Re: The Bo Raxo Gift Catalog

On Dec 20, 7:27 am, Charlie Wilkes <charlie_wil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:01:43 -0800, Bo Raxo wrote:
On Dec 19, 8:08 pm, Charlie Wilkes <charlie_wil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:55:19 -0800, Bo Raxo wrote:
On Dec 19, 6:38 pm, Charlie Wilkes
<charlie_wil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:08:11 -0800, Bo Raxo wrote:
Sometimes it's so hard to find the right gift for certain people.
Like that fundamentalist anti-Western neighbor of yours - you want
to get something for her kids for Christmas, but you're afraid
that could send her in to a jihad frenzy.

Ol' Bo is here to rescue you from these dilemmas with the perfect
gift selection:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?

in_article_id=503195&in_page_id=1770

Watch this group for more perfect gifts for imperfect people,
courtesy of Satan's little helper, aka:

Holy Christ. That is truly revolting. What kind of warped,
diseased people extol the virtue of a woman who leaves her children
motherless so she can be a suicide bomber?

Agreed. But then what kind of warped diseased people invade a
country for the flimsiest of obviously made-up reasons, killing
hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and feel not the least bit
of shame about it? In fact, feel outraged when the locals have the
temerity to fight back?

If Iraq is any guide, these death-infatuated jihadists tend to push
things so far they alienate the very community whose interests they
claim to represent. That's the good news.

If Iraq is any guide, America will toss out any pretense of morality
and bomb innocent women and children just to try and control an
important source of oil. Who dismantled the country's security
services? Who left huge armories full of weapons and explosives
unguarded? Who sent untrained and poorly supervised sadists off to
Abu Ghraib, to torture for the hell of it? Who put private
contractors completely outside the law, armed with machine guns,
roaming the streets of a densely populated city?

They do it for religion and nationalism. We do it for greed.
Somehow I don't think that gives us the moral high ground.

I don't want to defend the war in Iraq because I was against it from
the start, but war has been a universal part of human life throughout
history. No powerful nation has ever risen above it. Women strapping
themselves with explosives so they can blow up themselves and a few
guards at a checkpoint is perhaps no more immoral, but it is a
perversion of human nature.

True, and well said.

Another consideration that shapes my view of Jihadism is the fact that
it has no strategic purpose. The Palestinians can't win against the
Israelis. Al Qaeda can't win against the U.S. All they can do is lash
out in a blind rage at targets of opportunity. And they do not
differentiate between military vs. civilian targets. The suicide
bomber who blows himself up in a nightclub full of unarmed civilians is
as honored as the one who takes out an APC.

You just don't understand assymetrical warfare. The North Vietnamese
and the VC couldn't beat the Americans in a tactical battle - but in the
strategic sense, they clearly did win.

There are two ways that terrorist gradually win: First, they make the
occupying forces so fearful of civilians, they can't build
relationships, social bridges. They can't hand out candy to children or
rebuild a school. Instead they stay in armored vehicles, they shoot
anything remotely threatening, they shoot plenty of civilians either
accidentally or when some poor soldier just loses it. The occupying
soldiers get so stressed out, a few of them crack. If just a fraction
of one percent rape and beat and murder people (Haditha, anyone?) then
the local populace turns against them, unites under the terrorist's
cause, and the occupying force will need years if not decades to pacify
the place.

The second way they win is to keep up attacks on civilians to prove that
the occupying force can't bring peace. Pretty soon the local populace
is convinced that the only way they'll ever see peace is to see the
occupying force leave. They'll accept the most facist, repressive,
extremist regime of the terrorists just to have some peace.

It's the same reasons Italy and Germany embraced facism in the early
30s, it's the same kind of fear that makes so many Americans eager to
give up their civil liberties and let the "unitary President" override
Congress and the courts, to acheive safety.

