Congressman Ike Skelton is one of the many Democrats who voted in favor of allowing the war in Afghanistan to continue on into its 10th year. Explaining why he supports continuing the war, Skelton asked some rhetorical questions:
“Have we forgotten what happened to America on 9/11? Have we forgotten who did it? Have we forgotten those who protected and gave them a safe haven?”
In response, we could easily ask our own rhetorical questions:
Have we forgotten that the attacks of September 11, 2001 took place almost a decade ago? Have we forgotten that the people responsible for organizing those attacks, and the people who gave them a safe haven, have not yet been captured, after all these long years of war in Afghanistan? Have we forgotten that they’re now in Pakistan, not Afghanistan? Have we forgotten that the precursors of the Taliban were supported by the United States, as part of an anti-Communist Cold War campaign?
The decision about whether we continue a war today is best made according to current realities, rather than the enshrinement of the reality of one day years ago as the only thing that matters. A 2001 mentality cannot prevail in 2010.
We create the problems of tomorrow by chasing after the problems of yesterday.
Great point Peregrin!
Have we forgotten that some people have been calling for peace for centuries? Have we forgotten that injustice has not been eradicated? Have we forgotten that poverty still exists in the United States decades after the “war on poverty”? Have we forgotten that women still make on average less money than men? I certainly agree with Woody that it’s time to give up all things that seem hard to do.
I’ll paraphrase Woody a little: The decision to try to give all people health care today is best made according to current realities, rather than the enshrinement of the reality of one day years ago as the only thing that matters. Current reality states that: 1.) the government is already in debt way over its head. 2.) People actually live way longer today than they did a century ago, so why still worry about it? 3.) Anyone is legally allowed to get free health care anyway at a hospital if they just walk in. That law has already been around for years. 4.) The government stated several deadlines to get it done already, each of which already passed into history.
We create the problems of tomorrow by chasing after the problems of yesterday.
What stupidity!
I agree with Woody completely. Let’s stop chasing after social justice, equality, freedom, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc. etc. Those things are all old and passe.
You’re not actually factually correct regarding walking into a hospital and getting health care, ChuckleNuts. You can walk into an emergency room and have a doctor assess whether you are in a medical emergency through a screening exam. If you are in a medical emergency, that doctor is legally obligated to stabilize your condition. Otherwise, the doctor and the hospital aren’t obligated to do anything. There’s no other legal obligation for the provision of health care. That’s it.
sounds like chucklenuts subscribes to the “more curb space” theory for dealing with health care. stack up the sick and dying outside every emergency room along the curbside like cord wood and we will no longer have a health care problem. yes, and that’s the answer to all our other pesky problems like social justice, equality, freedom, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. stack the victims up like cord wood alongside the curb. use front end loaders to haul the dead bodies to the furnace and we can lower our energy costs. how’s that for a two-fer, chucklenuts?
Well ramo, in all honesty, you seem to be a little slow on the understanding part, so I’ll try to slow it down for you.
Maybe you were asleep the day they talked about sarcasm in school, or maybe school just wasn’t your thing.
The original author, Woodeee, makes a claim that “…We create the problems of tomorrow by chasing after the problems of yesterday…”
So saracastically, I apply this same “logic” and ask why should we discuss poverty, social injustice, etc. These are all problems which existed for many, many years, just like the “…that the people responsible for organizing those attacks, and the people who gave them a safe haven, have not yet been captured…” Those are Woodie’s words. So it just seems like his logic is faulty, or maybe he just likes to pick and choose when and where he gets to apply that concept.
If a person is going to make really stupid statements, they have to live with the consequences of what they have claimed. So if one thinks because something like the war against terrorism should not be continued as it stands today, merely because the genesis of it occurred some time ago in the past, then be ready to have others poke holes in that concept.
You, ramo, also stupidly and inadvertently make the same argument by your gibberish “…and that’s the answer to all our other pesky problems like social justice, equality, freedom, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. stack the victims up like cord wood ..”
Sure, I understand that you’re trying in some weak way to make an outrageous point. Two things should be noted: First, you draw completely incorrect conclusions about how I would advocate “health care”. Health care is just a discussion vehicle to show where Woodsie’s original premise (of the past not being important) falls completely apart.
