Free Republic

Yup, run away and take cover!

Makes sense...

Never mind China, what about Iran, or North Korea, or Syria, or... the list goes on. Shouldn't we get our priorities right for a change?

The dinner episode Thursday night amid a major regional conference on Iraq perfectly revealed how hard it was to bring together the top diplomats of the two rival nations.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, it could be regarded as a wake up call. A sensible approach is not to negotiate with or try to appease the rogue states.

The liberals have been longing for some sort of an appeasement approach with the 'axis'. The results are telling: public humiliation of the US officials. And this will never change.

The Arabic/ME culture is historically a culture of invaders/raiders; the willingness to negotiate is regarded as sign of weakness: why negotiate if you can take what you want by force?

Until we understand this (our ancestors in Medieval Europe did) we will never be able to prevail in any sort of a conflict in the East. You also have to walk the walk, talking is not enough and will be laughed at. The recent developments may actually help many Americans (always excluding the liberals, of course) to understand that there’s just no way you can negotiate with those guys.

This is exactly how one or two criminals manage to control large crowds: they have a sense of purpose; they know what they want and are prepared to take risks to get it. If you try to reason with them or submit, you will ultimately lose the minute you stop being useful to them. You could draw a parallel between the above and cattle: exactly the same thing, small number of humans controlling a herd. If we don’t want to be thought of and, consequently, treated as a herd, we’d better quickly acquire a sense of purpose and act as one force rather then lots of discordant and contradictory voices.

Apologies for barging in on your discussion; I plead total ignorance of the subject. Could someone please explain all this stuff to me. All this hatred, digging up the dead, cutting off oil supplies, etc. Can’t they find some sort of a mutually agreeable solution?

...say that hurricanes rotate clockwise... ...it's just an incorrect statement.

It would seem, the good Doctor has some issues with the Coriolis force: in the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes do rotate clockwise...

It's sort of self-explanatory: the problem is that the Muslim societies are fundamentally and inherently unfree.

Let's see what points she is making in her letter (I've only seen the excerpt).

She correctly identifies the problem as that of the Islamic societies rejecting individualism and meritocracy. She also admits that the excesses of the West are not the underlying reason for this rejection. It seems, that she does understand - on some level - that those excesses are nothing more but a side effect of the norms under which Western societies operate.

But the problem becomes evident as we get nearer the end of the excerpt. For example, she is seeking to find a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community to avoid 'breakdown of family and society that has taken place in the West'. A good cause, it would seem but fuzzy thinking. Could it be that those who choose their lifestyle actually prefer it? And, on the other hand, if they would like to change but unable to do so, it is the price they pay for the inability to pull themselves together and work hard on achieving their goals.

This highlights the issue: Muslim societies are inherently autocratic and things such as a free choice are nonexistent there. They don't seem to understand that, while there are unstable families, hedonism, gross excesses, etc in the West, the majority of the people lead normal lives in very stable families (and manage to preserve the values the Muslim are trying to enforce by decree by nothing more than a free choice.)

Until they understand that you cannot have a truly free society while oppressing someone, forcefully imposing a set of values that everyone has to follow, there is no chance they will change. Their society has been twisted for so many centuries that it will take many generations before they realize that they are living a lie, and nobody knows how they will learn - it could be by being defeated and brought to the brink of total destruction, or by absorbing the ideas from the more free societies and gradually changing and thus finding their place in the world.

On the other hand,seeing him flipflop on most issues, I wouldn't be surprised that he's not entirely honest about this one either.

Absolutely. Rudy is very liberal on all those issues, I fully agree with you. I just wanted to make the point that his statements about global warming where misquoted by CNSNews - the post is more about CNSNews than Rudy.

They seem to have badly misreported his views on global warming at CNSNews.com: http://cbs5.com/local/local_story_043113649.html

Russia (and China) will, sooner or later, become - again - very powerful nations. It is hard to see warm friendship developing between the competitors; I'd say the most we can count on are the occasional alliances when they profit all sides. The main goal though is not turn those nations into enemies, this is a wrong time for it.

I may have missed something but didn't North Korea change its tune shortly after Russians said, they regarded nuclear North Korea as a threat to Russian security. That part of the world is not all that stable and the agreement, I believe, is to shutdown the reactor, not to dismantle it. Then there's also Iran; Russia and China do not want to interfere there for now. But Middle East guys know that it is not a good idea to piss either country off - neither (unlike the West) will have any issues with nuking the whole place.

If a reasonably neutral relationship is maintained, those countries can even be a sort of deterrent. The downside is, of course, that the world will again be divided into zones of influence but I don't see how it's possible for it to be otherwise at this point.

Nothing new here. They had this sort of problem in all versions of Windows. Most likely, further security development would take too long and delay the release of the OS.

This can clearly can be linked to Global Warming, CO2 and general raping of the Earth by those capitalists. From now on we are going to have winters like this all the time... yes. And hurricanes. And tornadoes. And stuff... we're surely doomed! We have to remove all greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, stop using the energy, fire, wheel and start communicating by the means of grunts and clicks if we ever hope to save our planet.

Anyone ever asked those retards what do they think the planet would be like if there were no GHG in the atmosphere?

Indeed. The more correct way of putting it would probably be I'd sooner distrust the Russkies less...'

I agree on the 'beast' part fully. What I think is a little bit on a shortsighted side is that I'd sooner trust the Russkies then the Saudis.

True. Some of the policies were rather shortsighted. I do not believe for a minute that the Russians or the Chinese will make good allies or come to the Western view of the world (in the East, they calculate - and the Chinese are more patient than the Russians, and therefore, more dangerous). The thing to remember is that they will only pursue their own interests. The argument for ignoring them is that sooner or later, those interests will be opposite to ours and any sort of alliance that may be in place will disintegrate. On the other hand, the same tactics may result in obstructionist politics from that corner of the world, and that would not be a welcome development.

Let's just wait until it comes to this, shall we?

Dr Feathered Pretentious Snake Acapulco or whatever it is you choose to call yourself: we could always call those guys 'criminals' as that is exactly what they are.