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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
 Posted - 10/22/2006 : 00:36:17 [Permalink]
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Comments continued from above post.
Mycroft wrote:
4) "Net neutrality? Not even. Don't get me wrong, I agree it's important, but important does not equal threat to democracy. Be real, democracy predates the internet by thousands of years."
You are confusing a threat to democracy with a current threat to democracy in our country right now. Youth in this country are children of the Internet. The Net came along just in time to counter the loss of investigative reporting in the mainstream media. If corporate monopolies manage to control the Internet the same way they control TV radio and Newsprint, we will lose the last important access to free speech remaining.
If the corporations don't succeed, the older generation that relies on the TV and evening paper for news will eventually be gone and the Internet flow of information will bring back the informed public that democracy relies on.
5) "Soldiers lives. Again, very important, but soldiers lives can be placed at risk under any kind of political system. Soldiers lives being placed at risk is not itself a threat to democracy."
Soldiers are at risk and dying because a small minority of people managed to control the information a large majority of people were exposed to. That does not fit the definition of democracy.
6) "Habeas corpus? Sanction of torture? Habeas corpus isn't being taken away from anyone who had it before, that issue has been way blown up. Sanction of torture? You can't even have a discussion over what torture really is."
Talking point #29... it's discomfort, it's a stress position, they only think they are drowning, Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident.....
You need to read the actual accounts, look at the rest of the Abu Ghraib pictures and read about how they came to be leaked. Again, I have a lot of sources if you decide to look past the white washed version Bush et al would have you believe. And the sources are credible. Retired generals (plural) who are speaking out, for example.
7) "In either case, these issues are not threats to democracy, they are issues to be decided by democracy. You think an enemy combatant captured in Afghanistan should have the right of habeas corpus? Okay, write to your congressman. You think waterbording during interrogations is beyond the pale? Then learn your facts and write a well thought out letter to the editor in your local paper."
And again we have the Bush version, a combatant captured in a war zone. No one is really arguing habeas corpus issues there. The abductions I am concerned about happened in Europe and at an airport in the USA where an innocent Canadian citizen was merely changing planes on his way home to Canada.
The Bush version of waterboarding is that it was effective and led to all sorts of useful information. The blogs were boisterous after O'Reilly interviewed Brian Ross over a piece from ABC which reported torture had been used on 14 Iraqi combatants and they all gave up information. But what O'Reilly glossed over was the fact the information from those 14 was often bogus and led to false arrests and wasted efforts in many cases. The written piece by Ross was completely different than O'Reilly's take.
The worst part was at least one of the prisoner's family was abducted and threatened in front of him to get him to talk.
According to Bush, we were torturing people to find out the next terrorist plot and where the nuclear bomb was (Bush's favorite example). But according to many experts in interrogation and in military strategy, torture is of questionable use, and using it puts our own soldiers at greater risk.
Then there was that last intelligent report which summarized multiple reports. It concluded we were creating many many more terrorists than we were stopping in Iraq. Gee, do you think the US openly sanctioning torture along with pictures from Abu Ghraib might be great recruitment material for the next suicide bomber?
The only people |
| Edited by - beskeptigal on 10/22/2006 00:39:27 |
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Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 10/22/2006 : 02:46:15 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
And again we have the Bush version, a combatant captured in a war zone. No one is really arguing habeas corpus issues there. The abductions I am concerned about happened in Europe and at an airport in the USA where an innocent Canadian citizen was merely changing planes on his way home to Canada.
The innocent Canadian (Maher Arar) was sent to Syria where he was tortured by the Syrians on behalf of the US government until he made a bogus confession - leading to Beskeptigal's next point.
quote:
The Bush version of waterboarding is that it was effective and led to all sorts of useful information. The blogs were boisterous after O'Reilly interviewed Brian Ross over a piece from ABC which reported torture had been used on 14 Iraqi combatants and they all gave up information. But what O'Reilly glossed over was the fact the information from those 14 was often bogus and led to false arrests and wasted efforts in many cases. The written piece by Ross was completely different than O'Reilly's take.
