Subtle differences are not important. Not important enough to spread hatred because of them. You can either support institutions that seek to make light of differences or to support those that exaggerate differences. You do the latter. And as GJ pointed out in one of his lucid moments, that makes you everything that you despise in others.
Well… there seems to be a slight element of misreporting here. To say that the pPalestinian areas were to be surrounded by Israeli land is slightly inaccurate. They would be surrounded by land that would be transferred from Israeli to Palestinian control in a phsed way.
Now, that is a real distinction.
How possible would it be to achieve the transfer of land without phasing control in this way?
Yes, it does make the Palestinian state vulnerable to all sorts of security issues - the same kind of issues that face the Israelis now. And it is incumbent on the US and Israelis to recognise that and to try and provide some kind of guarantee.
One cannot help but feel, though, that an outright rejection of the plan and a return to conflict was perhaps too big a price to pay for its many imperfections.
Littleiron: i am with you all the way. Ignore that troll. He will go away once he figures out we’re not paying attention to him.
IYBF, I’m glad you pointed this out. I suppose some will be shocked at the slight inaccuracies :shock: in reports regarding Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Does anyone even remember the stink the British press made regarding “atrocities” and the “massacre” committed by the IDF in Jenin last year? 
[quote=“imyourbiggestfan”][quote=“Gavin Januarus”]
Tigerman,
I’ve got plenty of evidence that you’re harboring anti-Arab prejudices.
It’s a well-known fact by everyone here at Segue.
It’s not up to me to provide any “smoking gun” evidence though.
It’s up to you to prove that you’re not anti-Arab.
Your pattern of denial is really proof enough though that you’re trying to hide your prejudices.[/quote]
Very smart. Very witty. But the comparison is fatally flawed.
The UN knows Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction in the past. The UN has the first proof of the existence of such weapons and of the willingness to use them. If you want to make an analogy to legal process and the burden of proof, I suggest the following is imperfect but more accurate:
“We know Saddam is dangerous. He has done this before. We have convicted him and locked him up (sanctions). Now, the onus is on him to show that he is no longer a danger to the community, otherwise we will make sure he is not let out. EVER.”[/quote]
'fan and Tigerman,
Who said anything about Saddam Hussein? I was just talking about Tigerman and his anti-Arab prejudices. Now that you mention it though I see the connection.
BTW, I’m getting sick and tired of all the lies and deception. If Tigerman doesn’t start cooperating soon about coming clean about his prejudices and the way they’re polluting the Segue community I’m going to be forced to take action.
I’ll have to go to the moderators and have him banned. If the moderators prove too impotent to do the right thing, I’ll have to take unilateral action in conjunction with my allies Vincent, Sandman and Paogao.
Vincent, of course, will do the right think purely out of conviction. Sandman will cooperate because I’ll have bribed him with a good bottle of homeboy Scotch. Paogao, who knows where all the wires are plugged in, will cooperate because I’ll make sure he gets his US passport back.
Time is running out, Tigerman. It’s up to you.
(BTW, Tigerman, I agree whole-heartedly with every point you made in rebuttal to the rules of evidence/due process accusation I made against you.}
Oh no… not… “action” :shock:
Yawn…
YAAAAWN…
Our current aid distribution is, ridiculous. we give how much to the israelis then another big chunk to the arabs to pay them off for it. i say we should cut out aid to isreal and egypt by an equivalent and maximum amount, phased over years. redistribute the rest to more deserving donors. let nations in the middle east develop true self-reliance and stop being their never-ending patsy. anyone advocating such a plan, or anything similar, will immediately get my vote, assuming he is sound on china-taiwan.
I’m not sure we should be giving aid to donor nations. 
But, not to be pedantic for a nanosecond, the problem is that quite often “more deserving” nations are the least efficient users of aid. Lacking the proper investment environment in their native countries, the capital too often gets wasted or spirited off to Switzerland.
Your post does raise another interesting point, though. Is the provision of US aid a disincentive for countries in the Middle East to change their ways? There could be several arguments for this, i.e., if countries believe aid will be turned off if the region ceases to be a “hot spot” there is an incentive to keep things bubbling over.
But, nah, surely the gains from stability and increased trade far outweigh the amount of US aid and doesn’t the US have an interest to support democratic Israel and moderate Egypt as examples for the region to follow? It also gives the US a bit more leverage, too.
Juba, Mr. T.
There was an exchange of a couple of posts between you in the Flame Forum under “garbage” I think they would be a valuable contribution to this thread. Any chance of re-posting them here?
Tigerman,
I don’t mean to bore you. I’m just trying to make the simple but important point:
What goes around comes around.