So what you really mean is that you think social justice, equality, freedom, etc. should not be ignored. Yet, if we examine the situation today, instead of the past, many of those conditions that started these efforts no longer exist. Black people in the U.S.A are now free people, women can now vote, housing discrimination is prohibited everywhere in the country by law.
But, you may argue, injustice still exists in the world in places; indeed in many places here right now life does not treat everyone equally. And to that I say the obvious: of course. This is an imperfect world, and human beings can still break the law if they choose. No system is perfect. I believe in striving for as much perfection is possible, but with reality, nothing will ever be 100% perfect. In statistical analysis, it is often stated, “perfection is the enemy of good”, meaning too much planning and not enough implementation and attention to action can cause more B.S. than improvement. A good example of that is our national government today.
Specifically on health care, since it was apparently your hot button, people bug me by talking about “health insurance” and “health care” interchangeably. You can’t really insure health; if a person is going to get cancer, they will get it. Maybe if you have a colonoscopy every other week, you would find it pretty quickly, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get it, or you won’t die from it anyway.
What we really have is coverage for expenses. As far as access to health care, anyone can get access to it. I had made another post, but it looks like it somewhow got “cut”. I want to know where is my access to free food, free housing, free electricity, free cable (with HD of course) and free blah blah blah,etc. The basic need of food seems a lot more valuable to me than health care, but I “don’t have access” to it unless I pay someone for my food. That just does not seem very fair now, does it?
I should be able to state I easily have more of a “human right” to food and shelter before I even start talking about getting a free physical or free prescription from the doctors.
Are you advocating for free food for everyone, ramo, or should we just stack up all the starving people like “cord wood”?
The last other thing that bugs me is that there still needs to be some level of personal responsibility encouraged. Let’s follow a trail: A lot of black people (just one group for example) (I also have to give you a chance to call me racist as well, or it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?) “lack” easy [read free or low cost] access to “health care”. They also seem to have a higher than normal incidence per captia of coronary/pulmonary disorders due to overweight status. Supposedly, they also don’t somehow get enough to eat right. So how do they get overweight and then have high incidences of childhood diabetes, artery blockage, etc?
The answer is generally that they don’t eat the right kinds of foods. So do schools not teach children what is good for them to eat?
Hardly, there is a lot of information thrown at them every day about proper nutritional habits in school. They have been educated, or at least been shown. I’ve seen a high school snack machine where the snacks are actually labeled with stuff like “better to eat every day”, “better to eat once in a while”, “best to eat rarely” etc. But kids still choose the nastiest potato chips loaded with sodium more than they should. So now we take the fat kids to the doctor because they are short of breath and have the onset of childhood diabetes. The “free” doctor tells them to cut out the snacks. And they ignore him, and the cycle continues. They already have the information in front of them. You expect me to really believe if they saw a doctor more often because it was free it would really help that situation? get real. So right now we take a lot of pains to educate people from an early age about what is good for them, and they often ignore the advice. And according to Jimbo, if you have an urgent or extremely serious need, the ER will agree to treat you. So how many people really are pooping out because they waited until they were near enough to death to be let into an ER? Can you give evidence of that?
CN, the struggle against social injustice and the pursuit of liberty don’t require trillions of dollars and thousands of civilian deaths. The war in Afghanistan does.
That depends on how you define the “struggle against social justice”. We have spent many billions and constantly are proposing spending more. The war in Afghanistan does not “require” thousands of civilians deaths. As your boy Jimmy sez, you’re not “factually correct”.
Okay, it might theoretically have been possible to launch a military invasion and occupation with soldiers carrying pillows and water balloons, but the reality of this war is that thousands of civilians have killed.
Stick to the point. A soldier doesn’t have to have a pillow. Their goal is to shoot at real targets that are threats, not randomly pop civilians like an arcade game to get high score. Of course innocent people get killed too, but that is not the goal, even if soldiers do fight with real guns. When a bad person is harbored in a house with innocent people and the house gets stormed, it doesn’t have anything to do with the bad guy?
