TheAgitator.com
Morning Links
Sunday, July 31st, 2011- Bloodshed in Syria.
- Real lawsuit over virtual horses.
- TSA agent flashed badge, harasses slow driver.
- Honoring those who stood against torture.
- Hatching baby crocodiles.
- The saddest thing you’ll read today.
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Slightly OT but you did have some cute baby crocs hatching so I guess nature is sort of on topic.
Check out this Osprey catching fish. I can’t imagine how hard it was to be in the right place to catch the underwater portion of the video.
http://www.arkive.org/osprey/pandion-haliaetus/video-00.html
On that “saddest thing” story, they should be released and protected. Then there will be protests. Napalm the protesters.
I don’t even know what to say about Afghanistan. It really gets the inner xenophobia riled up if only for a moment. I really hope that these kids get to become political refugees in the US.
That TSA story is the biggest non-story I’ve seen with TSA in the headline. If he got out of the car and tried to use the badge to pretend he had authority off the road then it’d be one thing but honking a slow driver hardly seems newsworthy.
For me, the Afghanistan story underlines the essential indefensibility of what we have comes to understand “Multiculturalism” to mean. I have a deep suspicion that originally Multiculturalism was a mental discipline intended to help Historians, Anthropologists, and the like to keep their cultural biases from contaminating their research. On that basis, the idea has obvious merits. As it has been applied in the popular culture – as an absolute ban against saying one culture is better than another – it is total idiocy. Even the people who ride it hardest don’t really believe in it, or they wouldn’t criticize Western culture so much…
“There’s the idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone,
all centuries but this and every country but his own.”
from The Mikado, by Gilbert and Sullivan
Reggie: does the phrase “eternal vigilance” mean anything to you? This is the TSA we’re talking about.
On that “saddest thing” story, they should be released and protected. Then there will be protests. Napalm the protesters.
++
I respect their right to hold their ignorant, goat-fucking barbarian views about how people should behave. My tolerance ends when they attempt to enforce those views with violence.
I’m not sure how the Afghanistan story displays the errors of multiculturalism, since it’s a clear injustice occurring within a single cultural context (or, perhaps, caused by a failure of different ethnic groups to tolerate cultural diversity, but in that case it seems like a clear example of not enough multiculturalism rather than too much). Of course most charges of relativism leveled against advocates of multiculturalism are really just sly complaints about said multiculturalists objecting to some favored genocidal or systematically racist project.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/National_Night_Out
film them and ask hard questions. we’ll see how “community minded” they are when you do not properly prostrate. here comes the “disorderly conduct” and “disturbing the peace” charges!
I cannot imagine being a kid or raising kids in Afghanistan. Dancing boys, stoning lovers, killing girls… We’ve successfully participated in bombing them back into the 12th century.
Saddest? Not even remotely close. Nobody got drugged by their spouse, tied up, woken up, castrated, and had the bloody parts ground up in the garbage disposal.
Or had a panel and audience of women laughing about it uproariously and making jokes on broadcast midday mainstream television.
Or got an “apology” the next week, but from only one of them, and only after breaking down in laughter again first, and that didn’t even address the victim specifically, so that he just had to settle for just being one more anonymous person among the millions who were “offended”.
Or received that non-apology from a person who, just a few weeks before the attack, had told a major celebrity news show that she would have done the same thing to Arnold Schwarzenegger — cut off his penis and grind it up in the garbage disposal.
Not.
Even.
Close.
What a missed opportunity when that mob rioted in Afghanistan.
A couple of AC-130s overhead with gatling guns blazing could have made that country a much better place in a few minutes.
Maybe a sting operation with a couple of “ringers” could give us another chance.
I can’t see the “saddest thing” link. Could someone describe it please.
Nothing says “we embrace your forbidden love and condemn the barbarianism of your countrymen” like hot napalm murder blasting the guilty.
Truly, we have achieved enlightenment as a people when we can feel awesome revenging the shit out of some evil.
11, Acksiom,
What the fuck is that all about?
Could someone encapsulate the “Saddest Thing” story for me? The link isn’t working for me and my curiosity’s been piqued.
1. Sharon Osbourne tells Nancy O’Dell for ET that if Arnold had cheated on her in their home, she would have cut off his penis and thrown it in the garbage disposal.
