And you should at least make an attempt to get your information from someplace other than Amnesty International or Code Pink or The Huffington Post or God knows where you get such drivel from.
Blah blah wank wank.
BluesStringer - 06 July 2008 02:33 AM
Most of the rest of the ABC News article is devoted to buttressing your above-stated argument.
Yep, this part:
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,” said Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant and former FBI agent. Garrett has 30 years of experience interrogating terrorists such as Yousef, the Pakistani man who killed two CIA employees at the gates to the agency’s Langley, Va. headquarters in 1994 and hundreds of violent criminals.
“If in fact it’s true that they water-boarded him once and then he started talking and provided reliable information, then he falls under the category of the small minority of people on whom it works. But torture seldom works. Most people start talking...to get the pain to stop,” Garrett said.
But in many cases, the harsh intelligence techniques led to questionable confessions and downright lies, say officers with firsthand knowledge of the program. That included statements that al Qaeda was building dirty bombs.
“It is true that the person who was saying the nuke stuff said it under pressure. The analysts believed it was not true; it did not conform to other information,” one former intelligence officer told ABC News.
As these targets were subjected to the increasingly harsh interrogation methods—in some cases including water-boarding—KSM sat in his cell in Poland, writing poetry in English, writing letters to the president and to the head of the CIA, and debating the merits of Christianity and Islam with his captor.
“Using torture says that we aren’t any better than countries that historically tortured people. What are we telling the world about the United States?” Garrett, who has lectured on the subject of interrogation and torture and the perception of a nation, asked.
BluesStringer - 06 July 2008 02:33 AM
But the fact remains, theirs (and yours) is nothing but speculation. KSM is hard evidence that it’s a useful tool in extracting reliable information.
How so? For that to be a ‘fact’, you’d have to prove that he wouldn’t have given it up any other way other than by torture. Exactly as Garret says in the article. You can speculate of course, but you can’t do that and abuse others for doing the same thing.
Here’s a former FBI interrogator—who interrogated Al Quaeda suspects—saying categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence, but that it does sell impressionable people on the legitimacy of jihad, on the grounds that a regime that tortures deserves to be attacked.
Just a 3 min video:
And you should at least make an attempt to get your information from someplace other than Amnesty International or Code Pink or The Huffington Post or God knows where you get such drivel from.
Blah blah wank wank.
BluesStringer - 06 July 2008 02:33 AM
Most of the rest of the ABC News article is devoted to buttressing your above-stated argument.
Yep, this part:
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,” said Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant and former FBI agent. Garrett has 30 years of experience interrogating terrorists such as Yousef, the Pakistani man who killed two CIA employees at the gates to the agency’s Langley, Va. headquarters in 1994 and hundreds of violent criminals.
“If in fact it’s true that they water-boarded him once and then he started talking and provided reliable information, then he falls under the category of the small minority of people on whom it works. But torture seldom works. Most people start talking...to get the pain to stop,” Garrett said.
But in many cases, the harsh intelligence techniques led to questionable confessions and downright lies, say officers with firsthand knowledge of the program. That included statements that al Qaeda was building dirty bombs.
“It is true that the person who was saying the nuke stuff said it under pressure. The analysts believed it was not true; it did not conform to other information,” one former intelligence officer told ABC News.
As these targets were subjected to the increasingly harsh interrogation methods—in some cases including water-boarding—KSM sat in his cell in Poland, writing poetry in English, writing letters to the president and to the head of the CIA, and debating the merits of Christianity and Islam with his captor.
“Using torture says that we aren’t any better than countries that historically tortured people. What are we telling the world about the United States?” Garrett, who has lectured on the subject of interrogation and torture and the perception of a nation, asked.
BluesStringer - 06 July 2008 02:33 AM
But the fact remains, theirs (and yours) is nothing but speculation. KSM is hard evidence that it’s a useful tool in extracting reliable information.
How so? For that to be a ‘fact’, you’d have to prove that he wouldn’t have given it up any other way other than by torture. Exactly as Garret says in the article. You can speculate of course, but you can’t do that and abuse others for doing the same thing.
