At 09:58 PM 7/1/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Submitted for comment :-)
"...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them."
Osama Bin Laden
UBL's morals, which he unfortunately gets from a book (being a smart guy, he could derive them himself like any half-cluefull atheist), are largely convergent with the pre-Judaic/Xian culture the Moslems forked a few hundred years ago. (And what, Haiwatha rooted the tree some time ago?) Ie, as the Gadsen flag says, "Don't tread on me". However, this is contrary to the methods of colonial agents, eg. Romans, Brits, and Yanks. Where yanks includes neocons. At this point I will quote the reluctant general, Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements. -George Washington Where you can replace "all" with "oil" and "none" with Israel. Etc. Personally I think North America can be energy sufficient (nuke & coal sands) but this is an engineering/political issue. Morally I think our influence stops within 3 miles of our coasts, and as high as out ABMs can reach.
OK -- some comments. First, IMHO one confusing and perhaps confused post; I'm not sure I get the point. Second, to be specific, bin Laden isn't George Washington, but in at least one respect he is LIKE others who struggled to keep their countries from being dominated by foreigners. George Washington was one such leader. Vlad the Impaler was another (for the history-challenged, this original for the legendary Count Dracula temporarily saved Romania from being overrun by the Ottoman Turks, by massacring hundreds of thousands of them, mostly by impaling them on sharpened stakes.) Mahatma Gandhi was another. I think "Vlad the Impaler was Gandhi" or vice-versa is about as apt a comparison as Washington and bin Laden. For starters, I think the use of terrorism is a moral a distinction worth making. Murdering thousands of civilians is not the same thing as attacking enemy troops. (To be consistent, the plane that hit the Pentagon was not terrorism, but a military attack with civilian collateral damage.) Finally, while I (and John Kerry) agree that independence from Mideast oil is a wiser goal than our current slavish devotion to the Saudis, or military domination of the whole area, I think isolationism in the age of the Internet is absurd. The 3-mile limit was the range of cannonballs, and ABMs are about as useful against many threats we already face. Like it or not, we Americans are part of one planet, and we had better get better at it than we've been lately. Howie Goodell On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 21:16:32 -0700, Major Variola (ret) <mv@cdc.gov> wrote:
At 09:58 PM 7/1/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Submitted for comment :-)
"...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them."
Osama Bin Laden
UBL's morals, which he unfortunately gets from a book (being a smart guy, he could derive them himself like any half-cluefull atheist), are largely convergent with the pre-Judaic/Xian culture the Moslems forked a few hundred years ago. (And what, Haiwatha rooted the tree some time ago?) Ie, as the Gadsen flag says, "Don't tread on me". However, this is contrary to the methods of colonial agents, eg. Romans, Brits, and Yanks. Where yanks includes neocons.
At this point I will quote the reluctant general, Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements. -George Washington Where you can replace "all" with "oil" and "none" with Israel. Etc.
Personally I think North America can be energy sufficient (nuke & coal sands) but this is an engineering/political issue. Morally I think our influence stops within 3 miles of our coasts, and as high as out ABMs can reach.
E3-I: This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by UML's antivirus scanning services.
-- Howie Goodell hgoodell@cs.uml.edu http://goodL.org Hardware control Info Visualization User interface UMass Lowell Computer Science Doctoral Candidate
participants (2)
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Howie Goodell -
Major Variola (ret)