2. Allegedly, 2-3 weeks later, Catherine Kieu Becker drugs her husband and ties him down. When he wakes up, she cuts off his penis with a 10″ kitchen knife, and takes it into the kitchen, and runs it through the garbage disposal. According to news reports, she may have been upset that he was divorcing her for irreconcilable differences, and while allowing her to continue living in his condo, he may have had intimate relations with another woman there.
3. A few days later, on ‘The Talk’, this man’s victimization is laughed at by the cast and audience. They really whoop it up. Even though Sara Gilbert attempts to rein in the depravity, they ride right over her and keep laughing and joking about it.
4. A few days after that, Sharon Osbourne. . .well, you know the rest of the story.
So yeah, some poor 60YO guy is lying in a hospital bed in socal, quite possibly facing a life choice between minimal reconstruction of his remaining penile stump vs. a poor artificial imitation of a penis made from his own forearm skin. We don’t really know, as the details are being kept private for his protection.
And these women think it’s a laugh riot.
So like I said:
Not.
Even.
Close.
Star-crossed young afghani couple attempt to elope and marry properly and live happily together. They are assaulted by local community, with the boy beaten badly, but are safe in juvenile custody, and local leaders appear supportive of them.
16, Acksiom,
Sara Gilbert, you say? Good for her, fuck the rest of them. GO DARLENE!
(continued):
Look, we all know there’s room for shock humor if the guy was a true villain (spousal rape, murder, etc.) Not saying it’s what I’d do, but I could see a show targeted towards women making some jokes about a really bad guy getting his comeuppance.
But the moment from The Talk is just pure misandry at its absolute worst.
Not sure why you are so surprised about the Afghanistan story. Yes, it is outrageous according to our more advanced society but they still live in tribes and clans there. 2000 years ago so did our ancestors and they probably behaved exactly the same way.
Thinking that 10 years of occupation and $billions is gonna help a people take a 2000 year evolutionary leap is just wishful thinking.
The Afghans are quite happy living in the 7th Century with cellphones and Toyota Pickups. They don’t want to change. Barbarians will act like Barbarians.
I just want to avoid having them over here doing that. We have enough home grown Barbarians. I know. Good luck on that.
#13 | omar |
Not quite sure about that post. Maybe you were being sarcastic.
I don’t want to be “enlightened” if that means I should stand by or even join in stoning this young couple. (unless giving them a couple of bong hits counts as “stoning”)
I do think we are being way too nice over there. The rules of engagement there are just silly. If that is the way we are fighting, I want our troops the hell out of there ASAP.
Acksiom, I think the primary difference is that the couple’s family thinks they should be killed. And they personally reported that opinion to them.
A bunch of strangers laughing horrifically at your disfigurement is, indeed, terrible and sad. We live in a society that laughs about men getting raped in prison and which heaps praise upon officials who approve and implement tactics that regularly result in the violent deaths of scores of innocent men, women, and children. All of this is terribly sad, and no less sad than shallow people laughing at the misfortunes of others.
But when your own family visits you in a prison in order to tell you that they are going to kill you for trying to elope with the person you love, after your attempt has resulted in riots that actually kill a person, that has a specific quality of dramatic tragedy, that, indeed, makes it no less sad than the event you describe.
Stephen, not that Omar can’t explain himself, but I think he’s pointing out that responding to the barbarism of killing young people for the crime of being in love by indiscriminately setting fire on scores of villagers, is, at the very least, somewhat ironic.
One doesn’t need to approve of the villagers’ barbaric behavior to know that setting them all on fire is a barbaric response.
#24 | Les |
Actually what I advocated was not indiscriminate. If they want to stone these kids bad enough to protest their freedom, then they have conveniently set themselves apart from the general populace and concentrated themselves in a small area.
I have no problem with visiting hell on earth on those who want to kill these kids. If that makes me a barbarian, then so be it. I prefer my version of barbarism to theirs.
Radley Radly Radley… you should know better than to link to NYPravda schlock about how primitive (nay, ape-like) Afghans are (or do they mean Muslims generally?).
Practically subhuman, what with all their nose-cutting of young lovelies and stonings and such. Yeah – sub-human indeed… little wonder they don’t appreciate the West’s flaming packages of shrapnel-laden explosive freedom, the bastards – they’re too busy being inhumane to their fellow man.
So middle class Murkins will nod sagely to each other, hearts filled with melancholy for this Muslimised, propagandised Montague/Capulet dreck… perhaps a tiny tear will limn the eyes of Mom –
“Oh those poor POOR lovers… little more than children… Imagine that, dear. Pass the maple syrup.”