OK, I’ll restate it then since I cede the point, KSM might’ve eventually cracked under other forms of interrogation. So here’s the restatement: KSM is hard evidence that waterboarding has the almost immediate potential (2 1/2 minutes of said technique employed on KSM) to start saving American lives. The *fact* remains however, that it is 100% speculation to say that KSM would offer the same information absent the credible threat of more coercive interrogation techniques, just as it is 100% speculation that any other high-value target cannot have valid, reliable and useful information extracted from them using the same technique(s).
Better?
And one thing in what you quoted from that article stands out as proof positive to me that KSM was not harmed beyond the immediate deep fear he experienced during his one and only waterboarding session.
As these targets were subjected to the increasingly harsh interrogation methods—in some cases including water-boarding—KSM sat in his cell in Poland, writing poetry in English, writing letters to the president and to the head of the CIA, and debating the merits of Christianity and Islam with his captor.
Actually, two things strike me here. The first is that it is so obvious to me why this anti-waterboarding screed fails to specify how many interrogation sessions included waterboarding because it is such a minuscule number. If used, it wouldn’t support the mainstream media template that America is the always-inhumane villain, so they purposely leave it ambiguous to exaggerate the impact to their readers/listeners without having to actually get caught in a lie.
But back to the question of is waterboarding torture, somehow I can’t imagine that someone who spent 2 1/2 minutes under the interrogation method in question before he gave up everything, and this guy is the “record-holder” as a “hold-out,” was harmed in any long term way at all if, in the following days/weeks/years, he, “sat in his cell in Poland, writing poetry in English, writing letters to the president and to the head of the CIA, and debating the merits of Christianity and Islam with his captor.” To me, in order for torture to be a valid assertion, the “victims” of it must necessarily suffer either physical or mental long-term damage. John McCain can’t lift his arm above his shoulder because of Vietnamese torture, and never will be able to if he lived to be 101. That’s evidence of real torture. Writing poetry, sans any pain or physical impairment, or debating the merits of Christianity and Islam, sans any impairment in being able to articulate his beliefs or use his intellectual prowess, does not say “TORTURE!” to me.
The war in Iraq has been a tool for peace-at-any-cost types. The tool spins like a drill motor as the redefining of The Constitution, generally-accepted practices during war-time and the premise of patriotism itself are twisted beyond any recognition of traditional norms. The tool is so successful at this time in history precisely because of what we’re engaging in right here and now; immediate world-wide communication that empowers equally the voices of tradition, that typically appeal to a more mature audience, and the voices of redefinition of societal mores and norms, which typically appeal to a younger, more impressionable audience. Added to that, the latter group is the most savvy with the effective use of this new, world-wide-employed tool, so it’s not really a wonder that it appears that the redefinitions are taking hold in the minds of people en mass, but I believe that’s an illusion perpetuated by an agenda-driven world media bent on American defeat. One can argue the point if one must, but this is my opinion, based on a lifetime of observation from before the internet, as the internet was coming into its own, and now, as it has become one of the most effective sources of information gathering and dissemination in human history. I’m not saying we have “too much” access to information, I’m saying only that the new technology hasn’t yet caught up to what I believe will eventually be accepted once again as traditionally-accepted axioms; love of country, adherence to the rule of law, autonomy and sovereignty between cooperating nations and generally world-wide denunciations of regimes who reject those premises.
Anyway, KSM has never been tortured and his 2 1/2 minutes of discomfort and fear that netted reams of useful information are hardly a valid reason to slam the USA. But there it is, reason is not a part of world-wide leftism anymore, if indeed, it ever was.
...and frankly, the whole constitutional republic thing you’ve got going on seems like a pretty cool way to run a country.
It looks great on paper, and it worked pretty much as intended for the first 150 - 180 years, but it’s starting to look like that’s the extent of its shelf life. But us constitutional optimists persevere in hopes of making it cool again. But I digress.....
I agree. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. It seems to me that people like Michael Moore are trying to say, “America’s broken, we need to be more like ... [insert Scandanavian Country With Universal Welfare]” That’s not the answer. Some Republican types on the other hand, try to say America isn’t broken, everything’s fine, America is wonderful, and so on. The problem with this attitude is that it shuts people off from seeing the many problems that are destroying you from within. You’re really in the shit when you can be self-critical, and sometimes the patriotic flag-waving from the right is as empty-headed as the progressive anti-Americanism of the left.
