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Being I've been around for multiple sessions and versions of the "I hate America", "US is evil", and "Iraq War" threads, I'm more than aware of the forum rules. I'm also aware that others who thought it was an open bashing forum have been banned in the past for their mistaken views. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by agwiii
Gannex, I suggest you are doing a fantastic job in my absence. I am not posting as often because the real life is getting in the way!!! Ok, let me just say that this attitude that Iam too Pro American is a pile of crap. I am pro truth. I have been critical of America's role in trying to get post-war Iraq going. I have been critical of US foreign policy in backing people who should be flushed down the proverbial toilet of history. They have had a habit of playing real-politik with people who have bit them in the ass later.
But when I see one of you guys say BORAT tells us everything you need to know about Americans I laugh. You guys take movies as truth? Michael Moore's movies are the definative view of America? Borat? REALLY??
BORAT takes a few dumb back country people who are too embarrassed to know what to say to this whack job foreigner and either try to make him happy or they don't get what he is driving at. They are not America any more than all Englishmen are Mr. Bean. Watching Movies that guarntee your prejudices just makes you as racist as anyone.
Moore's movies are anti-Bush propaganda. His treatment of the shootings at Columbine was to compare the gun culture of the US vs the gun culture of Canada. He was off the mark by so much though when he said people in Toronto didn't lock their doors and there was no gun crime. Read a Toronto news paper for a week and tell me there is no gun crime and people leave the doors unlocked. He cant get details right because he chooses to gloss over what he doesn't want to see, which is why I am not surprised you guys love Moore. You gloss over what you do not want to see.
Gannex has explained, and I have explained in great details that your world of black and white is not, and it is a lot of shades of gray, but if you are confronted with BLACK, you better be prepared to fight for your WHITE. And if you are in a world where you would rather defend a dictator's right to brutalize his own nation, vs a free nation's leader's right to make mistakes, then you really are looking at all of this backwards.
Bush is not a great American president. Gannex and I stand by that one, but to suggest he is a greater threat to world peace than an unchecked Saddam Hussein would have been is a joke. IF you didn't put Saddam in a box, he would eventually be that threat that you guys deny he was, and if he is in the box, he will eventually try something to provoke the world to do something about him, and he DID. He flouted his authority in the face of the resolutions demanding UN inspectors free and unfettered access of his nation. At some point, you have to call his bluff. He was a weasel. He had no honour, used his own people as pawns, and played a silly cynical PR game that you guys obviously wanted to buy into. I have no sympathy for his fate, and while I have great empathy for the people of Iraq, I had empathy for the people there before he was removed from power, which is something I suspect most of you never put above your radar. You were too busy trying to think of ways to look at George Bush or some other American leader as a buffoon.
When you take movies as a serious way of educating yourself, you dismiss the value of going to a reputable university and sitting in a lecture hall learning from many professors, both of a right and left wing persusasion and realizing the world is MUCH MUCH more complicated than you want to paint it.
I realize now that Gannex and I can use facts, logic all we like, but when Tomi thinks Borat defines America, I realize we are fighting people who choose not to learn about anything but they choose to learn about.
AS for Stan, well he lives in the US, he has the right to criticize Bush, and the right to vote against him. That still doesn't change the fact he could be wrong about Bush, any more than Americans could be wrong about Clinton. The things is, in a world where dictatorial thugs called the shots, no one would have any rights, so for any one of you democratically charged oppoenents of mine, realize George Bush would have no problem you voicing your opinion, Saddam would. I think there is the lesson....
everyone in whos life the us politics effect, has the very same right to criticise them also.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
But the point is that Moore is not giving only his opinions about Bush. He's telling facts also. You cannot deny that, can you? And the facts that he tells are the ones that you don't like to see. So I'm not surprised that you don't like Moore.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
I cannot argue about the newspaper articles in Toronto, but I isn't it strange that there's just a border between Canada and US and on the other side of this border guncrimes happen many times more than on the other? This is of topic I know, but still had to brought this up.
You think Saddam was a threat to the WORLD? I think even Finland alone could have kicked his ass if necessary.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
I didn't see the Finns volunteering. Iraq had the 4th biggest army in the world in 1991, but Saddam invaded and took Kuwait. I didn't see the Finn's ready to just take him out of there and tell the US to stay home. I have no idea what the Finnish government's take was on it, but I suspect if the Americans didn't volunteer for the job, Kuwait would be a province of Iraq today.Quote:
Originally Posted by Eki
AS for your point Woodeye, you are right. Canada has a lot less gun crime. I didn't say that Moore was all wrong, but he often plays fast and loose with the facts. He made a big show of how safe Toronto is and how no one in Toronto or Canada locks their doors. The reality of it is Toronto is not that safe at all, and while people don't die in Canadian cities like American cities, that isn't because we are superior to the Americans or we are more intelligent, it is more part and parcel of we have a different cultural make up and a history that didn't depend on Guns. It is one major difference between the US and Canada. That said, Canada day after day is becoming a lot more like America, and it isn't America's fault. Gun crimes are up in this country in the last 20 years, while the government has been more anti-gun than ever.
Anyhow, I didn't come to this thread to argue about Canadian gun culture, but my point was in the case of Moore, he was all wrong about Toronto, but it didn't stop him from using that point of view to prove his "point". He is not accurate on that, so why would I trust his views that he is trying to portray on other subjects? He is a boor, and a bully who also grilled Charlton Heston and tried to portray him in a ridiculous light in that same movie for no other reason than to bring his view to the screen. The same Heston who invited him into the house for a chat about the subject and the same Heston who was suffering from the first stages of Alzheimers and it didn't stop Moore. Moore's pictures should be no more than entertainment. To use them as educational tools is crap. Before you attack me for my thoughts on this, understand I watched every one of his films and his TV shows right up to his Columbine picture. His Behaviour in that, and the way he acted at the Academy Awards shows the world what a jerk he really is.
