176 responses to “Community Unity – Liberal Version (updated 10sep2011)”

1. 

   Todd Juvinall

   15 September 2011

   Wrong again PaulE. The definition does not fit our role in Iran at all. A coup removes one set of rulers and replaces them with another. The replacements were Iranians, not Americans. To make your manipulation of the word work America would need to be there and running things. The Shah did that.
   Regarding the wars. Yes, wars are very expensive and should be avoided most of the time. Unfortunately their are people and countries that want to do us harm and we need to protect ourselves. Sure, there are times we have helped others (like the French in Vietnam which was a huge mistake) and we have treaties of mutual aid and protection we must stand up for. Like WW2 or Grenada and even Panama. Maybe Santa Domingo and Nicaragua in the 20’s. We have been the world’s police force force a 120 years and right or wrong it was done under every political party. Sometimes you have to stand up to tyranny and yes it costs us money. But we are not Imperialists, we even got out of the Philippines didn’t we?

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2. 

   George Rebane

   15 September 2011

   BenE re 1054pm – Wow! Where to start? You again ascribe opinions and beliefs to me that you fashion out of whole cloth to suit your thread of argument. I have claimed no “global manifest destiny”, nor have I claimed that we are expanding our “empire” (cf. PaulE’s continuing harangue on US imperialism). We are past the tipping point in many dimensions, and a graceful retreat is the best we can now hope for. Nevertheless, for the most part our interests remain unchanged. Those notions are semantically independent and should be covered in their own right.
   Your prescription for US retaining its hegemony is wrong. We cannot “bring back manufacturing” as long as those 3 billion workers out there compete with would-be American factory workers. Strict political and trade isolationism is the only environment in which that can occur, and as most readers know, if goods don’t cross borders, armies will. In the interval, the US will become a much poorer country with a degraded QoL. And due to our broken educational system and demographic inertia, there is no quick fix in sight – few politicians understand this reality, and none want to talk about it in public.
   As these pages have recorded and cited (now there seems to be clinical evidence), the collective mindset not only interprets differently what it sees of the world (the observables), but also uses a different and yet to be discovered logic with which it reasons. That is the prime impediment to understanding so that what each of us says to the other often makes no sense at all. RR is a hopeful venue where we can come together and keep the dialogue alive, no matter how frustrating it is. What other alternatives have we?
   (In a deeper vein here, I’ve been meaning to write a piece on how many people of goodwill fail to make progress in a conversation that seeks to dissect an seemingly crisp issue/topic that was introduced at the start. The explication involves the understanding of and hewing to a strict semantic taxonomy, and punctually noting when ‘lateral jumps’ are made so that the result is not getting lost in the forest of seemingly related notions and winding up exhausted and frustrated. Examples of such meanderings abound in RR’s comment streams.)
   Finally, you accuse me of “hiding behind flowery responses”. First, you ask a lot of prosecutorial questions of the form ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?, Yes or No.’ These are obviously weak in dealing with the topics and issues here (there are other blogs where such approaches may better serve). And second, for the most part RR readers and discussants are an educated lot, and as such, I treat, talk, and write to them as peers using the best communicative and compact language of which I am capable. If for some this causes a problem, I apologize without promise of any change.

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3. 

   Ben Emery

   15 September 2011

   Todd,
   The ones not getting it is Rumination Regulars (RR), which seems to be dwindling by the way. Total comments and supporters of these very extreme minority ideas are two totally different things.
   Please Read this short book online
   War is a Racket by Major General Smedley Butler
   http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html#c1

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4. 

   George Rebane

   15 September 2011

   BenE – your use of “RR” for “Rumination Regulars” is confusing. RR has been the initials contraction for the name of the blog since its inception. And you seem to have an additional meaning that the Rumination Regulars are only the conservative regular readers of this blog, and not all regular readers of which you are one. Perhaps using RRR would be more clear, or even RCR for ‘Ruminations Conservative Regulars’ as opposed to RLR.

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5. 