Also, it is absolutely a fact that many billions have been spent on social programs, intended to help the needy or otherwise improve the human condition of certain classes of people. I don’t of course say that this is bad money spent. But it doesn’t come free, not in a society where giving people things still costs money and wealth is not a universal, but must be redistributed by the government in an attempt to promote “fairness”.
“…this war is that thousands of civilians have killed…” I know what you meant by this, so I’ll let this obvious one go.
CN, wedding parties have been bombed. Wedding parties where there was no “bad guy”.
Please stick to the point. This anecdotal story is not a proof that a war is fought by bombing wedding parties. Just because mistakes have been made does not imply that a particular war or defensive act needs to be stopped. If you want to start expecting perfection in human events, then you will always be disappointed, because human beings are not perfect.
There is a case where a marcher was trampled to death at a large peace rally. Does making that statement mean that a peace rally is bad?
Not for nuttin’ but I’ve also been to a lot of weddings where there were a lot of “bad guys”. You ever see the “Sopranos”?
CN, you don’t like the point, so you’d like me to stick to something else.
One incident is not the same as repeated incidents. Over and over and over, the American strategy of fighting the war through “air strikes” has resulted in high civilian casualties. Not once. Not now and then. Consistently.
I didn’t say I don’t like your point; you attempt to read way too much into things apparently. I just don’t care for hyperbole when people are attempting to make valid points to sway the minds of concerned people. Hyperbole makes the speaker’s motives suspect and causes people to turn away from nonsense.
“consistently” is a pretty hard term to define. I’ve heard various numbers attributing civilian death to NATO (not merely American, but British and others as well, including the actual Afghan forces) forces; perhaps you have valid figures. What I saw was (as I remember) about 2400-something civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2009, which was reported to have 25% of them caused by NATO forces.
So that means that 3 out of 4 times, the civilian death is caused by someone else, probably either a suicide bomber, or some other cra_p from a Taliban fighter. That 25% figure was supposedly down from 39% in previous years, no doubt a horrific number.
I saw the following quote from a story in the U.K. Guardian:
“..A report by the New York-based Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy, has identified 98 civilians who were killed during night raids in 2009. The report also flagged allegations of ill-treatment, aggressive behaviour and cultural insensitivity.
“Afghans gave accounts of international forces tearing or chopping the Qur’an with an axe, taking women away in helicopters and returning them dead, and shooting babies or children at point- blank range,” the report states….”
So if I compare 25$ of about 2400 in 2009 (600 with those numbers) the “OSI” puts it at 98, a big disparity on the surface. When I read the rest of what was reported by the “OSI” it includes the report of shooting babies at point-blank range, etc. You can believe what you want, but I’ll question whether NATO forces are shooting babies at “point-blank” range, apparently just for fun. That’s not an air-strike problem. So this leads me also to unfortunately brand them with a charge of hyperbole also. Why really, would they take a woman away in a helicopter, and “return her dead”? That seems like a waste of time and fuel. Just throw her out the hatch!
So if they seem (to me at least) prone to exaggeration, then their number of reported deaths (98 according to them) could be suspect as well.
I’m not saying that you do not correctly point out that too many (one is too many) deaths of civilians have occurred. However, the recent changes in policy by the NATO forces commander seem to be focusing on that as an important cause to regain popularity among the citizens there. Time will have to tell if they are really making serious changes in operational techniques, or if those changes will bear fruit. But they are claiming to be turning down a different road, much as you seem to be calling for, if that’s what you meant to say.
Of course, your original closing line “We create the problems of tomorrow by chasing after the problems of yesterday.” is also just as valid when applied to the current situation. If the number of civilian deaths was too high yesterday, and the day before and the year before, etc, then your dumb statement would be just as valid when saying we should do nothing different.
Apparently the NATO forces commander is looking at what happened yesterday, and is making promises of serious changes to reduce those figures in the future. Making a unilateral statement like “..We create the problems of tomorrow by chasing after the problems of yesterday…” just seems shortsighted and very dumb. We learn from history; we learn from mistakes (and we all make them). It’s really how we move ahead that shows what our intentions are. Planning is important, but it’s folly to ignore placing them out of context with the past.
in answer to all rhetorical questions above: NO
moving forward…..?