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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 12, 2011 10:41:38 GMT -5
There is a difference. Our hatred is generated by people's actions, reactive hatred would be generated by our opposition to those actions. It's easy to say that one form of hatred is silly, but the other reasonable, so long as the actions are wrong. Still does not change the fact that your not going to accomplish anything. Reagan was not a murderer, torturer or dictator. Perhaps a discriminator. I think you are discriminatory towards the US. It would be nice if reality worked that way. Your right. Although he did still hold a military post during that time. Even as PM he was doing the will of the Empire. No. That does not mean the man was evil. Fine we will make an exception for him.
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Post by Napoleon the Clown on Feb 12, 2011 18:33:09 GMT -5
Finding ways to reduce military expenses isn't exactly sending a shitload of very ill people to live on the streets. Last I checked, most of the people making money through the military (either as soldiers, contractors, or whatever) have the ability to find other means of employment. Most probably could find other employment. While unemployed they still may have tough times. Yes, but they have the ability to get and hold new jobs. The people that were kicked out onto the streets didn't have that option. Dude, this country's military is, and was during Reagan's time, so powerful that nobody posed a realistic threat. We have two friendly nations bordering us, all the other nations have either an entire ocean to cross or go through Mexico if they're in S. America. We really don't need the military might to take on multiple nations at once without having to call on our allies. Unless you think we need to spend about $692 billion a year to stay safe? "Private industry!!!" It would "work" for mental health care, according to your source. Oh, and mental facilities are part of that medical thing. Fun little fact there. Yeah, and that's something that needs more funding, too. "Freeze to death, starve to death, or kill yourself because your brain is fucking broken negative? Or "find a new job" negative? Because cutting funding for medical research, medical care, or infrastructure isn't gonna make me think highly of a politician. You don't wanna be using people without some amount of psychiatric training in a mental hospital. A lot of janitorial duties are handled by the patients as it is, so there's only so much to save there. You can't save a ton of money with volunteers when it's a fucking hospital. Oh, and a couple fun facts: The military currently uses a shitton of private contractors, and they cost more than if it were run through a government agency that keeps its head out of its ass. They're for-profit companies, so they want more money. As to "able-bodied welfare recipients" why not just admit that it's a government job? You're doing work for the government and you're getting money. Why not acknowledge that? Again, there's only so much to be saved using volunteers. There's still going to be the costs for the trained psychiatrists and psychologists who need to pay off their schooling, and volunteering doesn't exactly pay for the very expensive loans incurred by going to school for any medical degree. Doesn't fucking matter. He spent government money of the Star Wars project, didn't he? Blowing up Ruskies was more important than making sure the citizens of this country got what they needed? Private corporations aren't usually out to help you. They're out to get your money. Funny thing, the federal government has more money than any individual state. Look at the funding issues going on right now. Most states are struggling to maintain any sort of social services right now, much less ones that the average idiot thinks he shouldn't help fund. Part of the purpose of the federal government is to handle the expensive shit. Interstate highways, for example. Building and maintaining them is damn expensive. Fuck, if we're gonna go with the concept of state-level funding for shit, why not have individual states fund military operations? Utah is land-locked, with mountain ranges giving us a decent barrier on both sides, and lots and lots of land in all directions. California, of course, has more need of defense, so they should carry much more burden. We Utahns shouldn't have to pay for California's protection, right? I mean, they bring in about $40 billion a year in income taxes alone. Utah's residents combined income is just shy of thee and a half times that amount, and we've got a lower income tax. (and so on...) Individual states simply don't have the income to support all their social services. That's what the Federal income taxes are for. So the NATIONAL budget can take care of the expensive shit. Kin Jong Il is currently causing the citizens of N. Korea to starve because he's more interested in building up his country's military. He may not be forcing food supplies to be stopped, but his actions are achieving much the same thing. Your stubborn refusal to comprehend the difference between cutting funding for killing brown people/commies implies otherwise. If they thought it was "the best way" they were idiots. And did I ever say I agreed with the US funding Afghanistan to help fight back the USSR? (Which, by the way, was invading them.) Or giving weapons to Iraq when it was fighting Iran? That one was largely because of a grudge against Iran. When you divert money from caring for your people so that you can more effectively blow up the enemy de jour, you're not exactly good. 20% of the federal budget is way more than we need to keep ourselves safe. Non-interventionism is a bad idea, it dragged out shit in WW I and WW II. As it is, though, the US military is able to steam roll any of our enemies in a few weeks, if we go the total war route. Not even need to use nukes. Just go in, gain total air superiority, and have B-52s start leveling shit. Hell, we can send a missile to fuck shit up if we find a delicious target we don't want to risk missing out on. If you don't care that you're causing people to die because you are diverting money to an already very well-funded military, I consider you to be just shy of a stereotypical dictator. Basically the only thing missing is ordering chunks of your population killed because they hold the wrong opinions or ethnicity. Genocide is not a prerequisite to being evil.
