I disagree MHA. I didn't hear Kasparov telling them anything they didn't want to hear. He just spoke the words in a little more elevated way. Thus Chris M. being overwhelmed by Garry's sophistication.
Yes, he made points with Maher's attempted 'strong man' analogy, GW's 'looking into the eyes' of Putin. But he let stand Maher's tired litany re the US's use of torture, wire taps etc.
He's pretty gutsy--he took on the whole USSR gov't when it was in its dangerous, dying throes --using his high profile (and relative safety) as new chess champion to lend a strong moral hand to Perestroika and Glasnost and all the currents that finally drowned that foul system.
Who could've known that the damn thing was only wounded?
It's a world-historical global tragedy that USSR's reform happened with Clinton/Gore at the western helm.
Kasparov is right as rain about Putin, and he is a very brave soul. Yet, he still played to the too cute by half Bill Maher crowd. Kasparov is Russia-centric (as he should be) but his geo-political analysis was a bit sophomoric. It's smart of him to go on a show and be liked by the Maher types, who would otherwise despise him if they really understood him. He was being a good politician, but not really explaining the world IMHO. His analysis succombs to the fantasy (shared by many) that America could do anything it wants but is choosing the wrong thing. Our influence is powerful but not that powerful.
The US is condemned for being omnipotent, for not being omnipotent, and all points in between. Same thing, BTW, with criticism of the Bush administration. He's a moron, and evil genius, puppet, puppet-master, and so on.
Another facet of this sort of condemnation that the US gets is the *-centric criticism. Russians, as thoroughly Russia-centric as the US is US-centric, condemn the US for being US-centric. What other centric are we supposed to be?
Liza - welcome. Nice of you to drop by. By and large the contributors and commenters here at Flares are what are commonly labeled "right wing nutters" these days. Which basically means we've got a healthy dose of "classical liberalism" in our veins, don't follow conventional wisdoms very well, and don't much like the quasi-totalitarianism that modern liberalism seems so fond of.
Aside from that we seem prone to being fond of technology (and MHA's nieces, of course).
Military supremacy could get the US far more "power" if we were really as "evil" and "barbaric" (and throw in "hypocritical" since Bill Maher can't pee without reciting that; it is the mantra of the Mahers) as the moonbats purport. So Putin and Chavez can prance the world stage because of US self restraint. They know they can count on that.
Both Putin and Chavez are thugs, very mafia-like. Al Capone seemed "untouchable" once upon a time. These types make mistakes. Their arrogance will cause them to reach too far. Maybe not today, but one day. Oil prices do not only go up, they also come down. They will get desperate at some point.
Good point. Nobody says boo about France's Secret War. Putin, the man in control of the nation that brought us the Chechen War (some folks define it as twowars, the second of which has been on his watch and is, what, 8 years now), has the chutzpah to blather Thank God Russia is not Iraq.
"Putin and Chavez are correct and a hell of a lot smarter than what we currently have runnning this country (into the ground.)"
get your kicks where and as you like,liza. (nice Che T-shirt,BTW).
stick around though.
you may be neither a nutter nor a wingnut nor a centrist,but i'm willing to bet there are people posting at YARGB who exceed your experience and breath of knowledge,if not your intelligence.
from some real 'wingnut' conversational challenge,give wretchard a read at
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
i doubt you'll agree with the general consensus,but you won't have wasted your time.
No, not much in the vitriol department. We are nutters, but rational nutters.
"Putin and Chavez..." I know several people - probably unlike you - who have actually lived under dictatorships. Americans, in their isolation and their innocence, can say things like that and actually believe it. But not those who have been through it.
Since you like mysteries, I would suggest you go see "Das Leben der Anderen", to see what life is really like under the likes of Putin. There are two good reviews of it on this blog if you care to look them up.
Personally, I'm happy to discuss anything from Chavez to Raymond Chandler to Quantum Mechanics, but I intensely dislike being put into a box first thing. When someone seeks to put me into a box, it is usually because they are very afraid of the ideas I might express if they were open-minded enough to actually listen.
"The world order is changing, and it is going to be about resources. It already is".
No, it is about enterprise and talent and the ability to penetrate markets. Not about resources. Only people stuck in the 19th century truly believe that - like Vladimir and Hugo.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 The Fundamentals of Faith
The Times Online describes a momentary misunderstanding.
The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
You say the conflicts are all about resources, then you sneer at the wars that are fought over them.
Cheap shot to say "enjoy your wars" --really cheap, not to mention old and familiar.
