Displaying 31 To 60 Of 416 Comments Ok, I will you give that. Provided you mean by ‘our reaction’, Iraq and not Afghanistan. Do you? Maybe what I am talking about is more a perpetuation of that victory, of their keeping the high ground once they emerged victorious. This by keeping us between a rock and a hard place. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 7:48 pm Bear with me, I made a big mistake in that summary. I will try to be brief. (Laughter explodes on the thread. Abby? Brief ???) Here it is: My whole premise was that there are only two possibilities. Wrong: there are three. Not that the third one is any prettier than the other two, in fact it’s the ugliest of them all. We can get rid of having to worry about upgrading or not upgrading, at least, by getting rid of terror altogether. How? By doing what New Labour has done. Appease. Give them all they want, and the terror will end. You can do what was done over here: give them their Shariah Law courts and their Madrassas, right there in America. Yes, you can do it too! (sark!) Change not only your foreign policy (which admittedly needs changing), but your domestic policy too. Just keep changing and accomodating and appeasing and pacifying until you get it just right. Ta-Da! No more terrorism. (No more America as we know it, either, but never mind.) Thank you for letting me clear that up. (And don’t you dare do it, you fight, don’t be like the UK and wimp out.) :] » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 7:29 pm I don’t mind the humor at all, Khirad, in fact I enjoy it. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 7:03 pm Don’t despair, it’s temporary. We’ll beat them yet. Why? Because they will overextend themselves. Why? Because they are arrogant. There is no third choice now, but there will be…says abby the idealist. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 6:55 pm Wow, the debate on this thread should be telling us something, and it’s not pleasant. Something about the pickle we have got ourselves in, or, rather, that the terrorists have put us in. Sorry this comment is coming a bit late. In this debate prompted by Tiger’s article, we have those like KQ who think we should take advantage of this state-of-the-art security stuff, that we’d be foolish not to upgrade every time something new becomes available (hope I got that last right, KQ); and we have those like Chernyn who find it way too intrusive and not good enough anyway: it can be got around where the terrorist is innovative enough. One thing is clear: we either keep increasing the level and kind of security measures that become available, or we don’t. If we do, we lose or seem to lose more and more of our freedoms, rights, and dignity, next thing you know and drawing from something a poster said here, they’ll be having us walk stark naked through the airports. If we don’t, that would seem to make us more and more vulnerable to attack and we might become one of the most unsafe countries in the world, which in turn will make us a tasty target. Either way, we’re toast…thinks the terrorist with a big smile. We either become less and less free, to increase our safety, or we shove safety aside to preserve our freedom (and dignity and the like). This is the very dilemma that, and lets’s be honest here, GWB had to solve and the very one Obama faces. Only two possibilities left and both of them are ugly ones. On the surface, the terrorist wins. Because here, there is no third possibility. All there is is trying to choose between freedom and dignity, and safety and peace of mind. Quelle choice! People talk or like to talk about ‘striking a balance between the two’, as if this were the third possibility that I have said doesn’t exist. But in my view, this is either a kind of delusion or it’s not and those talking about it are simply trying to comfort the masses. You don’t hear them saying much if anything about there being only two (ugly) choices; they like to make speeches about balance and compromise and ‘getting it just right’ (like Goldilocks’ porridge). Sorry to be so downbeat here but it just falls out of looking at the debate on this thread. When we hear ourselves debate like this, it drives it home, and we end up saying to ourselves: “Uh-oh, are we in a pickle, or what? And what’s that cackling sound in the other room?” It’s the jihadist, laughing his head off. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 6:30 pm I don’t like the scan either but… What would we say if they, using this scan, caught a terrorist 10 minutes before a flight with some liquid explosives… showing right where that gun is showing in the image of the girl on the right, above? We’d say “Bravo!!!” And what do we say when we get to talking about 9-11? We say: “It happened on their watch; they should have prevented it.” And what would we have said if the underwear terrorist had brought the plane down? Maybe this: “God, some countries have scans that would have caught that stuff on him; why don’t we?” The same kind of thing we said before the Fort Hood shooter: “Monitoring our emails is an invasion of our privacy and a violation of our rights.” But after ? I read posts where people said in so many words: “They had clues, they were watching his email exchanges, why even do that if you don’t act when you see something suspicious? ” It’s true. It’s part of the inconsistency of being human. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 3:10 pm Looks as if it’s been moved anyway…what a carry-on! Editors are sometimes like elves that appear and disappear, doing good deeds, they work swiftly and silently…etc. LOL !!! » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 10:39 am You are getting me choked up. I can’t bear it. Let’s have a beer or something and chill out. Why do you talk of dying…or are you just using an expression? Everything is ok…or will be if we can get one of the editors to move your article to the Home Page. See my other reply to you, I just finished it. :] » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 10:16 am Chernynkaya: If all you want is “Pre-Occupied” moved to the Home Page, ask Adlib or KQuark or Nellie to do that…because that’s the one thing I’ve forgotten how to do! I’ve done it just once…moved something from one category to another after it was published…and now I can’t remember quite how I did it! For future ref. and just to learn about selecting categories, don’t use Write a New Post. Use Dashboard. You will see it in the right margin of the Home Page under Authors, then under META. Click it and once you are in, go across to the left side of the page, near the top, where it says ‘Posts’. Click the arrow until you see ‘Add New Post’, it will take you to where you prepare articles for publishing. Once there and again in the right margin, under ‘Preview; and ‘Publish’ tabs, you will see a Category tab. Click it. The category ‘Speaker’s Corner’ should already be checked. Click that with your mouse until the check disappears, then select another category, there are several. If you want an article to appear on the Home Page, always uncheck the category Speaker’s Corner first and then click the category called PlanetPOV before you click ‘Publish’. abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 10:09 am When you are choosing a category for your article, in the right margin, UNcheck ‘Speaker’s Corner’ category and select the one you want (unless you do want it in Speaker’s Category, then just leave it as it is, it will already have a check by it). E.g. if you want your article to show on the home page, just click ‘PlanetPOV’, and it will go there. There are many categories you can click. Then click ‘Publish’, as you know, and you’re done. » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 8:47 am Adlib: Something you said (part of it in humor) about this article of Chernynkaya’s, namely, “Cher, what a wonderful article! Trying to secure your 2010 nomination early?”, made me wish I could nominate it for something now and not have to wait a year. Could there be a special award for Chernynkaya’s article? I mean for its impact upon us: for provoking thought, for touching a chord, for motivating and inspiring, etc. Given the comments, it seems that it has done that, seems unanimous that this article is unique in the most positive sense. Just a thought. abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 5:33 am I think I agree. :] » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 3:54 am Bernard says: “Israel has done very well creating the image of themselves as the underdog » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 2:52 am You know, Khirad, you are right. That was sloppy on my part. It’s Khomeini who is the driving force here. That said, sometimes when I see clips of Ahmadinejad talking about Israel, I see or seem to see such hate in his eyes. Hate is what brought on the Holocaust. And the minute we say, “Well, people are hated for a reason, they bring it on themselves,” we seem, at least, to be offering an excuse for the Holocaust, this whether we mean to or not. Yet we have to be able to say, sometimes, that some people just behave in a manner that seems to beget hate…and here I am not talking about Jews, either, but about human beings in general. We all know of people in public life, in the media, etc. who seem to beget hatred by their words and actions. The only real way to see if the hatred is earned and deserved, is to ask ourselves why we hate this person and then, if that person happens to stop doing what it is that we hate but we still go on hating them, we know it is not earned and deserved but is something in us. All this is quite difficult and our being subjective creatures is part of the difficulty. Objective analysis of a person, especially of ourselves, of a situation or event, is virtually impossible in human beings, with their built-in subjectivity. Along that line, it’s virtually impossible to find a newspaper that doesn’t have an agenda because newspapers are owned and edited by subjective creatures; and where you have an agenda, you are never going to get ‘clean’ news. It will always be tainted… even if only a little. In this way, it’s hard to know just what is true and what is false of both Israel and Hamas. We have to rely upon the subjective reporting of subjective human beings. » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 2:41 am Yes, in the same way that ‘Islamophobic’ is frequently used to not only deflect but silence any legitimate criticism of Islamic extremism. :[ » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 12:30 am Escri: Chernynkaya’s piece is one of the loveliest articles I’ve ever seen. I said something about it below just after reading it and shortly after it was published, but I was so gobsmacked at the beauty of it, I didn’t say much. In your last paragraph you talk about what you cannot stand. Something I myself cannot stand is the bias over here, in the media, when Israel does a raid, or does worse. The media in America might be pro-Israel, as Khirad says, but over here it is just the opposite. It is true that Israel might be heavy-handed at times…but how do we know what the plot really was? It is not as if no real threats exist against Israel, we all know what Ahmadinejad would like to have happen to that country. We’ve all seen those buses with kids on them, charred, and body parts in a cafe. And, yes, we’ve seen the same kind of thing happen to Palestinians and their kids. But it gets me when Israel responds to a rocket attack from Hamas and then the press acts as if the rocket went off by mistake…even if there were 30 rockets fired at Israel that day. If Hamas is as innocent as it pretends to be, and really wants peace, why fire any at all? I am not talking about ones fired in self-defence; I am talking about ones just…fired. The rockets are especially active whenever there is any attempt to get the two parties talking again…or at least it used to be that way, there haven’t been many peace talks lately. It is, or has been, a pattern of Hamas to try and poison any peace negotiations of any kind, a pattern that is well-established, i.e. it goes back years and years. But then Hamas is not the Palestinian people, is it? It is far removed, ideologically, from them. It pretends to care about them, even as it, allegedly mind you, installs rocket-launchers in the homes of some of them, which it knows will draw