths in war. The proponents of war speak as though all costs in human
life have already been stipulated and thoroughly considered, and it
would be a waste of time for us ever to mention the dead again. Indeed,
only a childish mind would have brought it up in the first place. We
all know that people die in war.

When the beheading of Nick Berg dominated the news, effectively
overshadowing all news of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for a week or
two, an acquaintance of mine with pro-war leanings was horrified, as
was I, but she was also at a loss for words that anyone could do
anything so savage to any other human being.

The idea that the
"Islamofascists" could be humanly capable of such atrocious evil must
have been the worst shock to many Americans since 9/11. And, certainly,
no one worthy of human sympathy could ever do such a thing as what the
Islamic fanatics had done.

I told my pro-war friend that, in fact, the U.S. government has
committed enormities just as evil and inhumane, and done so casually
and with impunity, for the better part of its existence. Asked to name
an example, I simply said, "Shock and Awe" - an act of mass terror
bombing in which innocent Iraqis were torn apart limb by limb, and an
atrocity that certainly left a number of children dying slow, horrible
deaths.

"Well, people die in war," was her response. Yes, and Nick Berg was one
of them.

So too were the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 - an event,
by the way, considered by both the terrorist perpetrators of that
attack, as well as most members of the American War Party, to have been
an "act of war." Indeed, America has been at war with Middle Easterners
since the 1950s, and of the millions who have died directly and
indirectly from the conflict, the vast majority have not been
Americans.

But to shrug off the 3,000 Americans whose lives were stolen on 9/11
with the crude adage, "people die in war," does seem a bit insensitive,
does it not?

People do die in war, and when we consider that a good
number of those people are ones like you and me, who lived and worked
in our own country, it is a little harder for us to dismiss their
deaths as uneventful "collateral damage."

On the other hand, as a war continues, the more devoted hawks among us
do begin to treat even their own countrymen and women as disposable
heroes whose steadily growing number of fatalities is simply an
inevitable, albeit unfortunate, component of maintaining global order.

At first we hear about the threats to the American homeland, in
patriotic rhetoric adorned with appeals to the sanctity and
preciousness of every single American life. In the case of Iraq, we
heard the memories of 9/11 invoked constantly to remind us of the
frailty of life and the urgency to do something - anything - to
prevent more irreplaceable American lives from being prematurely and
violently destroyed. Foreign lives, too, got a fair hearing, for we all
knew that Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer, who had gassed the Kurds
in the 1980s and whose insatiable bloodlust had led him to seek the
destruction of America, one city at a time with one of his supposed
weapons of mass destruction at a time. And, as Bush said only a few
months before launching the second Gulf War, "Either you're with us,
or you're with the enemy; either you're with those who love
freedom, or you're with those who hate innocent life." Saddam hated
innocent life, and the U.S. government had to do something about it -
for the sake of innocent life, of course.

But now, with the war still raging, with more than 1,700 American
military troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, the apologists
for the war machine say that "people die in war" and nonchalantly go
about their day - shopping at the mall, watching reality television,
or, if they're truly committed to the cause, participating in online
discussion forums that glorify war and the testosterone-heavy
celebrations that apparently coincide with rolling into towns with
tanks, shooting resisters to foreign occupation like stray dogs and
waving the American flag every time someone who speaks a different
language and practices a different faith in a remote country is blown
to bits by hi-tech, multi-million-dollar precision ordnance made in the
good ol' USA.

And so now, even the Americans who have died in Iraq are a taboo
subject, if not approached with careful politically correct patriotic
fervor. To bring them up in a negative tone, rather than as a toast to
the war effort, is in fact to aid the enemy. Seventeen hundred American
lives is suddenly something we should regard, if not with accolades,
then with casual acknowledgement. We living Americans are overly
squeamish about American wartime deaths, we are told by the manlier
among us, for they are trivial when compared to the glory of the U.S.
nation-state itself. Now that the main selling point of the war as an
act to protect American lives has been completely demolished, the
continued sacrifice of American lives by the government is still
defended, but on more tenuous grounds: people die in war, and this war
to dispose of the brutally murderous Saddam and establish democracy in
Iraq will certainly be proved to have been worth it.

Aside from the fact that Iraq is hardly better off,

a theocratic regime
being its likely new government, electricity not working, violence
everywhere and sewage in the streets,

the issue of Saddam's crimes
against innocent life has rarely gotten a sober assessment amidst the
jingoistic war propaganda. Almost never mentioned is the fact that he
had U.S. assistance during his worst war crimes. However, looking back
to the 1980s, we see a familiar sentiment surrounding America's
relationship with the dictator: at the time, Saddam's use of chemical
weapons was regrettable, his atrocities a bit gauche by American
standards, but, after all, it was war against the Ayatollah Khomeini,
and in war people die. Saddam was essentially a hero of the 1980s
realists, even if his forgivable excesses would later be cited as a
principal reason for ousting him from power at the cost of so many
dollars and so many lives.

So it goes and so it has gone with all U.S. interventions. The millions
the U.S. killed in World War II were unfortunate victims of tragic
circumstance, but not victims of any sort of crime.

People die in war,
and a war against totalitarians certainly justified an alliance with
Stalin and actively assisting him in slaughtering two million of his
subjects.

The millions that the U.S dropped bombs on in Korea, Vietnam,
Cambodia and all the lesser excursions since 1945 were simply millions
of those people - you know, the ones who die in war. For years the
American government has poisoned crops in Latin America, propped up
genocidal dictators in Asia, waged economic warfare in the form of
trade sanctions and blockades on people in third-world tyrannies all
over the planet, and left behind landmines and cluster bombs that still
kill people, long after the wars that inspired their use have
supposedly ended, in the far reaches and in all corners of the American
empire. But to keep the sun from setting on that empire, we must wage
war. And people must die. But that's hardly a surprise, nor is it
something with which we're supposed to worry our pretty little heads
or "beautiful minds" too much.

And yet, we hardly hear this line of reasoning when smaller, more
private acts of aggression come up.

When we hear of a gang slaying, a
brutal rape, a serial killing or kidnapping in the news, I doubt many
among us would have the temerity to say dismissively, "Well, yeah,
people are hurt in rapes. People die in murders. That's what
happens."

Few people have the heart to consider the victims of private
crime to be less than worthy of our deepest sympathies. And practically
no one but the most shameless sociopath would ever cheer or applaud
upon reading the news of the latest private slaughter or ravaging. The
apparent inevitability of crime in the modern world makes it no less
worthy of our denunciation and remorse.

For the millions of people
murdered, raped, ripped apart and brutally assaulted in war, however,
all we hear is that we're acting childish and petty by bringing it
up. That there is such a distinction in the way innocents killed by
private criminals and innocents laid to waste by bombings and military
shootings are perceived by the average person reveals a deep and dark
disparity in the way people regard the State's actions and those of
ordinary individuals.

This disparity is most dangerous and indeed most
depraved and perverse with war, as people come to praise and rejoice in
the very worst possible acts that humans are physically capable of
committing against one another.

The sociological phenomena that have
fostered such a twisted and pervasive outlook on life and death, peace
and war, are complicated and well entrenched in our culture, but we
must do all we can to combat the intellectual error and failure in
empathy that wartime encourages and thrives on.

People die in war. They are killed. The greater peace that is promised
never comes, the greater freedom guaranteed is never delivered.

Next
time someone shrugs off your concern for those who have died in any
given war at hand, and says, "people die in war," perhaps you should
ask why it is, considering the horrific effect wars apparently have on
people's respect for life, that they think war is an acceptable thing
to support.