Politics As Usual

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
Moreover, based on the above page standard, I suggest the Right Side of this board SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT ISLAM. If I had known about the 1,000 page requirement sooner, I could have saved you a lot of time.

How? Through frustration? I've seen your "discussion" with someone near that ten thousand page point, and found it a bit wanting.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Taung Child called. He wants his ability to make gutteral sounds back.

Hank, I know you desperately crave fb acceptance, so I thought I'd let you know that paigow called. She said the called in bit is way past its retell by date and the use of it is likely to get one placed on the IL faster than a Rude Fat's nasal waste to the underside of his host's undercushion (I paraphrase). I explained to her that this was really just a supersecret inside joke between you and I about how schoolchildren in the red states soon won't believe in fairtales like million-year-old fossils. paigow said, "Namaste."

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
How? Through frustration? I've seen your "discussion" with someone near that ten thousand page point, and found it a bit wanting.

All this meta-discussion -- y'know, talking about talking -- beats the hell out of discussing anything IRL.

Club, since you've read so much about the fall of the USSR, tell me this: If you could recommend only one book about the subject, one that makes the case that Reagan made a big difference, which would it be?

Anyone else can answer that question, too.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by bilmore
How? Through frustration? I've seen your "discussion" with someone near that ten thousand page point, and found it a bit wanting.

I think I would have enjoyed discussing Islam with you before 9/11, as I can talk about it with near-infinite patience, and your analytic strengths would have been fun to see applied to its history when neither of us had an axe to grind. I imagine we could each have been pretty rational about it. But it is not my religion and it is not my duty to defend it or to preach it. I didn't study it to convert people. I also didn't study it to justify its radical movement, which is what my position will be seen as by sock onlookers and perhaps others.

I cannot discuss this with you or Slave (or Pony) because you continue to regard 20,000 young criminals as representative of the single core value of the faith of 1.2 billion who've never lifted a finger against an American.

Lastly, anyone who can read 10,000 pages of Hodgson and Huston Smith and come away with "They stole algebra from Vedic India" isn't sharing enough worldview to make discussion productive. There are formal rules of comparative religion that finally elevated that academic enterprise above "your sources suck"; if you don't want to play by those rules, there is no game to play, period. I don't know if it's your atheism or what (I doubt it, but admit its distant possibility for the sake of intellectual honesty), but there simply isn't enough common ground between us to even find a place for me to stand to discuss this. If we were forced to start with shared first principles, maybe. But I'm not really turned on by the prospect of a convo in which one of us shits on a religion that neither of us believes in. Feel free to dump on Christianity, though. I'm here for that.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
All this meta-discussion -- y'know, talking about talking -- beats the hell out of discussing anything IRL.

Club, since you've read so much about the fall of the USSR, tell me this: If you could recommend only one book about the subject, one that makes the case that Reagan made a big difference, which would it be?

Anyone else can answer that question, too.

That's a tough question, mainly because I haven't reread any of them in a while. Most of the ones I've read are written by former Reaganites, so they aren't appropriate for a guy like you. Morris' book is the most critical of Reagan that I've read, but if my memory serves me, he does give Reagan a fair amount of credit. And if you can get over the fictional style of the book (he writes it from the first person, lifelong aquaintence point of view, but he made up the fact that he was an aquaintance), it is not a bad read.

Dsouza's (sp?) book is more on the academic side and I don't believe he worked in the administration, so that's not a bad choice either, especially when read in conjunction with Reagan's own writings which have been published over the last few years, because these writings dispell the notion that Reagan's supporters are creating conveniently backfilling strategy for a political purposes.

Let me state for the record that I am not of the view that Reagan single handedly brought down the USSR. That's just not the case. It was a long, cold war, and many other presidents (and others) had a hand in it's ultimate demise (Truman, Ike, Kennedy, etc.). The more important question, on which I have not reached a definitive decision, is whether the fall of communism in the USSR was inevitable. Many, even many Reagan supporters, believe it was inevitable. That certainly wasn't the conventional wisdom in 1980, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that in many respects the USSR's economy was superior to ours because it had more natural resources and made better use of its manpower, but I can see the reasoning that goes into that view.

In evaluating that inevitability view, there are two questions that stick out in my mind: (1) why hasn't China fallen yet? Yes, they are SLOWLY "reforming," but the Communist still have a strong, and at times brutal hand, over the country; (2) saying it was inevitable is one thing, but how long would it have taken? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years? It seems that the longer it would have taken, the greater the risk would have been of an intervening act that could have set off WWIII.

So given all this, I think it can be said with a great deal of certainty that, at a minimum, Reagan greatly sped up the inevitable.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
All this meta-discussion -- y'know, talking about talking -- beats the hell out of discussing anything IRL.

Club, since you've read so much about the fall of the USSR, tell me this: If you could recommend only one book about the subject, one that makes the case that Reagan made a big difference, which would it be?

Anyone else can answer that question, too.

Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism
by Peter Schweizer.

But what does the fact that someone writes a book have to do with the price of fish sauce in Thailand?

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
one of us shits

There ya go again.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
That's a tough question, mainly because I haven't reread any of them in a while. Most of the ones I've read are written by former Reaganites, so they aren't appropriate for a guy like you. Morris' book is the most critical of Reagan that I've read, but if my memory serves me, he does give Reagan a fair amount of credit. And if you can get over the fictional style of the book (he writes it from the first person, lifelong aquaintence point of view, but he made up the fact that he was an aquaintance), it is not a bad read.

Dsouza's (sp?) book is more on the academic side and I don't believe he worked in the administration, so that's not a bad choice either, especially when read in conjunction with Reagan's own writings which have been published over the last few years, because these writings dispell the notion that Reagan's supporters are creating conveniently backfilling strategy for a political purposes.

