Passivists Unite

“Ladies, ladies, no more bickering, please!

One person's hero may be another's dog.

One of my heros is Howie Long.
He's a former athlete who, whether or not he's actually MARRIED to her, gets to play house(on TV commercials) with Terry Hatcher!”

“Tom, I thought your hero was Superman.

What an idiot.”

“I agree”

“null”

“Kill em all and let God sort them out!

I too wish that there was another way to handle this situation but this bleeding heart bullstuff really gets on my nerves.It's gonna happen, there ain't nothing you or I can do about it so you are either with us or against us. Which will it be???????????”

“Against you...being a passive aggressive, I hate ultimatums from goons.”

“bacpac, I don't represent anyone but myself. I encourage people to think for themselves.

LH, we all know what your angle is. All your hero's wear white sheets.”

“Does anyone else think the "war on terrorism" sounds suspiciously like the "war on drugs"? How much u.s. resources are we going to flush down the toilet in this ill-fated military adventure? . I'm for the violent elimination of terrorists, but I don't think america has what it takes to do it. My guess we'll use too much brute force and alienate most of the world. So I'm not too gung-ho on shrub's war.

What we need is a new politcal/military culture that's able to prepare for and win this kind conflict. We don't have that now. I fear for our military personnel, and I fear for innocent lives abroad that will be caught in the crossfire.”

“Even the operation name spells doom.

Operation Infinite Justice????

What is this, a comic book superhero story? Is Captain Justice going to save the day? Our government must think we're all idiots.”

“There are 100,000 televisions, 29,000 phones, and 167,000 radios in Afghanistan with a population of 26 million. We need to parachute 500,000 more battery operated televisions, cell phones and radio?s so the people of Afghanistan can see what is really happening in the world. Maybe they would be as pissed as I am and fight back even harder. Just a thought : )”

“I remember when being passive-aggressive would get me laid.

Ohhhh, the good 'ole days!”

“Ahhh, finally Mutt is here. Now the real unity can begin. LOL!

How goes it dogman?”

“Hi Nigal. Christians vs. Muslims. A true holy war. This must be pretty exciting for all you jesus freaks, eh? Tell me something. If you pit the christian terrorists against the muslim terrorists, who would win? The wrath of God or the wrath of Allah?

Good to see you're still here, nigal.”

“To me, Ali is a hero. He sacrificed a great deal for what he believed.

He didn't simply duck the draft. He gave up his championship, lost 3 1/2 years of boxing when he was in his prime and received a 5 year prison sentence. Other people acheived heroism for what they did fighting in the war, but I don't think acknowledging one kind of courage needs to negate the other.”

“"How do we distiguish the pacifists from cowards?" - bacpac

A pacifist can be recognized as someone willing to admit and stand up for what they believe in. Whereas a coward is a hypocrite who speaks of desire for war, but is unwilling to get personally involved, prefering instead to sacrifice somebody else's child to "GO GET 'EM". All talk and no action.”

“Well I'll be..... except for the gloating tone, Mutts post @ 7:16:33 makes a fair amount of sense to me.”

“Hum, I don't view this as a holy war Mutt. The people who did this were not very Muslim-like and it seams pretty clear from the global Muslim comunity that they do not represent true Islam. Which wrath will win? This is a matter of the wrath of man not Yaweh or Allah (who are the same). This is the doing of man.

Which Christian terrorists are you referring to, Jerry Falwell? LOL!”

“Thin Air, I know I am probably repeating somebody else's sentement, but I'm too lazy to read all the replies. Anyway, There is a huge difference between our military attacks and their Terrorism. Our attacks target individuals and groups that not only threaten the USA, but the world. The Terrorists threaten innocent citizens. If we do nothing, then we become like many other nations that have learned to live with the fear of bombings and have adapted their society to it. Yes, we do need to make some changes, but why should we allow some group to force us to change the way we live? If war isn't the answer, then I'll let anybody who doesn't think it is go and talk peace with Osama himself. See how passive he is when you're staring down the buissness end of his AK.”

“BTW- I did catch that CNN Presents called "Behind the Veil". It was very interesting, scary, and sad at the same time. They treat their women very, very poorly.”

“Someone who is passive-aggressive does fight back, but not by confronting a person or the situation.

A passive-aggressive person knows that when they buy 2 burgers at McDonald's, his friend will take one without asking. Instead of telling the person not to take his hamburgers, he will empty a container of pepper onto the burger that his friend will take, but it's still aggression.”

“No kidding...

Want a hamburger LH?”

“BTW: Mutts subsequent posts were mostly a mixture of annoying and way off base.”