   Todd Juvinall

   15 September 2011

   BenE, so you have access to the pageviews on RR? I would suggest you know not what you speak of. I would suggest you read the Holy Bible. I am already a old hand at military history.
   George has you pegged perfectly. You always complain and you never answer any questions from the opposing view.
   Oh, here is a book you should also read. “How to win and Election for Dummies”. LOL.

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6. 

   Ben Emery

   15 September 2011

   George,
   My line of questioning is to get you to clarify what you are advocating, nothing more. US manufacturing can come back if we would remove ourselves from these destructive free trade agreements. It just takes political will to stand up the powers that own both republican and democratic leadership. If America is to remain a prominent player in the world this is a must. Creating level playing field with selective import tariffs creating the cost of goods equal no matter where companies decide to manufacture is far from being isolationists. Out of the G20 nations that the US is the only nation that does protect its own industries through some form of what I just described.
   I will stop participating at ruminations because it is evident that those who follow and support ruminations insights do not believe in that people should have any power in their government that control the laws from under which they live. I believe in representative democracy, allowing the people to control their government. RR believe in corporatocracy where the wealthy and businesses dictate the laws and conditions of our nation. This is really the extension of the arguments of the founders. A pure republic vs a democratic republic.
   Here are a few words from Thomas Jefferson (my perspective) to John Adams (RR perspective).
   “The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.”

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7. 

   Greg Goodknight

   15 September 2011

   Ben, your Smoot-Hawley part Doh! is not the path to prosperity, and Hitchens isn’t a neo-con. Or any con. Anti-theist heretic liberal is probably closest.
   The facts in Hitchen’s pieces are all verifiable. If you have problems with one or two, just ask. If more than that, you’re just not looking very hard.

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8. 

   George Rebane

   15 September 2011

   When we protect our commercial enterprises with tariffs, to ‘level the playing field’, we wind up making Americans pay more than the best price available from the most efficient providers. Other nations that did that have wound up the poorer for it – e.g. charging outlandish tariffs on American goods like cars and ice boxes.
   Protectionism has never worked in America’s favor, but in the past we always had the next area of technology or level of productivity as a unique capability on which the country could capitalize. That is still there, but fewer American workers are able to participate in such work areas for all the obvious reasons. Today protectionism is returning as a bi-partisan populist goal, but there is no indication that it will serve any better than in the past to beggar the nation.
   We simply don’t have a pat solution to the workforce crisis, and I fear that regressing to protectionist policies will simply reproduce past effects. More here.
   http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10983

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9. 

   paul emery

   15 September 2011

   Imperialism defination once again
   ” by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence”
   We installed and supported the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran with billions of dollars and AMerican intelligence services. We sat back while he sent untold thousands to death camps and prisons . How is it American to support such a despot? Imperialism no doubt by this definition. I can provide more later

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10. 

    Todd Juvinall

    15 September 2011

    PaulE give it up about imperialism man,. you are wrong.
    BenE, why do you make statements like this in your 11:10 Am today,
    “I will stop participating at ruminations because it is evident that those who follow and support ruminations insights do not believe in that people should have any power in their government that control the laws from under which they live.”?
    That is simply evidence again that you have no clue what a conservative stands for and for that matter, the multi-dimensional Tea Party. I am shocked, totally shocked you would make such an asinine statement. And threaten to leave the RR blog because you seem to believe the tripe in that quote! Please!
    I would suggest the Green Party is simply a arm of the liberal democrat party which is even more extreme than they. Your party platform ( http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/2010/index.php) would subjugate humans and place them on an equal right to live as an amoeba for goodness sakes. You also favor job killing regulations to “protect” the planet from human endeavors. Remember, wasn’t the Green Party the outgrowth of some violent European revolutionaries as well?
    Free trade is not the problem either, it is labor costs. That is where we are smoked by the billions of people across the seas and below our borders. I suggest you figure that out first.
    So please, if you can’t hack the debating surely leave and remain at the lefty blogs where people of your ilk play footsie all day.

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11. 

