Can We Just Be Honest, For Once? BooMan, Booman Tribune, July 28, 2014
I love how this country devises new ways to always avoid taking responsibility for its past mistakes. Did we torture people to death for no good reason? Oh well, we can’t admit it or our soldiers deployed overseas will be put at risk. This is why we never saw many of the more appalling photos from Abu Ghraib. It would have inflamed international opinion and made people want to kill our troops.
***
[L]et’s stop being idiots and admit that people already are killing our people because of what we did and that the best way to assure that our people don’t do it again is to just be fucking honest, for once, about what was done in our name.
How Did the GOP Turn Into Such a Bunch of Clowns? Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, July 24, 2014
There seems to be little question that the alternative media universe they built, which was once a strength for the right, has become a liability. But their biggest problem now isn’t the things so many conservatives believe about the world that aren’t true, or what they think will happen that won’t. It’s about the strategic decisions they make, and where those decisions come from. Think about it this way: Has there been a single instance in the last few years when you said, “Wow, the Republicans really played that one brilliantly”?
Criticising an Atheist Horseman – Sam Harris is wrong about Israel and Palestine, Avicenna, A Million Gods, July 29, 2014
Sam Harris’s take on Israel and Palestine shows an incredible naivety about the situation and buys into the whole notion that the conflict is purely religious in nature.
***
What we think of the situation is two countries at war. We keep speaking of a Palestinian as if there is a Palestine.
There isn’t. There is Israel and a series of fragmented parts of the West Bank that are basically self contained zones run by the Palestinian Authority. It however is like being the head of a ghetto. You have power but should the greater society wish to do things to you, there is little you can do but make gold fish impressions for all that would do.
And I use the term ghetto. I dislike the usage of the word “Concentration Camp”. These areas have permanent housing, they aren’t concentration camps. But they are ghettos. They are areas where people of a specific ethnicity or religion live. The joke being Palestinians aren’t a minority group. They are much like the Black people of South Africa. More in number than the whites of the Apartheid but outgunned and out-equipped. Let’s keep this in mind.