“Spock-
Those kind of cowards are what I call "Chicken Hawks".
They are cheerleaders for war as long as someone else does the fighting.
A few that come to mind are George F Will, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchannan,”

“pedxing: I'm annoying? Take a look at yourself. You strive so hard to always sound smarter than everyone else (not that you succeed). Your self-esteem obviously depends on it. I can just imagine you rushing to the search engines to look up info on the topic du jour so you can pretend to be informed. Just as an example, on one thread in the not too distant past, someone asked what some word meant, and you were the very next person to post its definition. A couple of posts later, someone else quoted Webster's definition, with credit given. Your definition and his were exactly the same, yet you didn't cite Webster. You wanted to create the illusion that you knew its definition off the top of your head. And do I need to remind everyone how you refused to engage me in my critical analysis of psychology? You're an unoriginal, plagiarising poser. Not to mention boring.”

“Ladies, ladies, please!!!”

“LH wrote: "calling Muhamed Ali is a hero is an insult to the rescurers in the world trade center."

We really ought to think before we post. Gear Slut was talking about Ali being a hero to him as a youngster. I don't know his age but I assume this was before the tragic events at WTC. Jim Zorn and Steve Largent were heroes to me as a kid. The people who gave their lives trying to rescue others on 9/11 are surely heroic...my choice of childhood heroes doesn't make them any less so.

I saw a story on the news about some young people carrying signs that said "Give Peace a Chance" and "Justice, Not Revenge" and they interviewed several people who were extremely angry because they thought these people were "cowards" for not supporting the growing chorus for war. Cowards? I thought it took a lot more courage to stand up for what they believed in -- to hold a viewpoint so polarly opposite of the vast majority of Americans -- than it did to be waving a flag and holding a sign saying "Bomb Afghanistan Now!" We do have to take action. I hope we can have some effect without turning the entire Muslim world against us.”

“Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He writes...

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the "Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.

There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping
bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the
West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does.

Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary 9/??/01”

“Fly: I think that has been posted on TT about 4 times.

Mutt: I do apologize for so flippantly dismissing your posts... I just wanted to distance myself from them, but should not have been so flippant.

However, I can't apologize for defining words correctly. If you are talking about the definitions of racism thread, the point was to discuss varying definitions of racism, not to prove we knew what the word meant.”

“Thanks. I'll be sure not to post it again.”

“Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan , a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Mir Tamim Ansary”

“Bravo flyguy6x and Tamim! Nice post. That letter expresses most of my concerns in an nutshell. If only other people could consider what is at stake in that light.”

“It was a courageous moment Friday night when, amidst all the clamor of folks wrapping themselves in the flag, Neil Young sang Lennon's "Imagine" on that TV fundraiser. It came in contrast to Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down." A sobering performance by Young, who does hold the music biz's feet to the fire regularly and for several decades now.

I was among the many anti-war activists during the Viet Nam "era." Coming from a military family and living in a pretty conservative area, that was not an easy thing to do. The current situation is not the same as Viet Nam, and I therefore am not against some "violent" steps to address the terrorism issue; yet I have to respect those who find the prospect of military action to be disturbing, or contravening their personal moral values.

At this point, it is hopeless to just fear that something might happen to our loved ones if we engage in counter-terrorism -- it already has and will again; your families, friends, and neighbors of every age are going to find themselves at some risk. That is the nature of terrorism. But to be passive at this point will cede the issue to those who want us to return to a pre-modern world. That wasn't the case in Viet Nam; the Vietnamese were not out to take the world back to the 12th century. That's why we have been able to reach rapprochement in the wake of that war -- they are just another market for modern culture.

The bin Laden's of the world want none of that. They want your daughter to be subjugated and illiterate. They want music to disappear. They want to burn art. And they want to come to your neighborhood to do this. I didn't want to fight in a rice paddy over someone else's self-determination when it didn't threaten my values or my freedom; but I do see the need to fight when that set of values is directly under attack.

The question of policy is another one -- what is the right approach in the current situation? Major land battles with massive deaths doesn't seem to make sense. If it is a cultural clash, and we can focus on our ideals and continue to see their ultimate value, then it will have to be a cultural war. So the idea of dropping lots of TVs is not that absurd. Our cultural will have to dominate. Tolerance and respect for other cultures has its limits. There are rights and wrongs in the world. Because the US has been wrong in the past doesn't mean we have to allow even worse wrongs to be perpetuated against us.”

“Finally they are coming up with what I have asked for from the beginning: the "proof" for wanting to start a war. War mongers out there could care less who Bush and his cronies choose to fight. They just want blood and any blood will do. If the good ole U.S. of A. govt. tells them someone did it, then by God, we should get that someone. Finally, Bush came to his senses and realized the U.S. alies wouldn't accept a blanket attack on Afghanistan without seeing what led the U.S. to that conclusion. Here in the U.S. I believe, despite all the flag waving and bravado, the American people would very much regret becoming involved in an action without some justification for why they chose a particular target. We heard the Taliban and bin Laden and so many people were ready to plow ahead into war, like a stupid lynch mob. Now we will see if the govt.'s "white paper" is capable of proving to both Americans and the world that bin Laden is responsible.”