    Greg Goodknight

    15 September 2011

    Paul, let us know when you want to stop chatting about cold war machinations.
    U.S. spooks weren’t trying to get control of the Iranian people or their wealth, but they were scrambling to have client states on the edge of the USSR for monitoring posts and to keep Soviet influence at bay. This was important to the spooks in the ’50’s, not so important now. Satellite technologies have largely replaced radios on the ground. Having a communist sympathizer running Iran the threat of nationalizing the British controlled oil company also angered many, especially the Brits. Now, had they just decided to milk the Anglo oilmen they way one would boil a frog, slowly raising tariffs, they’d have gained control of oil profits the old fashioned way while allowing the Brits to keep enough to make it worthwhile.
    Paul, just to ‘calibrate’ the discussion… on the evil scale of 0 to 10, 10 being really, really, maximally evil, where do you put the last Shah of Iran, and where do you put Saddam Hussein? I’d put the Shah at about a 3, where most active hereditary Kings with real power might be, and Saddam at a 9, along with Hitler and Stalin. You?

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12. 

    paul emery

    16 September 2011

    Todd
    You neglect to note that Saddam committed huge attrociaties while on the American payroll including gasing the Kurds with chemicals whose manufacture was supported by American advisors. We continued to give him financial and logistic after it become common knowledge. No Todd, evil is evil and I don’t want our country to be part of any of it. Imperialism? Yes

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13. 

    George Rebane

    16 September 2011

    “… including gasing (sic) Kurds with chemicals whose manufacture was supported by American advisors (sic).” Well there’s a direct connection to American imperialism if I ever saw one.
    The US has never become a signatory of any international agreement that outlaws the responsive use of chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. (In fact, for most CBR weapons we reserve the right to first use.) We have them in our arsenal, so of course we not only “support” the manufacture of such chemicals, we actually manufacture them ourselves. And such support doesn’t come from only American advisers, but from the President himself.
    Did we supply, teach, and goad Saddam in the use of such weapons against his own people? No. But with such tenuous tendrils of reasoning, America can easily be blamed for damn near anything that is on the leftwing agenda to denigrate the nation.

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14. 

    Todd Juvinall

    16 September 2011

    I still can’t make the connection PaulE is laboriously trying to make about Saddam. In his tortured mind Americans must have been holding the nozzle open when the Kurds were murdered. I guess that is why they greeted us so warmly when we booted Saddam. A liberals thought process has to lead to ulcers.

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15. 

    paul emery

    16 September 2011

    It was a policy that we supported because we continued to supply him with money and weapons after it was known. Imperalism
    Here’s all you need to know if you read it
    http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/11/20/sbm.documents/index.html

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16. 

    paul emery

    16 September 2011

    More from the declasified documents
    The provision of chemical precursors from United States companies to Iraq was enabled by a Ronald Reagan administration policy that removed Iraq from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Leaked portions of Iraq’s “Full, Final and Complete” disclosure of the sources for its weapons programs shows that thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture mustard gas, was among the chemical precursors provided to Iraq from US companies such as Alcolac International and Phillips. Both companies have since undergone reorganization and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum is now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and discount fossil fuel company, while Alcolac International has since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc.[24] Alcolac was named as a defendant in the Aziz v. Iraq case presently pending in the United States District Court (Case No. 1:09-cv-00869-MJG).

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17. 

    Todd Juvinall

    16 September 2011

    Paul you have tortured logic. Try to convince someone else, it hasn’t worked on me. The Kurds love us, the love GWB, they love Disney.

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18. 

    George Rebane

    16 September 2011

    PaulE – It would be faster progress if you would just connect the dots that you are laying down to apparently indict the US of war crimes as an accomplice of Saddam. Is that what the conclusion is? And then we go from that to ‘imperialism’? ToddJ’s 1240pm is a pretty strong counter here since the Kurds are not fools.
    In short, where are you taking us?

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19. 

    paul emery

    16 September 2011

    George
    call it what you want the evidence is there. Did you read the documents I included?

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20. 