If you're willing to gamble on rebuking your own lofty, emotional, feel-good moral snobbery, you could ask yourself if any of the big wars, say WWII (which cost a thousand times as many lives on all sides as the war on terror has cost) could have been AVOIDED by a prior "small war"?
No, it's not "neocons" but rather, people with your attitude that are going to put the world back into wholesale bloodletting.
heh --telling the likes of Pat Leahy, one of the meanest, nastiest, most destructive and irresonsible hate-mongers ever to disgrace the senate, to "go f**k yourself" was one of Dick Cheney's best shots.
I like Cheney --he's a great American. He's doing all he can to prevent another world war. You'd never know it, though, Liza, unless you become willing to do some thinking, some reading, some gaining of a little knowledge of history & human nature. Without that, you'll never get it. And that's a shame.
It wasn't the left that invaded and occupied Iraq and killed over one million people to plunder the oil
Why not just say "ten million" while you're at it --it makes a stronger statement. I think we're paying $85/bbl for that "plundered" oil, now --what was it when the sixty-odd nation coalition went in to finally depose the psychopathic mass-torture-murderer Saddam? $20? $30? Some "plunder".
Skook --I know. just sometimes the rank arrogance of someone who thinks memorizing a bumper-sticker or two is the same thing as studying history and geopolitics, is too much not to comment on.
Seriously --the world situation re oil is dangerous as hell, Liza --and would be a whole lot more dangerous with Saddam Hussein doing what he was doing when he finally got stopped. I really, really don't want to see another world war. That's all --I didn't mean to be nasty to you. But really --you ought to wise up. This whole thing is a LOT bigger than partisan politics in the USA.
Does that have anything at all to do with the fact that the world is peaking at 85mm bpd oil production --and that the demand is already equal to that, and growing at several percent per year?
Can you name a war, ever, that wasn't fought over economics?
Do you really think that having the "correct" administration in DC, or that shutting up all white males, is going to alter the fact that Liza will be ready to send in the marines, or fire off the nukes, the first time she has to stand in a bread line?
14-17% Buddy. Steady as a rock. I'd like to see a Meyer-Briggs breakdown with some Wechsler numbers and SAT scores. I would imagine that the major disparity would show up in the Math SAT score.
You're probably right, Rick. It's the language facility that always fools you into thinking that someone's analytical abilities are simply temporarily misplaced.
The probability is that our one chance for avoiding a major world war is to maintain an open-auction global energy market. There's but one power in the world that is both dedicated to, and able to, effect that.
No matter how much one might hate "hate-filled, racist, white, male assholes", that's still the fact of the matter.
Speaking of which, I'm still moved by those great Terrye posts from, IIRC, around this time last year. I'm not much on archive searching, but somehow my memory associates them with Christmas, or perhaps I should ecumenically say the Holiday Season.
We lost our women less than a year ago (they were strong supporters of President Bush) and it hasn't been the same since.
One of the things my father and I agreed on all through our time together as readers who made recommendations to one another is that Farewell, My Lovely is the gold standard of crime fiction.
I like movies a lot and I've been known to write an occaisional review of movies no longer in theaters and not always available on DVD.
I'm also something of a political junkie and I miss most of the listed contibutors who don't post anymore (and some that were gone by the time of the transition to the latest version of blogger) though I didn't much agree with any of them on much of anything political. The same is true of the guys you've been meeting during the past couple of days though, of course, I don't miss them because they still participate.
49 comments:
I disagree MHA. I didn't hear Kasparov telling them anything they didn't want to hear. He just spoke the words in a little more elevated way. Thus Chris M. being overwhelmed by Garry's sophistication.
Yes, he made points with Maher's attempted 'strong man' analogy, GW's 'looking into the eyes' of Putin. But he let stand Maher's tired litany re the US's use of torture, wire taps etc.
I can not stand Bill Maher.
He's pretty gutsy--he took on the whole USSR gov't when it was in its dangerous, dying throes --using his high profile (and relative safety) as new chess champion to lend a strong moral hand to Perestroika and Glasnost and all the currents that finally drowned that foul system.
Who could've known that the damn thing was only wounded?
It's a world-historical global tragedy that USSR's reform happened with Clinton/Gore at the western helm.
No disagreement there Buddy... I did not mean to imply otherwise.
Luther, didn't mean to imply that you'd implied that...oops, just went blank--
BILL MAHER! makes my skin crawl--so sick of these puffed up liars.