So beware. If you encourage your government to use a one-sided, dishonest, absolutely hypocritical set of standards for settling its external disputes, one day, when those external disputes are all settled and it turns its attention back to its many internal disputes, it’s inevitable it will want to use those same standards on its own citizens.
It will think, ‘well, why not? they’re fair – and it certainly will save us a lot of time and trouble compared to the way we used to have to do things.’
(On a side note, I see that you haven’t gone back and changed your posting of 7:35 yesterday now that its true intentions are clear. I respect that. Many men of lesser character would have been tempted to go back and change the facts to suit the moment. You may be wrong, but you’re a man of character. There’s hope for you yet.)
GJ. You persist with this even though it has been shown that your analogy is false. With Iraq, it is not a case of “innocent until proven guilty.” It is a case of ALREADY HAVING BEEN PROVEN GUILTY. You can consider the inspections as a PAROLE HEARING. In that sense it is exactly the same process as is used with the US’s own citizens. And the burden of proof has shifted - it now lies with IRAQ, to show it is no longer a menace.
That is quite clear. Why do you ignore this point?
That of course assumes (and we ought not to assume anything) that my government uses a “one-sided, dishonest, absolutely hypocritical set of standards for settling its external disputes”. I do not think that my government does that. So there.
Again, I dispute your notion that my government uses such standards as you describe. But then again, I’m not very cynical. Perhaps Cynicism comes with higher intelligence that I simply lack. Then again, maybe not. I have faith that my government, as it is set up, would not do as you suggest, even if it were using unsavory methods abroad.
Not likely.
Whatever. I don’t know what post you’re talking about. Anyway, I don’t think I am wrong. BTW, how does one go about “changing facts”?
[quote=“imyourbiggestfan”]Juba, Mr. T.
There was an exchange of a couple of posts between you in the Flame Forum under “garbage” I think they would be a valuable contribution to this thread. Any chance of re-posting them here?[/quote]
It is unfortunate that that debate is sitting in the garbage can due to Vincent’s racism. I am afraid that if it were moved back here, then this thread would become yet another Middle East debate, instead of a discussion about U.S. foreign aid. Maybe Vincent’s racist shit could be stripped out to make another thread worthy of some place other than the flame forum. Meanwhile, it remains in the “garbage” thread. To read that, click here.
To be brutally honest Juba, the thread got sidetracked by you, when you said:
So, its already become an Israel-Palestine issue. How about just cutting and pasting the last three or four posts between you and Mr T. Vincent’s stuff is not relevant to them, really.
People forget what the USA did for the world. Remember Hitler? Well, which country turned the tide of war? If it wasn’t for the US, most likely Europe would have been pulled back into the dark ages.
Also in the 1950s, when China was shelling Taiwan’s outlaying islands in preparation for a full scale invasion of Taiwan, who can to Taiwan’s rescue? Eisenhower sent in the Pacific 7th Fleet. The shelling stopped. China abandoned its plans to invade Taiwan. Now which other countries in the world even cared about Taiwan? England? Germany? France? Italy? They didn’t send a tugboat much less an entire fleet to Taiwan’s rescue, but sat cooly by.
According to the Economist magazine, the USA is the world’s larget market, supporting many businesses around the globe.
Yes, the USA now has its problems, just like any country has problems and had its period of shame, like its treatment of minorities in the 50’s, but it did contribute alot of its resources and manpower and the lives of many young servicemen for the world. Always remember WWII. Any country that led the struggle against an evil like Hitler is great in my book.
I’m not sure we should be giving aid to donor nations. [/quote]
whoops, meant donees. thip of the slung.
don’t buy this argument for, a nanosecond. if we want to help, find ways to donate that help. if we can’t, and i find that quite hard to believe, then retain the money at home. how are egypt and isreal using the money efficiently? i guess a bottomless pit is very efficient in it’s own way.
[quote]Your post does raise another interesting point, though. Is the provision of US aid a disincentive for countries in the Middle East to change their ways? There could be several arguments for this, i.e., if countries believe aid will be turned off if the region ceases to be a “hot spot” there is an incentive to keep things bubbling over.
[/quote]
I don’t see that dynamic operating, but I do see nations unconstrained in their actions due to our largess.
stability? deng yi xia. trade? I highly doubt it. What do you base this on?
[quote]
and doesn’t the US have an interest to support democratic Israel and moderate Egypt as examples for the region to follow? It also gives the US a bit more leverage, too.[/quote]
Isreal is plainly not going to be an example for the region. Egypt is run by a thug, not my idea of a worthy example. We do gain leverage, but do we want it? These nations should start taking more responsibility for themselves.
[quote=“ar-grp”]People forget what the USA did for the world. Remember Hitler? Well, which country turned the tide of war? If it wasn’t for the US, most likely Europe would have been pulled back into the dark ages.