I've heard that Morris' book is better than the critical reception he got for its form. I'm not interesting in reading something for the sake of it being critical, per se, but nor am I interested in reading anything by D'Souza, who is, IMHO, a partisan hack. He's the way you guys see Krugman, except that Krugman made a name for himself as an academic, while D'Souza is getting published by Regnery.

You were talking about revisionist history, but neither of these guys are really historians, in any academic sense. I guess I'd be interesting in something about the fall of the USSR from an academic perspective, but at a minimum I'd want to see something from an author who spoke Russian.

Let me state for the record that I am not of the view that Reagan single handedly brought down the USSR. That's just not the case. It was a long, cold war, and many other presidents (and others) had a hand in it's ultimate demise (Truman, Ike, Kennedy, etc.). The more important question, on which I have not reached a definitive decision, is whether the fall of communism in the USSR was inevitable. Many, even many Reagan supporters, believe it was inevitable. That certainly wasn't the conventional wisdom in 1980, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that in many respects the USSR's economy was superior to ours because it had more natural resources and made better use of its manpower, but I can see the reasoning that goes into that view.

No doubt it's a question of degrees. There are a lot of people who feared that they had a better economic model, not just on the left.

In evaluating that inevitability view, there are two questions that stick out in my mind: (1) why hasn't China fallen yet? Yes, they are SLOWLY "reforming," but the Communist still have a strong, and at times brutal hand, over the country; (2) saying it was inevitable is one thing, but how long would it have taken? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

There are other totalitarian regimes that have lasted a long time. The Chinese have done a better of job of trying to find economic -- but not political -- progress. Maybe they're trying to learn from the USSR's mistakes.

And I don't think inevitability is the right word. Nothing was inevitable. Another leader besides Gorbachev, different events, and something different might have happened.

So given all this, I think it can be said with a great deal of certainty that, at a minimum, Reagan greatly sped up the inevitable.

Why? Where does this come from?

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by Not Me
There ya go again.

You can pretty much count on whiffing when you respond to a scatalogical reference in my posts by pointing out the scatology therein. TIA.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
You can pretty much count on whiffing when you respond to a scatalogical reference in my posts by pointing out the scatology therein. TIA.

So we know for the future, is there some quantum of required reading before we can competantly comment on such posts?

[baltassoc]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Was the Reagan Center for International Trade, which I understand is the largest civilian federal building anywhere (or maybe built in the last 50 years or something), a suitable monument?

No. The problem is that the folks trying to honor him do it blindly and unthinkingly.

I'm a little slow to answer this, but what the hell.

I think the Ronal Reagan building is the perfect monument to the man. While it is huge in terms of square footage, most of that is taken up by display halls and wide, echoing corridors in the public portion of the building. There is a huge food court with dozens of food vendors. There are shops and a theater.

The actual offices that the government workers exist in are tiny, cramped and poorly lit. At least the couple of times I was there (a few years ago) none of the many white doors along the stunningly plain white meandering hallways had any sort of lable - either nameplates or even office numbers. A friend (who is even less of a fan of Reagan than I) described it as like walking around in Reagan's brain.

Add to that the Reagan building's reputation as the place where sub-agencies go to die (getting moved to the Reagan building was considered clear warning that your budget was about to be completely eliminated among the State Department folks I used to know working there), and it's a fitting tribute.

What always bugged me is naming not just an airport after him, but the most highly regulated airport in the country. And one that happened to already be named after a perfectly good president.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by baltassoc
What always bugged me is naming not just an airport after him, but the most highly regulated airport in the country. And one that happened to already be named after a perfectly good president.

President Joseph National?

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I think I would have enjoyed discussing Islam with you before 9/11, as I can talk about it with near-infinite patience, and your analytic strengths would have been fun to see applied to its history when neither of us had an axe to grind.

Well, FWIW, my thoughts and impressions far pre-date 9/11, coming from such sources as Hoodbhoy's early 1990's works (here's a small segment of a very good book, BTW, which I owned long before 9/11), and readings on the unfortunately short-lived history of the Mutazilites, who WERE the Golden Age, being willing as they were to push and ignore the allowable envelope until more traditional clerical thought reasserted itself - leading to my "in spite of" comment.)

Contrary to your apparent view, a discussion of how Islam might not foster intellectual investigation can consist of more than "the effin' savages are stoopid, kill 'em all", but it ain't gonna get past that. If nothing else, 9/11 introduced a whole new theme in the defense of Islam.

[Gin Rummy]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I cannot discuss this with you or Slave (or Pony) because you continue to regard 20,000 young criminals as representative of the single core value of the faith of 1.2 billion who've never lifted a finger against an American.

What sack of cowpoopie do you get those numbers from? The 911 Commission has taken evidence that Iman Hisrammi Kabbanni actually warned the CLINTON State Department in 1999 about the terror threat posed by Islam and especially the Saudi scum, as well as notifying Clinton et al that 75-80% of mosques in the US of A were conspiring to suborn terrorism and give aide and comfort to its proponents. I believe that Jamie Gorelick’s firewall destroyed this key intelligence that could have saved the lives of 3000 patriots on 911.

Bottom line whether its 20k out of 1.2B or more or less the non-combatants don’t lift a finger or a voice to put down, control, arrest or otherwise contain the criminal element of radical Islam. And that’s because the non-sanitized true face of Islam is one hell-bent on conquering the infidels. In the US this means that amongst other tools they will attempt to use our great and hallowed Constitution as a sword to decapitate us. Beware!

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
Feel free to dump on Christianity, though. I'm here for that.

A traitor, sympathizer, radical Islamic apologist and hater of God too! You'd do best to heed the good book where Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by me."(John 14:06).

[Gin Rummy]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Why? Where does this come from?

RES IPSA LOCQUITER. Look it up chump!