I think the answer is not to be less American, but more American, and the way to do that is to look back at the Constitution and understand what it’s creators were trying to achieve. Consider the moral crisis of slavery in the 19th century. The Constitution was a wonderful weapon against slavery because it said “all men are created equal”. In other words, America wasn’t created great in 1776, after all it still had slavery. But what was created was the potential for greatness. The point being that the greatness of America cannot be taken for granted but is always a work in progress and that work begins by upholding the Constitution.
I told you I had a libertarian streak. You need a libertarian candidate with the charisma of Obama. Someone who can say, “we need change, we need better health care, better education, safer communities. We need to be more compassionate. We need to look after the environment better. And the best way to do these things is with the instruments of civil society and not the government”.
How do you like that, Blues? I even capitalised the C in Constitution. I feel strangely dirty, like if we were in prison, I’d be your bitch. What can I say to redeem myself.
Global Warming is a massive problem and we need to take it seriously!!!
OK, that’s better.
To tell you the truth, my jaw kept getting closer and closer to the floor as I read this post. You obviously have the instinct and intellect to understand our founding better than a lot (or most?) Americans do. The last few lines make me a little nervous that the preceding lines were also tongue in cheek, but even if that were true, your understanding is apparent in that I might even have to wonder if they were.
As I started reading the third paragraph, I thought, “Yeah, I knew there had to be a catch!” But your last sentence in that paragraph totally redeemed the whole thing. I hope you meant it, especially the part about looking after the environment being better served outside of government. If so, we agree, and that’s nice.
...and frankly, the whole constitutional republic thing you’ve got going on seems like a pretty cool way to run a country.
It looks great on paper, and it worked pretty much as intended for the first 150 - 180 years, but it’s starting to look like that’s the extent of its shelf life. But us constitutional optimists persevere in hopes of making it cool again. But I digress.....
I agree. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. It seems to me that people like Michael Moore are trying to say, “America’s broken, we need to be more like ... [insert Scandanavian Country With Universal Welfare]” That’s not the answer. Some Republican types on the other hand, try to say America isn’t broken, everything’s fine, America is wonderful, and so on. The problem with this attitude is that it shuts people off from seeing the many problems that are destroying you from within. You’re really in the shit when you can be self-critical, and sometimes the patriotic flag-waving from the right is as empty-headed as the progressive anti-Americanism of the left.
I think the answer is not to be less American, but more American, and the way to do that is to look back at the Constitution and understand what it’s creators were trying to achieve. Consider the moral crisis of slavery in the 19th century. The Constitution was a wonderful weapon against slavery because it said “all men are created equal”. In other words, America wasn’t created great in 1776, after all it still had slavery. But what was created was the potential for greatness. The point being that the greatness of America cannot be taken for granted but is always a work in progress and that work begins by upholding the Constitution.
I told you I had a libertarian streak. You need a libertarian candidate with the charisma of Obama. Someone who can say, “we need change, we need better health care, better education, safer communities. We need to be more compassionate. We need to look after the environment better. And the best way to do these things is with the instruments of civil society and not the government”.
How do you like that, Blues? I even capitalised the C in Constitution. I feel strangely dirty, like if we were in prison, I’d be your bitch. What can I say to redeem myself.
Global Warming is a massive problem and we need to take it seriously!!!
OK, that’s better.
To tell you the truth, my jaw kept getting closer and closer to the floor as I read this post. You obviously have the instinct and intellect to understand our founding better than a lot (or most?) Americans do. The last few lines make me a little nervous that the preceding lines were also tongue in cheek, but even if that were true, your understanding is apparent in that I might even have to wonder if they were.
As I started reading the third paragraph, I thought, “Yeah, I knew there had to be a catch!” But your last sentence in that paragraph totally redeemed the whole thing. I hope you meant it, especially the part about looking after the environment being better served outside of government. If so, we agree, and that’s nice.
Blues
I meant every word, including the bit about global warming. One of my big issues is sound money, which, I understand, was one of the great concerns of the founding fathers. The American Revolution was a revolution against taxation, and the founding fathers knew that currency manipulation was just another form of taxation. And yet now we have a system whereby the government and the Federal Reserve think it is there job to run the economy through the lever of interest rates. For the last decade, the Fed has been lowering rates to keep Wall St happy and thereby taxing the middle class with inflation that is now really starting to hurt. It hurt my parents, who lost half of their retirement savings in a pension scheme that went under during this current credit squeeze which everyone thinks the Fed should fix, without acknowledging that they created it in the first place.
