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redtreviso said:Fox news.....................................
redtreviso said:Fox news.....................................
Scott SoCal said:So what, the DOW was down more that 37 pts?
Geography can be tough, cut 'em some slack...
redtreviso said:very tough....
sublimit said:You need to listen and show respect.
Just saying feller.
The Hitch said:Show respect?
You do realise that "redtrevisio" preffered choice of "debate" is to accuse someone of being a "teabagger" or telling them they watch fox news, and continue repeating the adhominem without answering any of their points.
So far he has called me a kkk sympathiser, a Lance fanboy (on multiple occasions) a Thatcher fanboy, a "right wing nutjob" a "teabagger" a "bff fanboy" whatever that is etc etc etc. Always without provocation, always with the sole purpose of trolling.
So its quite funny when you come in demanding i show respect.
Maybe now youll learn that when you enter into a dispute you know nothing about, your chances of ending up looking foolish, are quite high, and you have succesfully achieved that. Congratulations.
redtreviso said:
Cobblestones said:Crude breaks $100/barrel. The days of cheap oil are definitely over. This comes on the back of an only moderately recovered global economy. Granted, there's unrest in the Middle East as well as hedge fund speculators both of which drive the short term market. But oil is also simply getting harder to find and more costly to extract. We need to deal with that problem. The sooner the better.
Cobblestones said:Crude breaks $100/barrel. The days of cheap oil are definitely over. This comes on the back of an only moderately recovered global economy. Granted, there's unrest in the Middle East as well as hedge fund speculators both of which drive the short term market. But oil is also simply getting harder to find and more costly to extract. We need to deal with that problem. The sooner the better.
blutto said:....much more political factoid action...enjoy...
How uneven is the distribution of wealth in our two countries? Studies from several organizations, including the United Nations and the CIA, applied the widely-accepted "GINI Coefficient" to both countries and found that the US has greater inequality of income than Egypt.
Cheers
blutto
blutto said:....much more political factoid action...enjoy...
How uneven is the distribution of wealth in our two countries? Studies from several organizations, including the United Nations and the CIA, applied the widely-accepted "GINI Coefficient" to both countries and found that the US has greater inequality of income than Egypt.
Cheers
blutto
Cobblestones said:Yeah, there also was a bit of a surreal moment when I tuned in to CNN Saturday morning for a bit.
One of the anchors, or maybe a guest, I really don't remember, was lecturing on the underlying reasons for the unrest. He mentioned that (i) the middle class has gotten the shaft over the last 30 years, (ii) wealth distribution has become more and more unequal, (iii) working full time jobs doesn't pay the bills, (iv) there's very few jobs for the young and educated, they don't want to drive cabs for the rest of their lives, and (v) there's not enough democracy, with the office of the president going from father (Hussein) to son (Gamal).
I looked over to my wife at this point, and we had both a bit of a chuckle. The guy on TV managed to stay serious the whole time.
rhubroma said:I kinda argued this point before.
rhubroma said:snip
This article follows at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/01/201111413424337867.html#
Cobblestones said:I find many of Al Jazeera opinion pieces incredibly well written and thought provoking. This one is no exception.
On the other hand, seeing the same tired pundits and commentators in the US droning on from health care to economic politics to middle east foreign policy and so on, it is clear that they have a very limited to no understanding of any of the topics.
"It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be “difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power” and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended."
Judge Roger Vinson
"Under the Obama administration's logic, he wrote, "Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold buy a General Motors automobile—now partially government-owned—because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business."
rhubroma said:So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
—Edward Said, The Nation
Author of Orientalism (1978)
I don't doubt that this is the case, any more than I do that there are grave problems with religious obscurantism and fanaticism in the Muslim world today, though this is not unique to their world, but, unlike the US, their is no superpower's military force to do its fighting for it, thus their taking recourse to terrorism.
However, it seems to me, that the US approach along with its European partners in the Middle East has only enhanced the phenomenon of anti-American and anti-Western sentiments in the region.
Although, at the same time, I also realize that there are no easy solutions and that the internal issues of political despotism and religious fanaticism within the Arab world is an urgent problem for humanity.
That said, the injustices committed by many of those despots (one thinks of the same Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, once upon a time Saddam Husein, for example) have been done with full US support, but also Europe's, whenever it was strategically expedient to do so. The worst thing about it has been that leaders such as Mubarak, who has been responsible for 30 years of civil and economic backwardness in Egypt, were supported simply because they guaranteed "stability" in the interests of America and Israel. To the tune of 2 billion in US aid per year to fund Mubarak's army of civil obedience and repression when necessary (which accounts for the strong anti-Americanism among the educated protesters), and is why Bush Jr. also used Egypt as the state to entrust the interrogations of caught Islamic fundamentalists, because the Egyptian police could do what it was against the law for the American military to do to. Torture them.
Though all of this, of course, was after Sadat was punished by assassination for having signed a peace treaty with Menachem Begin. Yet this is a question of Israeli legitimacy, for which the Arab and Western worlds are diametrically opposed and will never, nor could they, see eye to eye. I have never made it a secret that I think, in light of history, the Arab case is stronger, that there would have been a much better resolution to the Jewish question after WWII than what the West came up with, especially in regards to the Palestinians, and this seems, most unfortunately, to be the real irresolvable rebus that haunts the region and indeed the entire world (which is another reason why religion poisons everything).
The interesting thing is that in the Maghreb their is a broad social class of educated and secular graduates, who would like nothing better than to live in a legitimate democracy, something that has not only be kept from them by their leaders, but who has internationally supported them over the decades.
I would hope that in Egypt, just as in Tunisia, these elements are given their time to realize such a project, but wonder, and fear, that we could wind up with yet another Mossadeq situation in which allowing the Arabs to live in a free and secular society goes against America's and the West's energy and profit making interests. Certainly Mohamed el-Baradei, the man who in 2003 exposed the lies and bellicose propaganda of the neocons in Washington regarding atomic weapons and Iraq before the UN, who is leading the Egyptian post Mubarak reformation, is hated for this reason by the conservative political class in the US and Israel.
This will prove to be, at any rate, for the Americans, as the promoters of "democracy in the Middle East" by force (especially having supported so many anti-democratic governments in the region for decades because it was in OPECS' and Israel's interests), a case of be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.