“BTW: Tamim is legit according to an urban legend site dealing with rumours.”

“Thank you for posting that, Flyguy6x (and again Violin). I had missed it where it was posted before, and it was very interesting and sad. I had thought that the Afghan people had already suffered tremendously, and was confused by the "bomb them back to the stone age" statements being made. We do need to somehow crush the El Queda? group, bin Laden's network, but it seems inevitable that there will be an arab vs israel (and each group's allies) world war if we are not very careful. Maybe it is inevitable, regardless of how careful the U.S. is. It seems to be what the various terrorist groups really want.

Is fundamentalist islamic religion really that horrible to its people, especially its women, or is it evil masquerading as religion, just like in the inquisition?”

“all organized religion is essentially evil at the structural level.”

“LyndyS -

My Beneath the Veil thread seemed to go largely unnoticed. If you get a chance to see this documentary, it will give you some insight into life in today's Afghanistan.”

“"Is fundamentalist islamic religion really that horrible to its people, especially its women, or is it evil masquerading as religion, just like in the inquisition?"

Yes, it is that bad to it?s people. I saw the ?Behind the Veil? show on CNN about the Taliban and it was horrible. The international community paid for a soccer field so the Afgans could have something to do (sounds like night time basketball for the gettos, eh?). They use this arena for public executions. They showed women being led to the goal line, forced to kneel down and then shot in the head with an AK. They hang men form the goal posts. What are some of the crimes? Women are killed for teaching there young girls how to read and write. They are imprisoned for wearing make up, having a TV. Men can be thrown in jail if their beard isn?t long enough. Women are not allowed to work even if they are widows. They have no rights to medical treatments. They showed film footage of villages where the Taliban came through and murdered a dozen people at a time. They showed one young man that had his head half blown off and then he was skinned.

Keep in mind though, this is not all Muslims any more than the ?church that burned people at the stake for not converting are representatives of the Christian church. Most Muslims are very good people.”

“PU?

And then what?

Make a show of solidarity by staging a sit-in on the ruins of the WTC?

Fling each other off a moving AMTRAK trains as a passive/ aggressive demonstration?

Bomb Afganistan with bananas?

Bacpac, you were a good marine.
I'm glad to hear your boy is just like you.”

“Haha mel! Kind of like the passive monks that would set themselves on fire to get their point a crossed? Get yer petrol Tarpy! We gotta point to make and yer just the feller to do it!

I don?t remember which one you bastards it was but someone here posted a thread that said something like ?Come Mr.Taliban, Tali?s gone bananas!? Well I for one would just like to say thanks a lot! Every time I hear about the Taliban I have that song stuck in my head! May you faucet drip without ceasing and your wife never stop snoring!”

“Mean bastard!”

“Does the phrase, " Afganistan Banana Stand", ring a bell with anyone???”

“Hint-
Zero Mostel
Robert Redford”

“Gear Slut -
What makes you think no one else has seen the writing on the wall (as expressed in the letter)?

I know that I have. And hasn't the Bush cabinet been making many of the same remarks? Jess.

We're not gonna go in there "willy-nilly" (Powell) and start blasting away. We are, however, going in there to eradicate the Taliban and bin Laden.

It will be ugly, but it MUST be done. It will be a terrible moment in time...

There's not a single American that is looking forward to what we must do. Do you not see what a scourge these people are to our modern world? They have to be stopped, and we're the ones most capable of leading the attack.

God Bless America...

and have mercy on the souls of the brave American men and women who will soon be making the
Supreme Sacrifice.”

“Tom T -

Tried to e-mail you off list to answer your questions, but you don't have an email address listed.

My daughter is 20 and so is her boyfriend that's in the Army.

Yes, I realize there are two things that sound like thunder and one of them IS thunder, however, when it is 90 degrees and sunny out (or a clear starry sky) and I hear thunder, I know it's not the truck stop down on the interstate. It's Ft. Hood and they are fixin to get sumthin started!! :-)

Tex”

“gojo, judging from many of the comments made here on TT, there are very few who have considered the cost. Few have talked about some alternatives to all all out war either. Some major policy and attitude changes need to be made before we even think of commiting to a war and even then all other alternative actions should be used first.”

“Don't have to worry about me not being aware of the consequences of war.

55,000 men and women represented on The Wall in Washington.

I remember all too well Dan Rather reporting from the middle of the battlefields in the Viet Nam War.

My ex husband was reclassified A-1 delinquent (now that's another long story) in 1968.

We had a nine month old baby.

We consulted draft lawyers, did the psyh exam route, and considered running to Canada.

When you're 18, have a new baby and Uncle Sam wants to send your husbands' butt to Southeast Asia to get it shot off, it makes a pretty good impression.

It's one I never forgot.”

“He didn't simply duck the draft. .
pedxing
9:14:40 PM
9/23/01

Ped, You are absolutely right......he also throws a great phantom punch”