If the local fundies keep the pressure up long enough, and you haven't
been able to go across town to visit your grandchild or see a dentist or
any other normal thing in a couple of years, then even if you're not in
to their extreme beliefs you want the Americans to leave and let the
mullahs take over, if it brings peace to the streets. Better to be a
live person in a hijab than a dead person in a country that's been
"liberated" by some well meaning people who dropped a two thousand pound
bomb on your house.

I don't dispute any of this, although it does appear that the dynamic in
Iraq has shifted in recent months. But I accept that in Iraq, it is
entirely possible that asymmetrical tactics could be used to wear down
and drive U.S. forces out of the country.

What I mean when I say al Qaeda can't win is that al Qaeda does not
represent the future of society in any sense. It is a reactionary force
that combines golden-age nostalgia with religious mysticism in a futile
effort to push back the tide of history.

Mohammad Atta, the chief hijacker of 9-11, had a crucial experience that
shaped his view of the world and contributed to his destiny. The Grand
Souk in Syria is a kind of shopping bazaar that has been around for
centuries. When Atta was a young child, he visited the Grand Souk and
was mesmerized by the beautiful artifacts of Arab culture... beautiful
rugs and jewelry, hand-crafted musical instruments, all of the ornate
accouterments of Islamic ritual.

More than a decade later, Atta visited the Grand Souk again as a young
adult. All of the wonderful things he remembered were gone -- and in
their place was a jumble of cheap manufactured goods from the west.

That is what al Qaeda is attempting to resist... it's not U.S. gov't
policy, which has largely been benign in the Middle East despite what the
Noam Chomsky types would like to believe. It is the inexorable rise of
the western tide, blanketing and obliterating traditional cultures.


Wow, I had never heard this. Fascinating!!!

This is happening all over the world, not just in the Middle East. In
Alaska, the Eskimos no longer use dog-teams. Why would they?
Snowmobiles work better and are easier to maintain. But something has
been lost... just as something is always lost in the advance of history.
This is why we have museums.


Yes, you see it everywhere on a scale both big and small. I have seen
locals in my city protest when a building was torn down to build
something new, and 15 years later protest when *that* building was
torn down to build something new.

That's what I mean when I say that al Qaeda can't win. And it is also
why I think U.S. policy, although brutal, is tolerable by comparison.
History is going to take a wrecking ball to Arab society, and eliminate
all these dictatorships with their stagnant political culture and their
barbaric modes of enforcement. The U.S. should be more circumspect in
its involvement, but at least we are on the winning side of history.



Very well said, although I think it's more that the west is on the
winning side of history. Whether that means the US or the EU or some
new player like Brazil comes out on top, who knows? If Cuba could
shake off the bonds of Castro's authoritarian regime and their
ridiculous planned centralized economy, I think they are poised to be
a dynamo of the western world.


The Palestinians can't win? Guess again - they aren't going away, more
and more nations are pushing Israel for a two state solution, they'll
eventually get it with the borders rolled back to pre-67 lines. It's
the Israelis who can't possibly win. They periodically invade Lebanon,
kick ass far and wide, and at the end of the day still don't have peace.
Assymetrical warfare can be powerful when used to unite a populace and
break the morale of an occupying force (as well as that force's
sponsoring country).

The Palestinians are their own worst enemy from what I see. You are
right that they will eventually get some kind of state, but will they be
able to govern it and make anything of it? I hope so.

They are, it's true, but the US giving such unconditional support to
Israeli policies that punish entire communities and strangle trade in
the occupied territories doesn't help. I think it will take a
generation of Palestinians who grew up in peace for that people to
emerge from their long nightmare. IOW, a forty or fifty year
timeline. Look Northern Ireland and I think you see the future of
Palestine.


Bo Raxo



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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: The Bo Raxo Gift Catalog
    ... who blows himself up in a nightclub full of unarmed civilians is as ... and the occupying force will need years if not ... that the occupying force can't bring peace. ... populace is convinced that the only way they'll ever see peace is to ...
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