No, If you want Hollywood to confirm your views of the world so be it, but Moore talks about he is the little guy from Michigan and he idenfies with the little guy, but he is a multi-millionaire who has money in stocks, bonds and the like, and that is fine, but don't feed me this little guy persona. He is also notoriously nasty and thin skinned when people disagree with him, and he isn't exactly a renowned phlantropist either. He is flawed, so spare me of how he understands what Bush is. He is another activist with an agenda.
You just happen to agree with him, i don't.
In Bush's America, he can say all those things and no secret police are busting down his door. He can say those things because that right to be a fool and an idiot is protected and enshrined by law and the willingness to enforce that law. That same willingness to enforce the law is what makes the civilized world work. That same willingness that drove the US to try to make Saddam stick to the terms of cease fire in the form of 14 resolutions in the UN. You know, the pretext for war. The war Saddam could have avoided. EASILY. No one here save Gannex and few others seems to want to believe this, they just want to Bash Bush. You guys with your Anti-American ramblings just have no idea what America is at all.
Tomi, I didn't say you couldn't criticize Bush. I didn't say Bush is a genius either, but Stan at least comes at it from a view that Bush is his President. I can accept Stan's view of what Bush is and what America is, even if I don't agree with him because he lives there. Your view of George Bush is he is a war criminal and BORAT defined what America is. You have no idea of what America is any more than I can define Finland from watching the Conan O'Brien show when he went there last winter. You fall for knee-jerk reactions and play this moral superiority game of how America is the greatest threat in the world. This in a world where the Chinese are backing Iran in their search for nuclear weapons. This in a world where Russia is also doing this, interferering in political procesesses in sovereign nations such as the Ukraine and Georgia. This in a world where terrorists use civilians deliberately as targets in countries that often have little to do with the war in the Middle East.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomi
George Bush is just a leader of one nation that tries on occasion, no matter how poorly you might think to try to effect a positive change. You want to hang him. If you said Americans shouldn't have elected him, I wouldn't waste the time arguing with you, as I don't with Stan. You and Eki though in particular have wanted to hang Bush, while all along saying Saddam shouldn't have been hung. You have said Bush is no different than Saddam. I pity your view of the world. You have no idea how wrong you are on so many levels because despite my effort and Gannex's, you don't want to hear that your view is too simple to even be considered. The world is complicated and that makes it very hard to criticize any leader who is in front of a free nation for trying to effect a change, when their motives are good. This War for Oil nonsense is just that, and I have proven that as has Gannex. The market for Oil runs the world economy, and if you think Bush is wrong, and that Saddam was a great fellow, you wouldn't want him controlling the oil in the middle east. Trust me, that is where Saddam was going in time if left unchecked. Power is a drug and Saddam was addicted. Bush on the other hand, well, he is gone in 2 years, and I look forward to seeing you whine and complain about the next American president. I think your rantings are based on some smug intellectually insular attitude that seems to pervade Europe about what America is. I may not be always right, but I constantly seek ways to understand the world, and I don't put any person or leader of a democratic nation in a box and state they are a buffoon for sport. You speak like you have all the answers, I know I need to know more answers.
We didn't think it was necessary. We could have provided at least half a million men (and some women) instead of the measly 200,000 or so that actually participated.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
Yes true I see Bush as an war criminal, more than 100000 has dead in Iraq after he went there, the real figure is propably many times bigger like usual i wars.
Offcourse Borat dont show what real usa is about, but what i think it shows is how it's possible that someone like bush can be voted president.
Also i dont think i have this critic on any other us president but bush, my opinion is that he makes the world more insecure and also has introduced a line of stupid laws that effct everyone in the world, for me it would be ok if they only effected us citizens, he is their president not mine, also the us monitoring of the SWIFT is 1 more thing, its against many countries constitution, this all has to do with redousing private persons freedom, and I dont like it at all, also the demand to build fenced security space around harbours that foreign ships are using, they still also are lobbing for armed guards in planes, all this and much else is just sick, and cost very much tax payers money.
I also dont see Hussein as a model leader or as a somekind of a hero either, but many in the arab countries sees him like that, and that is what counts i belive.
Eki, in addition to what Mark said, let me remind you that Saddam, immediately following the invasion of Kuwait, actually stated that Saudi Arabia was next. Do you think the Saudis, without American help, could have stopped Saddam's armies? Maybe, but it was far from certain, and the Saudis certainly took the threat extremely seriously. They begged Bush Sr. to intervene and protect them, but let's suppose for a moment that they had not, Bush Sr. had done nothing, and Saddam had secured control of both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now he controls the vast majority of the Middle Eastern oil supply, meaning he has access to unlimited funds. He is a mega-billionaire, with power second only to the Americans. How long would it have taken him, with that amount of money, and that strong a bargaining position, to acquire a sophisticated nuclear arsenal? Remember, the Pakistanis at the time were selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder. Would they have resisted Saddam, the monarch of the Middle East? If they had, it would have been a simple enough proposition for him to have invaded Pakistan, and they knew that too. So when you say, with incredulity, that surely Saddam would not have been a threat to the world had he been left alone, I say you are completely wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Eki