Stuck in the fucking stone age.

[byronius]

I find myself in odd disposition to most of my progressive brethren and sistren on the Syrian issue.

I think it is because I lived near there, in Saudi, for long enough to alter me forever. The kids I played with all the time, my best friends and academic competitors and girlfriends all kind of looked like the kids in those videos. I made out with Jameela Abuhamdiyah in the Empty Quarter, fer chrissakes. Her brother Hassan was a smart older kid who spoke several languages. To me, the only reason to have a military like ours is to find super-smart professional ways of trying to make certain the kids and the artists and the goofballs aren’t in the crossfire. I’m not so concerned with the schisms as with the individual humans involved, one of whom may have been the young woman who would have figured out FTL a generation earlier than Zephram Fucking Cockran.

Does that make sense? I feel connected to them. I’ve eaten their food and been in their homes. I’ve met rich Arabs and dirt-poor Arabs. They’re mostly just people, and their Teabaggers are a lot more entrenched in government and religion than ours are(!!!).

Fuck nations. Fuck borders. Everyone Free. Everyone Safe from the Fucking Meanness. Everyone.

We should be BETTER AT THIS by now. Anaesthetic gas and zappers and pleasant neural fields, man. Where’s my fucking tax money going? To BULLSHIT. I want my fucking Phaser On STUN, THAT’S WHAT I WANT.

Stuck in the fucking stone age.

[Tace]

1. Let's Me Offer You A Beer From The Replicator!

Bravo! --Tace

[newfie11]

2. It's always different if you can put a face on it

What we are and have been doing is beyond horrible.
Thank God many in America are waking up and rejecting war alto it seems our government will possibly going to go ahead any way.

[sulphurdunn]

3. Natons do not wage war

for humanitarian reasons. They wage war for resources or to defend themselves from being plundered. In modern war the overwhelming majority of casualties are the innocent. The only humane act is not to wage wars but to negotiate an end to them and keep them from starting again. You can't do that with cruise missiles, regardless of what the warmongers say to the contrary.

[tomg]

4. Thank you for the reminder of

what it is about. The global rich and multi-national corporations figured it out awhile ago. The traditional nation state is dead. It is time the rest of us who are jerked around by them figure it out. No nations. No borders. Everyone Free.

[brush]

5. You're so right, it's about people — human flesh against bombs

With all of our swiftly advancing technology which has sped up communication to being just about instantaneous, WAR IS OUTDATED, so 20th Century!

Or should be.

What the hell are we even doing debating just bombing people out of the blue, or gassing them for that matter, when Assad and Obama and whoever is the rebel leader/s can be instantly connected to work out a solution by phone/twitter/email/facebook/whatever the hell other device that's out there and not available or known to the public yet?

We need to pull back and THINK about what happens when missiles/bombs rain down on cities with human beings in them — human flesh does not stand any chance against high explosives.

We keep doing this to the same end — dead, mangled and dismembered bodies and more brothers, sisters, fathers, sons, husbands and wives with long memories and grievances to settle against those who killed and mangled.

Talk about breeding terrorism — that's what we're doing. When will we get a president who will stand up against the arms manufacturers, other corporate suppliers looking for massive profits, their paid for congressional operatives and the corporate media war drummers and just tell them, "NO, we are not getting into a civil war in another country even though you want to sell millions of dollars worth of your bombs/missiles to us and most likely to both of the other sides though intermediaries."

This president will say, "It stops here now, with me, or we will continue as a country in our warmongering ways as we've done throughout the entire 20th century and the first decade of the 21st."

This will take tremendous personal courage because presidents have been KILLED before.

I feel this president does not really want to do this, thus his flipping of the script to get congressional approval to thwart and delay the massive pressure being exerted upon him, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and all that comes with being the commander-in-chief of the only extant empire going today. He's boxed in and almost has to, at this point, answer the war drums, for the profits that can be made, for the political considerations that have to be answered, for the media critics to be quieted. After all, the 2014 campaigns are around the corner and Hillary/Democratic chances for 2016 are on the line as well

Let's hope this president has the courage do what hasn't really been done before, to say, "We will not do it. We will begin now in finding a way other than war to settle disputes between and within nations. We will stop being the warmongerer, blood-lusting people that we have been for so long."

And we HAVE been that for over a century in the eyes of many outside the US. Many inside our country can't seem to see that, or are in denial, being in the belly of the beast and all.

This president has a chance to bring a sea change to our being as a nation. Let's hope our faith that we've invested in him through hard work during two election campaigns won't be dashed by capitulation to yet another military campaign.

[MindPilot]

8. God! I can only imagine (and hope, I guess) that Obama would say something like that.

"It stops here now, with me, or we will continue as a country in our warmongering ways as we've done throughout the entire 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. We will not do it. We will begin now in finding a way other than war to settle disputes between and within nations. We will stop being the warmongerer, blood-lusting people that we have been for so long."

[felix_numinous]

6. K&R

Thank you, beautiful post. Yes, I believe a minority has vested interest in keeping the rest undereducated enough to condition them into fighting amongst themselves.

It almost doesn't matter the reasons, just as long as people don't pause long enough to, you know, wake up, make up with each other, and unite against them. That would be very bad, a game changer.

I strongly believe, and have seen, that the world is full of wonderful, funny, loving, hospitable people (many if whom would blow you away with their kindness), but this narrative is being suppressed in the mainstream.

I dream of uniting as a human family.

[MindPilot]

7. Great post, although it did take a few for me to figure out FTL

But yeah, I've often wondered that we should be moving beyond an economy that depends on infinite growth, and that geographic borders are fast becoming an anachronism.

BTW where the fuck is my hover car?


ETA: I work in the defense industry. The only thing that keeps me from not putting a bullet in my head before coming to work every day (other than paying a mortgage and needing to eat type of stuff) is that although I make my living helping build the next generation of cool new toys to break shit and kill people, I can always hope that a) the stuff we make will never be used, and b) it is some seriously neat-o tech that can easily have civilian applications.

I dream of the day my boss calls a meeting and says "guys, time to ramp it up again; we got another billion-dollar contract from the Department of Peace & Progress."