Another one of my big issues is sustainability. It’s going to be vital this century on a planet with a growing population and ever-increasing competition for resources. Unfortunately, sustainability is a word that isn’t well understand. It isn’t simply an environmental idea. For example, in recent years the only thing driving the global economy has been US consumption, based on debt and an artificially high US dollar. This is not sustainable and is currently unwinding. And yet the American public and Washington has yet to come to terms with this reality. For America to continue to thrive it needs to be genuinely competitive and yet it has laughable uncompetitive labour laws. You need look no further than Detroit. It’s all very well for the Democrats to say that workers have this and that right, but the reality of the changing world will force you to change or collapse.
Anyone reading my occassional rants on the US dollar who understands economics would know that I subscribe to the Austrian view of economics. It’s the only view that makes any sense whatsoever of the tsunami that is sweeping the global economy. All the CNBC types are just scratching their heads and struggling to catch up. The Austrian School has a strong libertarian streak. I tend to agree with what makes the most sense to me, whether it’s global warming theory or Austrian economics.
Personally I don’t care if torture is or isn’t effective (as far as I have seen the results are mixed, apparently some of the statements they got from KSM was rubbish).
Anyway, as I said. The effectiveness is a non-point to me. Torture is just plain wrong, always. I’m fully aware that not all agree with me though.
I’m curious. Is there a list of things considered to be torture? I noticed this from Hitchens:
Waterboarding [...] has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,”
how much time?
Perhaps after the dirty bomb? How does one know how much time they have before the attack? These are fucking people that want a nuclear cloud above our cities, and you want us to be polite with them? What’s it like to be an appeaser and coward? How do you teach your kids? “hey look son, I know they’re killing our family, but we have to try and understand their culture, then we’ll reason with their ideology. Once they understand that we mean no harm, we’ll swap flowers and sing Kumbaya”.
Did Hitler want to negotiate? Not even when he killed himself. AND, his ideology was not based on religion.
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,”
how much time?
Perhaps after the dirty bomb? How does one know how much time they have before the attack? These are fucking people that want a nuclear cloud above our cities, and you want us to be polite with them? What’s it like to be an appeaser and coward? How do you teach your kids? “hey look son, I know they’re killing our family, but we have to try and understand their culture, then we’ll reason with their ideology. Once they understand that we mean no harm, we’ll swap flowers and sing Kumbaya”.
Did Hitler want to negotiate? Not even when he killed himself. AND, his ideology was not based on religion.
The argument in favour often tends to come down to the hypothetical ‘24’ situation, where the bomb is ticking and torture is the only way to get the location. But in the REAL WORLD, how often does this happen? According to some of the leading experts, never.
A coward? Steady on. It’s simply a point of view that resorting to violence to get what you want might not be the most sensible way of doing it, and that it’s ineffective, self-deceptive, self-destructive and ultimately self-defeating.
Clearly, torture may sometimes persuade people to reveal information they would not otherwise have divulged. But that does not mean that permitting torture might keep you safe.
The US army intelligence manual is clear: “The use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” This military common sense has been abandoned in the past few years in favour of the brutal, politically driven shortcut. Alberto Mora, until recently general counsel of the US Navy, argues: “Getting the information became the overriding objective. But there was a failure to look more broadly at the ramifications… When you put together the pieces, it’s all so sad.”
As I started reading the third paragraph, I thought, “Yeah, I knew there had to be a catch!” But your last sentence in that paragraph totally redeemed the whole thing. I hope you meant it, especially the part about looking after the environment being better served outside of government. If so, we agree, and that’s nice.
I’ve always said that the issue of global warming should be broken down into two parts. 1) is it happening, 2) what should we do about it. With number 1, I say yes, but with number 2 I don’t really know, and am I highly skeptical of the ability of governments to deal with this issue intelligently.
Take oil exploration off the Florida coast. It seems absurd to me that Cuba is drilling for oil off the coast of Florida but America isn’t. The amount of oil off the coast is not enough to make any real difference in CO2 composition in 50 years, but it will make a significant difference to oil prices and to energy security in the US. And as I’ve argued before, combating global warming this century will be nigh on impossible if we don’t continue to have relative peace and prosperity. And besides, you’re still consuming more oil than anyone else, but it’s as if your politicians think it’s OK to burn other people’s oil, just not your own. So the US is filling the atmosphere with CO2, lining the pockets of some of the most despotic nations on earth to buy oil, and then telling yourselves you’re green, because you don’t drill in ANWR. It’s so many kinds of stupid I don’t know where to begin.