    George Rebane

    16 September 2011

    PaulE – Yes I did, and in detail. There is nothing in them that attests that we colluded with Saddam to kill Kurds. The first document confirms an analysis of US influence in the mid-east via Iraq in light of the Iraq/Iran war ending. The second is a vapid misapprehension of Iraq’s intentions after the war – especially blowing the prediction that it would not invade Kuwait. And in the third we find that it was the US who actually informed the world of how Saddam gassed his Kurds. None of these corroborate your conclusions. Now I’m wondering whether you read them.

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21. 

    paul emery

    17 September 2011

    George,
    You cannot deny the truth of this. Quite simply do you deny the fact that the us aided Saddam in his chemical and biological weapons program and continued to do so after it was discovered that he used chemical weapons against the Kurds
    Do you need more? This is from Conservative columnist Robert Novak no less. Perhaps my links were too subtle.
    “That suggests Rumsfeld also has not read the sole surviving copy of a May 25, 1994, Senate Banking Committee report. In 1985 (five years after the Iraq-Iran war started) and succeeding years, said the report, “pathogenic (meaning “disease producing”), toxigenic (meaning “poisonous”) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce.” It added: “These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction.”
    The report then details 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding, “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”
    http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/IraqBioweps.html
    And more here from the New York Times
    WASHINGTON, Aug. 17—A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.
    http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/220.html

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22. 

    Greg Goodknight

    17 September 2011

    Paul, realpolitik infected dems and repubs since wwII. Cherrypicking can be done by all sides.
    The problem is hubris and attempts by the pols and bureaucrats in power to choose the lesser of a multitude of evils. Dissecting documents with 20-20 hindsight looking for the bad guys isnt all that easy… I think youve unwittingly proven that.

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23. 

    paul emery

    17 September 2011

    Greg, George
    I grant you your observation. The path of this conversation has been to examine the moral grounds by which the Penn Valley gathering may be considered damaging to this countries best interests and of aid to the enemy, being the Islamic radical factions that wish to harm us. My contention is that we harm ourselves by engaging dictators and strongmen to act as agents for this countries interests and we neglect to take responsibility for the harm they inflict on the people of their country. By us intentionally aiding them and being aware of how they inflict harm on innocent people we must then assume responsibility for what occurs. This is very basic ethics, moral and spiritual code.
    That said I believe I have provided ample documentation to show that the aid we gave Saddam contributed to the death of innocent civilians and that we were aware of that occurring and continued to provide him with money and assistance because it was in our best interests to do so. This is today accepted knowledge even amongst conservative journalists so it’s pretty shaky to deny that this occurred.
    If you continue to deny the basic historical facts I will rightfully accuse you of intentional ignorance. By accepting the historical reality that these things did indeed occur we can go on with discussing the moral questions involved, and they are considerable and varied, as they apply to whether demonstrations such as what happened in Penn Valley are harmful or helpfully enlightening leading us to a better understand of our proper future in the world.
    I hope my position is clear. Thanks for the respectful conversation.

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24. 

    Greg Goodknight

    17 September 2011

    Paul, it isn’t a denial of “basic historical facts” to call you on your stretching them to fit your thesis, and the “Peace Center” is a center for left wing hate of the non-left. Good music, though.

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25. 

    Bonnie M

    19 September 2011

    …”they try to rewrite history all the time.” You’re so right Todd. Any honest historian will back that up. That’s why the manipulator’s can’t wait for the eye witnesses to die of old age. Whoever controls the educational media rewrites history. Most hypnotic is television. First get the subjects attention and then when he’s relaxed…feed his mind with subliminal (secret) messages not apparent to the naked eye, but picked up by the brain. On the screen the image or words are flashed so fast they’re physically unseen. It’s supposed to be illegal, but evidently advertizement ads abound with it. I think that’s what happened during the last election. Everyone talked about how intelligent Obama was. I kept watching and listening, but he never said anything intelligent. He talked about “change” but never even explained what he meant. This blank mindedness is puzzling, but epidemic…Perhaps this advanced form of mass hypnosis explains it.

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26. 

    Paul Emery

    19 September 2011

    Greg
    What is your opinion. Did the US continue to aid Saddam after it was known he used chemical weapons on the Kurds? Did US financial and technological assistance help in the effort?
    Direct simple questions.

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