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To: discostu
If a lie results in the death of one military man ... or in the death of one innocent civilian, would you still support that lie? What if that 'lie' precipitated an 'undeclared' (and therefore unlawful) war? Would you still support the lie because someone attacked us and you were too angry and impatient to ask for a lawful declaration based on overwhelming evidence before launching that war?

Reminds me of the old joke about the old bull and the young bull standing on a ridge looking down on a pasture full of young heifers. The young bull nudges the old bull and says 'lets run down and get one'. The old bull looks disgusted and says 'how about if we walk down and get 'em all '.

In other words, I don't trust this rush to judgement, because there are possible other reasons for attacking Afghanistan, such as control of caspian oil and pipelines that were already in the planning in 1996, but were being rejected by the current Afghan overlords.

91 posted on 01/11/2002 11:21:23 AM PST by Ridin' Shotgun
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To: Ridin' Shotgun
Where as I don't think it was a rush to judgement. I've seen the oil crap for the "real" reason and spent the 5 minutes necessary looking at a map to realize how bogus it is. I really don't care if we get other benefits from killing terrorists, I was taught fringe benefits are icing and should be celebrated not vilified. And even if bin Laden and crew didn't take out the WTC (which is one of the silliest suppositions ever) I really don't care, he's an admitted terrorists and all terrorists are rabid dogs that need to be treated the same way pa handled Old Yeller; I just hope we keep going until we get to take out the oldest of terrorist organizations, the IRA. And I'm fully in agreement with not declaring war, we shouldn't flatter these scumbags by making them official.

I've seen dozens of these threads questioning our real motives and criticizing the methods. So far they've run the gamut between wild conclusions based on minimal and unimpressive "evidence" and out right BS. I haven't seen anything that was even remotely compelling and most of them were a complete waste of the time I spent reading, would have been better spent reading aknowledged fiction at least that has character development and usually a much better use of prose. These charges of false translation are right there in the latter, we've got a whole article picking on 3 or 4 words, no transcript, nothing even "correctly" translating the entire sentence any of the words were in.

I don't doubt that individual words are translated oddly, one of the hardest parts of translating is dealing with catch phrases and colloquialisms. Different cultures don't use the same words to mean the same the same thing. And this wierdness hits at a much lower level than many people think.

I learned this one when I was taking German. Here in America when you want to complain about the heat you'll frequently say "I'm hot", depending on who you're with they might deliberately miscomprehend you but in general it's understood that you feel the room is too warm. In Germany (at least back in the mid-80s) "Ich bin heise (I am hot)" is a come on, if you want to complain about the heat you say "est ist hiese (it is hot)". So if I wanted to translate something to German where somebody said "I'm hot" to complain about the heat I wouldn't translate it "correcly" I would translate it to "it is hot" otherwise my German audience would misunderstand it. But then I'm opening myself to exactly the type of criticism this person has laid out because the word "it" is no where in the sentence that I translated from.

That's always the big quandry in translation, do you translate the words or the meaning? Generally you go for the meaning, an exact word for word translation is usually meaningless, and sometimes impossible not all languages have assigned words to the same thing. You could never translate anything directly from Inuit to English that talked about snow, English doesn't have as many words for snow, you're translator will have to add adjectives and maybe even metaphors to get the different types of snow across. Or he could just say "snow" everytime and you'd get a sentence like "it was definitely snow, far too wet to be snow, but clearly not as wet as snow and far colder than snow" (and of course a proper word for word translation will use the original langauge's sentence structure which just confuses matter even more, especially if you're going into English which has a rather unique sentence structure).

Subsequently all translations have to play a little fast and lose, there's no way around it. You gotta trust somebody sometime. Might as well trust the guy that's telling you OBL is a piece of crap, that was already known this is just quibling on what kind of crap and how stinky.

112 posted on 01/11/2002 1:21:14 PM PST by discostu
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