Kasparov is right as rain about Putin, and he is a very brave soul. Yet, he still played to the too cute by half Bill Maher crowd. Kasparov is Russia-centric (as he should be) but his geo-political analysis was a bit sophomoric. It's smart of him to go on a show and be liked by the Maher types, who would otherwise despise him if they really understood him. He was being a good politician, but not really explaining the world IMHO. His analysis succombs to the fantasy (shared by many) that America could do anything it wants but is choosing the wrong thing. Our influence is powerful but not that powerful.
Liza --good comment, and humorous question. Any such thing as a centrist nutter?
Barry,
The US is condemned for being omnipotent, for not being omnipotent, and all points in between. Same thing, BTW, with criticism of the Bush administration. He's a moron, and evil genius, puppet, puppet-master, and so on.
Another facet of this sort of condemnation that the US gets is the *-centric criticism. Russians, as thoroughly Russia-centric as the US is US-centric, condemn the US for being US-centric. What other centric are we supposed to be?
Liza - welcome. Nice of you to drop by. By and large the contributors and commenters here at Flares are what are commonly labeled "right wing nutters" these days. Which basically means we've got a healthy dose of "classical liberalism" in our veins, don't follow conventional wisdoms very well, and don't much like the quasi-totalitarianism that modern liberalism seems so fond of.
Aside from that we seem prone to being fond of technology (and MHA's nieces, of course).
Liza,
Thanks. Glad you stopped by.
Military supremacy could get the US far more "power" if we were really as "evil" and "barbaric" (and throw in "hypocritical" since Bill Maher can't pee without reciting that; it is the mantra of the Mahers) as the moonbats purport. So Putin and Chavez can prance the world stage because of US self restraint. They know they can count on that.
Both Putin and Chavez are thugs, very mafia-like. Al Capone seemed "untouchable" once upon a time. These types make mistakes. Their arrogance will cause them to reach too far. Maybe not today, but one day. Oil prices do not only go up, they also come down. They will get desperate at some point.
Knuck
Just as long as we aren't being France, they can criticize away, you global hegemon, you :>)
Barry,
Good point. Nobody says boo about France's Secret War. Putin, the man in control of the nation that brought us the Chechen War (some folks define it as twowars, the second of which has been on his watch and is, what, 8 years now), has the chutzpah to blather Thank God Russia is not Iraq.
Not a peep from the International Community.
"Putin and Chavez are correct and a hell of a lot smarter than what we currently have runnning this country (into the ground.)"
get your kicks where
and as you like,liza.
(nice Che T-shirt,BTW).
stick around though.
you may be neither a nutter nor a wingnut nor a centrist,but i'm willing to bet there are people posting at YARGB
who exceed your experience and breath of knowledge,if not your intelligence.
from some real 'wingnut' conversational challenge,give wretchard a read at
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
i doubt you'll agree with the general consensus,but you won't have wasted your time.
Liza:
No, not much in the vitriol department. We are nutters, but rational nutters.
"Putin and Chavez..." I know several people - probably unlike you - who have actually lived under dictatorships. Americans, in their isolation and their innocence, can say things like that and actually believe it. But not those who have been through it.
Liza,
Since you like mysteries, I would suggest you go see "Das Leben der Anderen", to see what life is really like under the likes of Putin. There are two good reviews of it on this blog if you care to look them up.
Personally, I'm happy to discuss anything from Chavez to Raymond Chandler to Quantum Mechanics, but I intensely dislike being put into a box first thing. When someone seeks to put me into a box, it is usually because they are very afraid of the ideas I might express if they were open-minded enough to actually listen.
"The world order is changing, and it is going to be about resources. It already is".
No, it is about enterprise and talent and the ability to penetrate markets. Not about resources. Only people stuck in the 19th century truly believe that - like Vladimir and Hugo.
Gresham's Law holds on that, tho, skook --the Putins and Chavezes can make it the 19th century wherever they have the power to do so.
There will be Peace only when we Americans quit stealing the world's fossil fuels and water.
But, we aren't doiung that.
Yes we are.
No, we're not.
Yes we are
No we're not
Are
Aren't
(to be cont'd)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Fundamentals of Faith
The Times Online describes a momentary misunderstanding.
The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
cont'd at link...
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
2007/10/fundamentals-of-faith.html
Liza, try adding up your own implications.
You say the conflicts are all about resources, then you sneer at the wars that are fought over them.
Cheap shot to say "enjoy your wars" --really cheap, not to mention old and familiar.
If you're willing to gamble on rebuking your own lofty, emotional, feel-good moral snobbery, you could ask yourself if any of the big wars, say WWII (which cost a thousand times as many lives on all sides as the war on terror has cost) could have been AVOIDED by a prior "small war"?