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Post by ltfred on Feb 12, 2011 18:34:58 GMT -5
There is a difference. Our hatred is generated by people's actions, reactive hatred would be generated by our opposition to those actions. It's easy to say that one form of hatred is silly, but the other reasonable, so long as the actions are wrong. Still does not change the fact that your not going to accomplish anything. So we should all just stop speaking, because it never accomplishes anything, right? You first. He heavily funded drug-dealers and terrorists with the intention of killing civilians. The School of the Americas, under his watch, trained people to use terrorism to defeat leftist political parties. After the El Mozote massacre, twice the size of My Lai, Reagen continued to fund the terrorist group responsible. It was doing exactly what he wanted, and acting as he had ordered it trained. After various murderous incidents in Nicaragua, including mining their harbours, the US was actually convicted of interenational terrorism in the world court. He trained terrorist groups that he founded, including the Atlacatl Battalion mentioned above, to torture. When they did torture, he continued to fund them, without asking them to stop. He heavily back dictators. And, like Nixon, he came to power in what has been described as a 'coup'. But he was elected, that's true. If I ran a buisness, I'd allow Americans to shop there, or work there. Ronald Reagen did not allow gays, blacks or others their full rights. My point is, by your standard there is no evil. Everyone means and is doing good. There are no wrong acts.
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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 12, 2011 19:22:49 GMT -5
Yes, but they have the ability to get and hold new jobs. The people that were kicked out onto the streets didn't have that option. Yes Well except maybe the USSR. I don't. A lot of other people do. Yup. Yes. Yes, but are you going to think them evil? Your arguing with me as if I think what Reagan did was right. I don't. In all that you did not answer my question. DO you think everyone involved with the cuts to mental health care and the closings of mental hospitals evil, or just Reagan? ...and in the US people are starving because there is not enough funding for homeless shelters. Does that mean all the politicians not pushing for the funding, or voting against it are evil? I know the difference. I'm not arguing that Reagan was right, just that he was not evil. Most likely! No you did not, nor did I think you did. I was just pointing out that the strategy of funding groups fighting against communist forced was done in multiply places. I will agree with that, but unless you thing a person is good or evil with no in between I don't think it makes them evil. The US military was not that force when Reagan took office. It became that force after he spent trillions of dollars on the military. Your right, genocide is not. I think being evil does take more then not caring. What you don't get is that Reagan thought that the cuts to social programs would ultimately be good for the country. He was wrong, and his whole way of thinking was flawed. That does not make him evil. It makes him an uncompassionate moron.
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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 12, 2011 19:35:56 GMT -5
So we should all just stop speaking, because it never accomplishes anything, right? You first. No we should keep speaking. We should just be intelligent enough not to have to use hate filled language. Wrong, the US was convicted of encouraging human rights violation. It was not convicted of those acts. The US wrote them a manual regarding guerrilla warfare. That manual did not include torture. Strike two. Don't just throw conservative presidents under the bus. Funding of some groups started under Carter. Nor did the Presidents before him. Does that make them all evil? I just said he was evil, so there is evil by my standards. There are also wrong acts. It is just that not all wrong acts are evil. See unlike you I can see shades of gray. Not every thing is good or evil with no in between.
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Post by Napoleon the Clown on Feb 12, 2011 19:46:57 GMT -5
Rather than playing the quoting game, I'll just respond here:
The reason I place more blame on Reagan is because he had this thing called "veto" at his disposal. Each individual that voted for it was a complete cunt, yes. But I place more blame on the leader of the nation than on a cog in the machine.
And the USSR was in terrible shape. Their military was basically limited to nukes by that point. You don't see a true superpower collapse in just five years without something catastrophic happening, and there was nothing catastrophic to collapse the Soviet Union. Their military "might" was saber-rattling.
We'll use Kim Jong Il as an example of "evil person with 'good of the nation' intentions" again. He's letting his country starve to death instead of cutting funding for his military so he can feed his people. Yeah, he's ordered his army to do terrible things, but that's not the only factor in him being someone you can easily label as evil.
You may not consider allowing people to die needlessly evil, but I do. Subjective and shit.
And please, please, please get the your/you're thing right. Shitty grammar makes it hard to take a person seriously.