The worst part was at least one of the prisoner's family was abducted and threatened in front of him to get him to talk.
According to Bush, we were torturing people to find out the next terrorist plot and where the nuclear bomb was (Bush's favorite example). But according to many experts in interrogation and in military strategy, torture is of questionable use, and using it puts our own soldiers at greater risk.
Torture is an excellent way to get someone to tell you what they think you want to hear. Any resemblance to the truth is coincidental.
quote:
Then there was that last intelligent report which summarized multiple reports. It concluded we were creating many many more terrorists than we were stopping in Iraq. Gee, do you think the US openly sanctioning torture along with pictures from Abu Ghraib might be great recruitment material for the next suicide bomber?
The only people being misled that it is merely humane discomfort and not actually torture are the US citizens. Everyone else in the world calls it by its real name.
Exactly - Al Queda couldn't have asked for a better reqruitment poster than them images form Abu Graib. "Humane discomfort" - now there's an oxymoron worthy of George Orwell.
The Islamic terrorist plot recently uncovered in Canada was dicovered because 2 individuals approached by the plotters seperately contacted the authorities and became moles. One contacted the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) because he felt the plot would disredit Islam, the other contacted the police because he was a patriotic Canadian. Using torture loses the moral high ground and loses informers such as these.
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"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
| Edited by - Ghost_Skeptic on 10/22/2006 08:48:14 |
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Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
Posted - 11/02/2006 : 13:00:45 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
Comments continued from above post.
Mycroft wrote:
4) "Net neutrality? Not even. Don't get me wrong, I agree it's important, but important does not equal threat to democracy. Be real, democracy predates the internet by thousands of years."
You are confusing a threat to democracy with a current threat to democracy in our country right now. Youth in this country are children of the Internet. The Net came along just in time to counter the loss of investigative reporting in the mainstream media. If corporate monopolies manage to control the Internet the same way they control TV radio and Newsprint, we will lose the last important access to free speech remaining.
If the corporations don't succeed, the older generation that relies on the TV and evening paper for news will eventually be gone and the Internet flow of information will bring back the informed public that democracy relies on.
I don't see any serious political threat to the flow of information on the Internet.
quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
5) "Soldiers lives. Again, very important, but soldiers lives can be placed at risk under any kind of political system. Soldiers lives being placed at risk is not itself a threat to democracy."
Soldiers are at risk and dying because a small minority of people managed to control the information a large majority of people were exposed to. That does not fit the definition of democracy.
Wow, that's just packed full of unfounded assumptions.
Your point of view wasn't very popular back then, but nobody blocked it from getting out. It was still a democratic process that put us to war in Iraq, democracy doesn't guarantee decisions you like. That decisions you don't like get made and that not everyone shares your opinion is not itself evidence that democracy was subverted.
quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
6) "Habeas corpus? Sanction of torture? Habeas corpus isn't being taken away from anyone who had it before, that issue has been way blown up. Sanction of torture? You can't even have a discussion over what torture really is."
Talking point #29... it's discomfort, it's a stress position, they only think they are drowning, Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident.....
This is a straw-man.
quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
You need to read the actual accounts, look at the rest of the Abu Ghraib pictures and read about how they came to be leaked. Again, I have a lot of sources if you decide to look past the white washed version Bush et al would have you believe. And the sources are credible. Retired generals (plural) who are speaking out, for example.
Maybe, but that would be on a different topic from Habeas corpus. Can you stay on topic, please?
quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
7) "In either case, these issues are not threats to democracy, they are issues to be decided by democracy. You think an enemy combatant captured in Afghanistan should have the right of habeas corpus? Okay, write to your congressman. You think wat |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2006 : 03:05:53 [Permalink]
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Mycroft, you are mixing up free speech with access to a bully pulpit.
If you think the assumptions about control of information in the mainstream media leading up to the Iraq War had no impact I direct you to the book, "Exception to the Rulers" by Amy Goodman and her brother. They document the fact that after 9/11 and prior to the Iraq invasion, there were hundreds of pro war commentators interviewed on the news while only 3 anti-war leaders made it on. As Goodman put it, if you happened to go to the bathroom at the wrong time you would have missed the anti-war position altogether. The same is documented on Democracy Now if you don't want to peruse the book.