No, it's not "neocons" but rather, people with your attitude that are going to put the world back into wholesale bloodletting.
That's okay. Liza --we all make typos. Thanks for the excellent debate.
heh --telling the likes of Pat Leahy, one of the meanest, nastiest, most destructive and irresonsible hate-mongers ever to disgrace the senate, to "go f**k yourself" was one of Dick Cheney's best shots.
I like Cheney --he's a great American. He's doing all he can to prevent another world war. You'd never know it, though, Liza, unless you become willing to do some thinking, some reading, some gaining of a little knowledge of history & human nature. Without that, you'll never get it. And that's a shame.
Buddy - fish, barrel. Not worth it.
Damn... I had some hope there for just a bit... naive me.
lisa...
"and Americans do not want to die in wars that do not involve a direct threat to the nation."
Don't bet on that assumption. There are many who have larger hearts than yours.
Yes lisa... I read your last... re assholes... but you will read this... as trolls can never resist.
It wasn't the left that invaded and occupied Iraq and killed over one million people to plunder the oil
Why not just say "ten million" while you're at it --it makes a stronger statement. I think we're paying $85/bbl for that "plundered" oil, now --what was it when the sixty-odd nation coalition went in to finally depose the psychopathic mass-torture-murderer Saddam? $20? $30? Some "plunder".
Skook --I know. just sometimes the rank arrogance of someone who thinks memorizing a bumper-sticker or two is the same thing as studying history and geopolitics, is too much not to comment on.
Seriously --the world situation re oil is dangerous as hell, Liza --and would be a whole lot more dangerous with Saddam Hussein doing what he was doing when he finally got stopped. I really, really don't want to see another world war. That's all --I didn't mean to be nasty to you. But really --you ought to wise up. This whole thing is a LOT bigger than partisan politics in the USA.
And what's with the white male bs?
Does that have anything at all to do with the fact that the world is peaking at 85mm bpd oil production --and that the demand is already equal to that, and growing at several percent per year?
Can you name a war, ever, that wasn't fought over economics?
Do you really think that having the "correct" administration in DC, or that shutting up all white males, is going to alter the fact that Liza will be ready to send in the marines, or fire off the nukes, the first time she has to stand in a bread line?
14-17% Buddy. Steady as a rock. I'd like to see a Meyer-Briggs breakdown with some Wechsler numbers and SAT scores. I would imagine that the major disparity would show up in the Math SAT score.
It ain't like it can be fixed.
Sorry, Luther, I meant "Marines", not "marines'.
You're probably right, Rick. It's the language facility that always fools you into thinking that someone's analytical abilities are simply temporarily misplaced.
Yes lisa, you did get carried away.... but from your response, I won't write you off completely. Just yet.
Stick around, no need to comment.
We keep our ears, and eyes, open here... no monologue, much as you see different.
Give 'debate' a chance. Don't be so quick to judge.
The probability is that our one chance for avoiding a major world war is to maintain an open-auction global energy market. There's but one power in the world that is both dedicated to, and able to, effect that.
No matter how much one might hate "hate-filled, racist, white, male assholes", that's still the fact of the matter.
Liza,
I'm sorry you got so angry.
Actually, not everyone on here agrees.
And not everyone on here is male.
And not everyone on here is white, for that matter.
I'm glad you were willing to talk to us a little.
Good luck.
Speaking of which, I'm still moved by those great Terrye posts from, IIRC, around this time last year. I'm not much on archive searching, but somehow my memory associates them with Christmas, or perhaps I should ecumenically say the Holiday Season.
Liza,
We lost our women less than a year ago (they were strong supporters of President Bush) and it hasn't been the same since.
One of the things my father and I agreed on all through our time together as readers who made recommendations to one another is that Farewell, My Lovely is the gold standard of crime fiction.
I like movies a lot and I've been known to write an occaisional review of movies no longer in theaters and not always available on DVD.
I'm also something of a political junkie and I miss most of the listed contibutors who don't post anymore (and some that were gone by the time of the transition to the latest version of blogger) though I didn't much agree with any of them on much of anything political. The same is true of the guys you've been meeting during the past couple of days though, of course, I don't miss them because they still participate.
I hope you decide to stick around.
Best.
There ya go --more--much more--to life than bitter partisan politics.
Wow, go away for a few hours and things get interesting. Nuance. We just never have it, do we. Bummer.
Nuance, new aunts, don't got neither one (*sigh*).
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