What will make a difference is China and whether they burn all their coal? Firstly, we won’t be able to make them. Secondly, the West won’t be able to subsidise them into alternatives because we won’t be able to afford to. The only thing we can do is to develop technologies that narrow the gap between the cost of burning coal and the cost of alternatives, as well as further developing our understanding of climate whereby we can more accurate understand the risks of burning coal Vrs the risks of using alternatives. I believe that when the risks of burning coal are better understood and the costs of alternatives come down, China may well rationally choose to keep their coal in the ground. After all, if our understanding of climate change continues to warn us of the dangers, then rational choice theory would determine that we would rationally apply a cost to carbon, rather than imposing one artificially.
The problem we have, however, is the standard of discourse regarding climate change is so appalling - there is so much junk science thrown around - that is it impossible for anyone to disentangle the ideology and make a rational choice about what the best path forward might be. My faith in government to do this disentangling is pretty thin, but my faith in civil society (the internet, universities, the free press, etc) to do this is somewhat greater.
What I found surprising in Hitchens’ article is that he says that members of the elite team he was researching had to learn about waterboarding by being waterboarded, “until recently.” So, I guess he’s saying they don’t receive that training anymore? That seems pretty stupid to me if it’s true. No matter what our military’s policy on the practice is, these warriors should still be allowed to prepare for being caught and having it used on them.
I read it to mean that “until recently” it was only done by Americans on other Americans in training, and that “recently” it is now not only something to be trained for, but also something certain Americans are being trained to use on prisoners. I could be wrong though.
If they have stopped training for it then I agree with you, it seems pretty stupid to me too.
BluesStringer - 04 July 2008 03:21 PM
Oh! I know! Let’s say I am a bounty hunter and track my rapist-prey to Mexico, capture him, send him back to the States to face the sentence that he’s already been given while being tried in absentia because he ran while he was on bail, and the Mexican Policia arrest me and my family and charge me with bounty hunting, a crime in Mexico. (This really happened to a well-known bounty hunter here) Do you think that the “rights” that the Mexican government affords me will have any resemblance whatsoever to the real rights I enjoy in my country? Of course they won’t! Nor should they. They are a sovereign nation, and as such, would laugh us out of the Security Council chambers if we demanded that our set of rights be conferred upon someone charged with a crime in their country. And this example is about two “friends” that share borders and a continent! When we’re talking military action, historically, “rights” go out the window, and that, too, is as it should be.
Are you talking about the “Dog the Bounty Hunter” mess?
He was never arrested by the Mexican police. If I remember it right he was arrested by American police on a request from Mexico. There was talk of extradition for him to face the charges in Mexico but the last I heard the charges had been dropped by the Mexicans and the extradition order had also been thrown out.
However, to the larger point, of course you cannot expect American rights when arrested abroad, just as a foreign citizen arrested in the US cannot expect to be subject to their own countries law instead of American ones. You should get all (or almost all) of the rights accorded to the citizens on that country when arrested, just as I would were I arrested here in the US. In addition to that, in most countries you would get some additional rights above what local citizens there would get, as listed in the Vienna Convention, the main part of which says they authorities that are holding you must notify your embassy or consulate. This recently did not happen (but should have) in the case of a Mexican citizen convicted of a crime in Texas.
On the issue of the reliability of info gotten through waterboarding, the Hitchens article mentioned:
To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.”
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,”
how much time?
Perhaps after the dirty bomb? How does one know how much time they have before the attack? These are fucking people that want a nuclear cloud above our cities, and you want us to be polite with them? What’s it like to be an appeaser and coward? How do you teach your kids? “hey look son, I know they’re killing our family, but we have to try and understand their culture, then we’ll reason with their ideology. Once they understand that we mean no harm, we’ll swap flowers and sing Kumbaya”.
Did Hitler want to negotiate? Not even when he killed himself. AND, his ideology was not based on religion.
calm down dude
I was actually making your point
There may not be another attack for 5 years, but the sooner we get any information, the better simply because we can act on that information, minimizing missed opportunities
I’ve always said that the issue of global warming should be broken down into two parts. 1) is it happening, 2) what should we do about it. With number 1, I say yes, but with number 2 I don’t really know, and am I highly skeptical of the ability of governments to deal with this issue intelligently.