But she will continue to not give a flying fuck about the children getting torn to bits by flying death that she finds through her taxes.
A crowd of 300? Really, @nytkeller? I call bullshit, top to bottom. This story was probably written by a PR company (Rendon, Hill & Knowlton… doesnt’ matter which: NYT is the modern version of ‘Angriff’).
Should I have said “barbarianism”?
#26 | GT |
Well, then. Then the protests should be too small to waste napalm on right?
Yes, well, since my own mother actually did try to kill me once, and since her abuse probably crippled my father, I’d say I’m sufficiently qualified by experience to objectively know better and tell you you’re wrong.
It’s not even close. It really isn’t. Been there, done that, created the t-shirt concession.
The man probably heard his own penis being ground up in the garbage disposal while he was tied down and bleeding to death. You should think about that, if you still don’t get it. You should try to imagine what that must have felt like. Try to actually imagine that experience, imagine it happening to you.
Because that’s pretty much the only way this guy is going to humanized to you, I think.
#30, Acksiom,
Chill the fuck out dude.
#20,
Certainly not if we aren’t prepared to take a public position that we’re sure our way is better. Granted that, even then, it wouldn’t be easy going, but the British DID manage to go a long way toward stamping out Suttee, because they were SURE that it was wrong, and said so in no uncertain terms.
The post WWII era saw the Western peoples retreat from their certainty that their culture was best, which is too bad. Frankly it doesn’t take too many decades of resurgent slave-trade, ethnic cleansing, famine as a tool of statecraft, and general Kleptocracy to make old fashioned Colonial Paternalism look awfully goddamned good.
Pity there isn’t anybody with the temperament to do it anymore.
Mmmmm. . .no, ACB; I think instead you should go try to do something helpful or at least nice for another human being.
Because you clearly need the practice.
Didn’t some guy named Shakespeare write about a similar type story to the Afghanistan story?
@30, maybe you’re under the impression that I was suggesting that the story of the lovers should be the saddest story for you, or maybe you think the adjective “sad” is an objective one. Neither is true. The fact that I agreed that the story of the man is awful and truly sad and that you still think I’m unable to humanize him says more about your emotional state than my opinion on any of this. We all invest ourselves emotionally in different ways. There is no objective right way or wrong way to gauge something as ineffable as “sadness,” when comparing tragic stories.
I prefer my version of barbarism to theirs.
For the record, so do I! And I understand the fury that informs it, despite my disagreement with it.
@csp everytime you comment you reveal more of what an authoritarian, nostalgic colonialist bigot you are. Great the enlightened British empire in thier heart of hearts was so offended by the barbarism of sitter that they banned it, and then manufactured a famine that killed millions of Indians. Oh the benevolence in Malaya or the mau mau rebellion or Rhodesia or were ever the sun never set. You are a rediculous fool, I can just see you imaginging yourself in redcoat and pith helmet gallantly fighting Zulus for mother queen.
@ #37 | demize! |
Thank you for saying it better than I could.
CSP:
Are you really saying that American politicians and media personalities are reluctant to point out that US society is better than Afghan society? While commenting on a story whose basic point is to show (correctly, as far as I can tell, though I know little about Afghanistan) how barbaric and nasty Afghan culture is?
I think I get the point you’re driving at–it’s easy to follow the logic of cultural relativism off the deep end, till you find yourself unable to make any moral objections to Nazi murder factories or Soviet gulags or West Indies sugar plantations. But that’s a disease that affects a small subset of intellectuals and a large subset of college students trying on the concept for the first time. It’s pretty much absent from US media (whose huge pro-US and pro-Israel bias is much easier to see if you read foreign media), and entirely absent from US politicians (who routinely work lines into speeches and books and articles about how the US is a shining city on a hill, has a special role in the world, is the greatest nation in history, has the mightiest military in history, etc.
Stephan:
Foreign interventions are almost never about morality. My understanding is that our tame, friendly Afghan government and allies are about as willing to do barbaric crap like that as our evil, nasty Afghan enemies.
Sooner or later, we will make peace of some kind with even those evil Taliban (who aren’t the same as Al Qaida, though the US MSM loves to confuse the two), because we don’t actually want to *own* that ungovernable, impoverished hell-hole. At which point, they will continue treating their women like animals and f–king little boys and goats and doing all the other charming stuff that their society is famous for.
Fortunately, this doesn’t really concern us that much. We can just leave, and be really careful about giving visas to people from that part of the world.