fire from Israel and end up killing innocents. Is it untrue that it does this? Is it untrue that it smuggles arms in from Egypt and elsewhere? Where does it get the money? And who’s feeding the Palestinians? I ask these questions in a straightforward way, it may be that these things are untrue. Israel makes mistakes, the settlements are one of the terrible ones it makes. I am disappointed that Obama has not said and done more to get them to stop that. I would have thought that if anything could jump-start peace talks again, and they do need that kind of start, it would have been getting Israel to get off Palestinian land. That said, I don’t believe that even if they did stop it and removed all Israelis from Palestinian land, Hamas would be satisfied. I believe, and believe I have reason to believe, that no matter what changes Israel might make, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, and Hezbollah too, would still want Israel driven into the sea and promptly drowned. Chernynkaya writes: “When I was growing up, Israel was a source of pride and an example of a new kind of nation. A small country with great heart. What has happened to that vision? How did we get here? How did Israel become the bully, the corporate state, the military state? This is what perpetual war does to people.” Perhaps it is also what perpetual hate does to people, what being surrounded, for decades, by a wall of pure, active hatred on the part of such countries as Iran and Syria, does to them. And even more, perhaps it is what comes of merely trying to survive. abby » Posted By abby4ever On January 7, 2010 @ 12:03 am Chernyn: I am not surprised you got a headache after the effort you must have put into that article. I’d give a lot to be able to put something like that together, but that kind of thing isn’t my forte. I am going to read it again. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 1:29 pm I am speechless. Virtually…all I can say to you about this article of yours, for now, anyway, is that it’s lovely. Which underdescribes it, but I just can’t find any words good enough… » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 10:42 am ‘Calypso’ as read by the author… What’s: I had to start a new thread, the reply boxes are blanked out. I figured you meant it lightly but I just wanted to make the point, it’s that important to me. Maybe I could do an article on scones or something. LOL !!! :] » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 2:52 am Oh! That’s exactly what I DON’T want to be known as. That would kill me, to be thought of in that way. And that’s exactly why I am hesitating about the nuke article. Some might say it is just to provoke. (It isn’t, though.) No one should ever EVER write anything for the sole purpose of stirring or provoking. To me that is the cardinal sin of authorship. I feel very strongly about that. And if people think you are doing that, then even if you aren’t, you will lose all credibility. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 2:35 am I may not publish it. You know how controversial these things are. No one here will like the conclusion, not even I like it, but you can’t just cook arguments to get a conclusion you do like, you’ve got to let the logic take its own course. There are lots of topics I’d like to write on, not just big ones but little ones too…little but still important. Things peripheral to the main big issues. I am looking forward to your article too, I fancy your writing. » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 2:26 am I admit it. What’s, will you be doing any articles today? » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 2:14 am Keira Knightley, eh? » Posted By abby4ever On January 6, 2010 @ 2:00 am I will tell you something: that art of yours, is breathtaking, and so is your courage. » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 9:41 pm Hopeington! Where have you been? » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 9:38 pm ‘Evening, Emerald (but it’s morning here, just dawn). Yes, the President is fuming all right. And I think it’s a good measure of the kind of man he is, that he can remain so physically in control of his emotions and yet, at the same time, convey to those he is unhappy with, indeed, convey to the whole wide world, his indignation. We do not know what his private thoughts are on this matter, how he would answer the questions that you pose in your post. But we do know that ‘failure’ only just barely describes what the intelligence community can be charged with. Even if it was not deliberate, the failure is colossal: 300 people could so easily have been blown out of the sky. It is true that the incident is yet another ‘might have been’ catastrophe. “It didn’t happen,” some will say, “so stop behaving as if it did.” But it is equally true that the attempt suggests that more and other terrorists will be planning the same, that they have not been cowed, and, on the law of averages, that one of them will eventually get ‘lucky’ unless the President can put the fear of God into those in charge of preventing this kind of thing. » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 10:58 pm boomer: they broke this news over here early this evening, making much of it, and played part of the video. He is one unhappy President about this matter and you did well to put this video up and the news commentary too. Because it’s that important. I can’t imagine what the end of this will be. My husband says there should be sackings all ’round. » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 9:36 pm I thought I had seen a couple of other video posts at the top of the home page. Guess I didn’t. » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 7:35 pm boomer: don’t you want this on the Home Page? It’s at Speaker’s Corner…or did you want it there? » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 7:21 pm “Populist Republican” is an Oxymoron Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! wait, wrong Shelley… » Posted By abby4ever On January 5, 2010 @ 4:03 pmComments Posted By abby4ever
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Bird thou never wert,
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