There are a number of people who lost loved ones on 9/11 who started a group called "Not In Our Name". They get zero publicity from the mainstream news.
There are hundreds of other cases that support my position. It is not an unfounded assumption just because you are unaware of the evidence.
Why is mainstream media whitewashing torture with fake names like discomfort a straw man? I don't need an intro into logic, you need one on manipulation of the masses via controlling the message.
Let's shrink this down a bit more since the above post is really hard to follow. If you want to expand on what I am narrowing it to then do so after addressing this point.
If I own all the broadcast stations and control the news I can convince a lot of people my politics are correct. A few people may look elsewhere and discover I have left out many facts which don't support my view and distorted many other facts to make them support my view. But the majority of people are unlikely to look elsewhere for information.
So if that were the case, why is it not important?
It's hard to have this discussion with you when you don't seem to get this basic premise. You haven't presented evidence it isn't true. You have merely said if I want to go yell from the street corner no one is stopping me. But you have ignored the fact that only a few people hear the guy on the street corner while millions hear the TV broadcasts.
So is it that you don't believe you are hearing filtered news? Or do you believe that a rich guy like Rupert Murdoch earned the right to own the megaphone?
Is it healthy for a democracy to have 400+ news commentators for the war and 4 against? Do you believe that was the feeling of the country first (this is Iraq now, not Al Qaeda) or do you think the news media could have influenced public opinion instead?
Do you think stories written by Judy Miller which she knew were false (she got fired because of it) that were published in the New York Times influenced anyone's beliefs? Ambassador Wilson reported that the yellow cake from Niger story was false. Bush and Cheney used Miller and Robert Novak to discredit Wilson's report. We know now that Wilson was right and Bush and Cheney knew that all along. (They claim they didn't know but the CIA has documentation they advised Bush the story was false.) So the Bush government essentially planted false stories in the news to gain support for a war which has turned out to be a big mistake. Do you think the filtered media had no impact on the public? Then why do Bush and the rest of them need to plant false stories if those stories have no influence?
Have you seen the Media Matter's list of corporations that don't want any of their ads on Air America? Is it healthy for a democracy to have corporate money influence what politics you have access to in the media? Have you not noticed the power one has with such financial resources and access to media monopolies?
Try these on for size:
Top election falsehoods, myths, and talking pointsquote:
As the November 7 midterm elections approach, the increasing media coverage has carried with it an onslaught of conservative misinformation. Media Matters for America has compiled some of the more common examples below.
American voters favor Republicans on national security
Many in the media -- such as ABC News political director Mark Halperin, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux -- have either uncritically reported or asserted that "national security" or "terrorism" are Republican "strengths." MSNBC host Chris Matthews, meanwhile, has stated that "Republicans know from the polls they got two strengths right now" -- "terrorism" and "[t]axes" -- and then added: "[W]hether the current polls back that up or not."
In fact, recent polling undermines these assertions, indicating that Americans favor Democrats by a significant margin when asked whom they trust more to handle the specific national security-related issue of the war in Iraq. And recent polling is mixed on which party respondents prefer to handle the issue of terrorism.
The article goes on to document the following myths including the one you believe that "Republicans had the "Contract with America" in 1994 to power their victory, but Democrats in 2006 have no agenda".
In addition, documentation of media perpetuated myths can be found in the article on the following:
quote:
The public favors Republicans on the issues of taxes and fiscal responsibility
Terrorists want the Democrats to win
Even if Americans don't approve of the job Bush is doing, they like him personally
Once a "pro-Bush" state, always a "pro-Bush" state
Democrats will drown the Bush administration in investigations
A Democratic takeover of the House would put extreme liberals in leadership positions
Kuo's claims regarding White House's real views of religious conservatives have no precedent
Republicans and Democrats both equally guilty of "dirty tricks"
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