Always remember WWII. Any country that led the struggle against an evil like Hitler is great in my book.[/quote]
USA far from led the war. Your comments make little sense. If England/UK had not been involved in the war Europe + Russia would have fallen and a united Europe/Russia would have kicked the begeebers out of USA if a conflict had arisen years later.
Likewise if Germany had never attacked Russia the war would also have turned out very differently. We have the USA to thank for turning the tide of the war but the USA has many countries to thank for letting it sit back for years of the war doing nothing. It may have contiued to do so for longer had there been no pearl harbour so perhaps we should be thanking the Japanese.
It ain’t for sale - but it is a theme of a lot of recent research in development economics.
Agree - my comments were too shorthand. What I meant to say was its not just a case of transferring the aid elsewhere. You need more qualitative help. My point is: $3 bn of aid to an economy with developed market institutions will be more efficiently used than $3 bn to an economy without. Look at Russia. And, yes, Virginia, all the money did end up in Switzerland.
[quote=“daltongang”]I don’t see that dynamic operating, but I do see nations unconstrained in their actions due to our largess.[/quote] I don’t think I see that dynamic either - its a possibility but I tend to agree that its not happening. But, I think your second point is wrong, I think Egypt’s foreign policy is constrained by its desire not to forfeit US aid.
[quote]
stability? deng yi xia. trade? I highly doubt it. What do you base this on?[/quote]
My fault. I didn’t explain fully. I meant to say that I don’t think countries are trying to keep trouble boiling over in the Middle East just in order to attract lumps of US aid, because the gains they make if the countries are relatively stable and trade is relatively abundant outweigh the current value of US aid. Thus their incentive is still for peace and stability. (That is not to say that they have achieved it, yet, but that is where the incentives lie and I believe they are not skewed by US aid. I was in effect, rejecting my own musings… hence the “nah” in my earlier post.)
Largely agree. But, as imperfect as they are, they are surrounded by EVEN WORSE. That’s one reason why the Middle East is such an unstable place.
Hitler was always going to attack Russia, just read Mein Kumf(sp?)
Guderian was always going to use blitzkrieg, just read “Achtung Panzer”
These things happen, because the men who thought them up had the opportunity to do them. What won the war was US aid and manufacturing. Their stuff was better, but we had more of it and could replace it quicker. Russia would not of fallen to the Germans. Stalin was willing to fight to the last man in the worst conditions in the most inhumane ways to stop the Germans. For the record, it worked. Molotov cocktails, snipers, constant guerilla harassment of supply lines, Russian tanks literally charging and ramming German tanks, fighting in sub-zero temperatures, human waves of cheap conscript soldiers, female pilots flying slow biplanes dropping bomb on German camps at night, you name it; the Russians did it to win.
The US supported Germany after WW1. We gave them aid and helped them pay back the horrendous reparations inflicted on them by their fellow Europeans, notibly the French. The US almost came in on the side of the Germans. There were large scale German organizations in the US that firmly believed that Germany should stand up for itself and throw off that hated document, The Treaty of Versailles. Which the US did not sign, but sign another seperate peace treaty with Germany.
The US believe it or not rejects the Clausiwitz theory that war is just another instrument for the state/nation. This explains why the US saw no reason to jump into a war that it had no part in starting, despite what you hear from Japanese propaganda. To the US, war is the last resort, when all other options have been expired. Thanking the Japanese is pathetic. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. Have you even fucking read what those fuckers did in WW2!!! Have you seen the documentaries, the picture, or read the eyewitness accts.??? MY GOD, if there wasn’t such a thick mind splitting propaganda shoved down the brains of people in Korea and China. They would be thanking us for saving their sorry asses from the Japanese. Most people don’t even know that the US bombed Taiwan during WW2(Kaoshiung to shutdown the oil refinery, oil was the major achilles tendon of the Japanese military).
Alleycat once remarked to me in “which country was the only one to use nuclear weapons on another?” I said that American lives were on the line and we did not want to have to expend 1 million American lives in order to defeat Japan. He asked me, “Why do they have to be American lives?” I tried to explain that if 1 million US GI’s died the Japanese casualties, civilian and military, would of approached 20 million. This does not take into account the 1 million man strong Japanese army in China, which was self-sufficient.
Rainman listen up, read your history and then get back to us on WW2, till then shut up and stop talking about things you don’t know about.
Over 20 million people were killed by the Japanese over the course of WWII (and leading up to it… their occupations, invasions, etc), a very large part of which were civilians. This seems to oftentimes be forgotten in arguments for or against whatever.
Did the US act in its own best interest in the 30’s and 40’s? Yes, just like every other nation. I find it amusing when people blame wars on the people who don’t start the huge manslaughters (well, you goaded them into it! They had no choice… 
)