I agree those are the two key points. I am not convinced of the first. Even so, even if there definitely is no global warming, there are some things every country, the US in particular, should be doing just because it’s the right thing to do. Energy independence to me isn’t simply an environmental issue. I think that’s a nice side effect. Energy independence is a security, stability, and freedom issue.
It makes sense to me to product power from hydro, solar, nuclear, coal, and oil combined. Solar, for example, makes financial sense to anyone building a home who is looking to live there for the long haul. You can install enough solar paneling to power your home and pay for it over 10 years if you take the offset in energy savings and apply it to higher mortgage payments. It makes sense. If all new homes in the US did that we’d be quite a long way to energy independence.
Geothermal heating and cooling often can make financial sense over a period of time, as can grey water collection, and simple things like outside shutters! To me this has a nice side effect of being good to the environment, but the key thing to me, personally, is that I can make my own energy independence. If states and the country as a whole took a similar approach in key areas we would significantly reduce our requirements for fossil fuels, allowing them to be used to supplement needs that can’t currently be covered using newer methods.
The problem we have, however, is the standard of discourse regarding climate change is so appalling - there is so much junk science thrown around - that is it impossible for anyone to disentangle the ideology and make a rational choice about what the best path forward might be. My faith in government to do this disentangling is pretty thin, but my faith in civil society (the internet, universities, the free press, etc) to do this is somewhat greater.
I agree. This is why I remain entirely skeptical. There has been so little honest discourse that I can’t trust any of it. Until that communication is open and honest within the scientific AND political community I will remain a skeptic.
“If one water-board session got him to talk, you could have gotten him to talk (without it), given time and patience,”
how much time?
Perhaps after the dirty bomb? How does one know how much time they have before the attack? These are fucking people that want a nuclear cloud above our cities, and you want us to be polite with them? What’s it like to be an appeaser and coward? How do you teach your kids? “hey look son, I know they’re killing our family, but we have to try and understand their culture, then we’ll reason with their ideology. Once they understand that we mean no harm, we’ll swap flowers and sing Kumbaya”.
Did Hitler want to negotiate? Not even when he killed himself. AND, his ideology was not based on religion.
calm down dude
I was actually making your point
There may not be another attack for 5 years, but the sooner we get any information, the better simply because we can act on that information, minimizing missed opportunities
Sorry, it not you guys, it’s the media that pisses me off so.
r.j., I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve said. Like LD, I’m not convinced of #1, but I hold no ill-will towards anyone simply for believing it is happening. I guess I have to admit that I’ve read you eschew government involvement before, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff sometimes in these conversations. What I mean is, nearly all who believe in #1 as strongly as you do here in the states, are manifesting that belief by demanding government action. It’s constant. It’s ubiquitous. You can’t get away from it unless you become a hermit and don’t take a radio with you. Not even an emergency weather radio! Until the last few posts of yours, I can honestly say that I’ve never heard a committed global warmer say government is not the answer in such unequivocal terms. While it’s a relief to read it here from you, I guess, for me, it’s kind of like the issue itself; I can’t help but be somewhat skeptical. That’s not intended to call bullshit on anything you’ve said, just an admission that I’m capable of knee-jerk reactions as much as the next guy. I don’t like being sterotyped as a conservative, like being called racist, homophobic, sexist, warmonger on and on and on, and that’s what I’ve done where you’re concerned. I apologize for that.
In the future, whenever I’m tempted to get a dig in on you about global warming, I will try to remind myself that you’re not the enemy, that you believe about government involvement pretty much as I do. If I fail to remind myself and go off half-cocked, perhaps you can find it in yourself to give me a gentle reminder before (threatening?) to put me on ignore.
Gotta git. Dinner’s ready and I’ve already had my humble pie for desert.
r.j., I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve said. Like LD, I’m not convinced of #1, but I hold no ill-will towards anyone simply for believing it is happening. I guess I have to admit that I’ve read you eschew government involvement before, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff sometimes in these conversations. What I mean is, nearly all who believe in #1 as strongly as you do here in the states, are manifesting that belief by demanding government action. It’s constant. It’s ubiquitous. You can’t get away from it unless you become a hermit and don’t take