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Post by ltfred on Feb 12, 2011 20:30:10 GMT -5
So we should all just stop speaking, because it never accomplishes anything, right? You first. No we should keep speaking. We should just be intelligent enough not to have to use hate filled language. It's neither intelligent nor warranted to pretend not to hate people who do very bad things. As you yourself said, it's not unreasonable to hate people like that. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to say that you hate people like that. QED. False. The US was convicted of 'violating the sovereignty' of Nicaragua- ie invading that country, or launching a terrorist war from abroad. The US was "in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State". The manual did include torture. The "School of the Americas ... used improper instruction materials in training Latin American officers from 1982 to 1991. ... certain passages appeared to condone practices such as execution of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment..." according to the Intelligence Oversight Board. In any case "The record of the contras in the field, as opposed to their official professions of democratic faith, is one of consistent and bloody abuse of human rights, of murder, torture, mutilation, rape, arson, destruction and kidnapping." And the US never told them otherwise. As Human Rights Watch (which is the above quotation) later said "The Bush administration is responsible for these abuses, not only because the contras are, for all practical purposes, a U.S. force, but also because the Bush administration has continued to minimize and deny these violations, and has refused to investigate them seriously." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas#Human_rights_violationsen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras#Human_rights_controversiesI agree completely. Carter, Johnson, Kennedy and the rest also deserve their share of historical blame. But Reagen was unusually bad. Not only did Reagen deny those rights, he fought to keep them denied. That's different. Carter, Johnson and so on did not fight for discrimination. Except that your standard was a double-standard. You didn't prove that Torquemada meant evil by your standard, so he must not have been. Some things are black and some are white. Not all is gray. Not all is justifyable. Not all is 'error' or 'mistake'.
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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 12, 2011 21:30:18 GMT -5
Rather than playing the quoting game, I'll just respond here: The reason I place more blame on Reagan is because he had this thing called "veto" at his disposal. Each individual that voted for it was a complete cunt, yes. But I place more blame on the leader of the nation than on a cog in the machine. And the USSR was in terrible shape. Their military was basically limited to nukes by that point. You don't see a true superpower collapse in just five years without something catastrophic happening, and there was nothing catastrophic to collapse the Soviet Union. Their military "might" was saber-rattling. We'll use Kim Jong Il as an example of "evil person with 'good of the nation' intentions" again. He's letting his country starve to death instead of cutting funding for his military so he can feed his people. Yeah, he's ordered his army to do terrible things, but that's not the only factor in him being someone you can easily label as evil. You may not consider allowing people to die needlessly evil, but I do. Subjective and shit. And please, please, please get the your/you're thing right. Shitty grammar makes it hard to take a person seriously. The way I see it is that Reagan or any leader has a lot of things to take into account when making decisions. Sometimes groups of people are going to lose out. If government had unlimited resources no one would die needlessly, but they don't so people sometimes do. We might not agree with those decisions, thing they are bad, or evil, but I don't think they necessarily make the leader evil. ....oh and, fuck grammar! ;D
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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 12, 2011 21:45:55 GMT -5
It's neither intelligent nor warranted to pretend not to hate people who do very bad things. As you yourself said, it's not unreasonable to hate people like that. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to say that you hate people like that. QED. It is if you expect them to listen to you. Violating the sovereignty is not "ie invading that country". "appeared to condone", not did condone, or train. Try again. ...and as some saw it "Three weeks ago, Americas Watch issued a report on human rights abuses in Nicaragua. One member of the Permanent Commission for Human Rights commented on the Americas Watch report and its chief investigator Juan Mendez: "The Sandinistas are laying the groundwork for a totalitarian society here and yet all Mendez wanted to hear about were abuses by the contras. How can we get people in the U.S. to see what's happening here when so many of the groups who come down are pro-Sandinista?"" Really, what rights did Reagan fight to keep from black people? The difference between Reagan and Torquemada is Torquemada directly ordered that deaths of people all the people he killed. Very few thing are black or white.
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Post by Dragon Zachski on Feb 13, 2011 2:15:20 GMT -5
And this is one of those few things.
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Post by m52nickerson on Feb 13, 2011 7:23:46 GMT -5
Lets take a quick poll. Not to prove anyone right, but to see what people think.
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Post by nickiknack on Feb 13, 2011 13:42:05 GMT -5
On the poll question, I went with the evil monster choice, given the fact that I believe for the most part I think he knew what he was doing, and he got joy in making the lives of those who aren't well off miserable, like most conservatives do.
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Post by mechtaur on Feb 13, 2011 22:06:45 GMT -5
Considering how his administration treated the growing AIDs epidemic, I said evil monster. You cannot say he was a good person when he and everyone associated with him laughed at a direct statement about 1/3 of the people infected with it dying.
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Post by Oriet on Feb 13, 2011 22:31:24 GMT -5
I voted for evil monster. For example, his economic policies were very similar to those that lead to the Great Depression, and were opposite to what got us out of that and recovered the economy from Word War II. I find it unbelievable that neither he nor any of his advisers were oblivious to this, or that they thought it would do anything other than increase their wealth while making it harder for others to gain wealth (or get themselves out of poverty). And of course there's him closing down facilities which were the only things keeping a segment of the population fed and housed, which condemned many to certain death as surely as if they had bullets put in their brain-pans. Or his funding of terrorists, which means supporting the killing of civilians (even if it was the civilians of other countries), which is something I find reprehensible (as there are far better ways to overthrow oppressive governments, especially when one is leading the top superpower of the world).
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