[jaguar]

woohoo!
Great stuff.
Know what? I agree with you entirely.
That is why I stand where I stand. Which sometimes gets confused.
The price of freedom as so often stated (and had to in my English exam today urgh) is eternal vigilance. For all its flaws liberal democracy is a pretty good system (more accurately it’s a bad system that beats everything else till you come up with something better) and I want to keep that. That’s why I’m pissed off at the US, because money is undermining these principles.

Sure, we've got something pretty good but that doesn't mean we should go, gee well, this is pretty good and leave it at that. Let’s keep aiming for something better and stop the rot setting in.

That’s why I bitch allot. I'm not stupid enough to advocate something else like communism or benevolent dictatorship, I’m just saying this, this and THIS (he says pointing a big accusing
finger at the SSSCA) is wrong, and we should do something about them instead of rolling over. Enemies from within are as dangerous as those from without.

I know your sig was talking about something else - I just like twisting stuff to my advantage, force of habit after years of verbal sparring matches =)

The reason I laid into you was that to summaries allot of conversation:
juju said patriotism is bad because it makes people sheep
you fought back
I joined juju as he dropped out of it
I said if you were a true patriot (as in support the value it was founded on) you would hate your currant government for what it was doing
You retorted with something about people dieing to establish those values (interjected with allot of capitals) which merely served to reinforce my point before dropping out of the discussion. If you'd just said that you'd written to congressmen etc...

Now..

their leaders tell them to so they can increase their power. That, and because they don't understand that their violence only does them harm. They lose in the end. When you *target* civilians, all your bargaining chips are lost. They seem to not recognize this. Blind leading the blind. The funny thing is, I used to be totally completely sided with the Palestinians. "oh, Israel is treating them awful. fuck israel." but the fact of the matter is that while israel is performing their "targeted killings" against what are basically the "military commanders" of the militant groups, palestinian extremists are picking weak, easy-target civilians and murdering them. they're sending suicide bombers into discos to kill "the enemy" - that enemy being comprised almost wholly of teenage girls. it is some seriously sick fucking shit. I would never argue that Israel is perfect - but they haven't thrown away their bargaining chips. I personally think they have shown great restraint - I’ve not once heard of Israeli soldiers grabbing some Palestinians, killing them, throwing their bodies out the window of a building and beating their corpses in the street - but this is what I saw some Palestinians doing to Israeli soldiers last October 13.

Firstly, Israel isn’t anywhere as near as clean as you seem to think, often innocents are shot in firefights with Israeli soldiers shooting live rounds and during the recent takeover a few towns they went down the fronts of many major streets and completely ripped the fronts off them - simple revenge. If you go back into the last few decades it’s been fucking messy on both sides, Sharon himself is a goddman butcher responsible for allot of Innocent deaths. Both sides have allot of blood on their hands.

their leaders tell them to so they can increase their power. that, and because they don't understand that their violence only does them harm. They lose in the end. When you *target* civilians, all your bargaining chips are lost.

Debatable - suicide and merciless attacks do get one message across - DON'T FUCK WITH US. I don't advocate their tactics but their grievance is real - Israel should stop building more settlements in the west back and withdraw. Fully. They are exasperating a very open wound. Tit for tat on both sides in the really destructive thing. The issue is control of Jerusalem but don't as ask me how to answer that. Peace keeping force came to mind but...

I also notice that you and I end up arguing apples and oranges - that bothers me. I’m like "yeah, we need to respond to the terrorist threat to preserve our freedoms" and you're like "dmca, bitch!"

There were/are two simultaneous arguments going on
a: Patriotism and B; terrorist response
I guess lines got crossed.

interspersed with stuff you read on some web page some where

Rest is all okey-dokey but most of my ideas etc come from books. Try 1984, Brave New World, Communist Manifesto, various stuff on the French Revolution, Twain, and others combined with allot of debating, listening to all sorts of people, as well as personal experiences (patricianly time in Vietnam). Most of the political shit on WebPages is just hashed up versions of other stuff anyway. Heck when you get down to it its not easy to attack my basic political views, they've ben attacked and hacked down so often that there a pretty hard to hit target these days.

Onto the nature of the response, starting with Whit

To answer your question I think they exist for the same reason as neo-Nazi’s, the original Nazi’s and dozens of other fascist groups they hate. It's easier to hate and blame someone else than it is to hate your own life.

Yes...Buy WHY do they hate?
Let’s take the Nazis, between the wars there was awful economic conditions in Germany, the currency was worth, food was scarce at time - to summaries people had no money and no food. Socioeconomic conditions sum it up. Now, I’d argue similar conditions exist in the Middle East. Germany felt like it had been shitted on by the treaty after WW1, I’d say the Middle East feels the same about its treatment by the west. See what I’m getting at? We need to address those issues - and that is *not* easy before the problem will go away. Tha'ts what iv'e been argueing all along. But hat is along term issue of world-wide equality, a kind of global class-war.

Of course in the en i still blame religion, more blood on its hands than *any* government. Allot fo the stuff tw posted about emotion being needed by extremists to gain a foothold is entirely true (tips his hat in tw's direction)

One last thing: I keep hearing people go bah - anthrax letters is *that* the best they can do??/ Well gee,for buggar al expense and little risk they've scared the livingshit out of half the country, foreced shutdowns and the evacuation of congress. Pretty good effort if you ask me.