Anti-American Protesters

[hopperboo]

This was posted at another site and I thought it was pretty intense and I wanted to hear some more comments.

Personally I have no use for these kind of people, and I don't think America has use for them either.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zja97pocN8U&eurl=

[Shwenn]

There are retarded people who think the sky is blue. That has no bearing on what color the sky is. There is nothing we can learn from that about the color of the sky. I think this video you've posted is ultra conservatives resorting to petty logical falacies.

Yes, there are complete morons on both sides of the fence. I think we're all aware of that.

Here are some very informative YouTube videos about U.S. foreign policy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFdFvihF_NM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCp1gqlR5ZE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIqwxv35dyc

[Ragoczy]

There are retarded people who think the sky is blue. That has no bearing on what color the sky is. There is nothing we can learn from that about the color of the sky. I think this video you've posted is ultra conservatives resorting to petty logical falacies.

Yes, there are complete morons on both sides of the fence. I think we're all aware of that.

Here are some very informative YouTube videos about U.S. foreign policy.

Um ... the video from the original post consists primarily of the protesters' own words and refusal to answer questions. There weren't any fallacies, logical or factual, presented by the makers of the film -- there were some pretty illogical ideas and outright lies presented by those being filmed, though.

Your examples are not useful.

CCR is a leftist, anti-American organization that has no fundamental understanding of Constitutional law.

The video on "war crimes" shows a lack of understanding of what war crimes are -- and what war actually entails. Civilian deaths and injuries in time of conflict are not inherently war crimes and never have been -- by that logic, every soldier in history has been a war criminal. If you believe that, then you're naive and misguided.

[Shwenn]

Um ... the video from the original post consists primarily of the protesters' own words and refusal to answer questions. There weren't any fallacies, logical or factual, presented by the makers of the film -- there were some pretty illogical ideas and outright lies presented by those being filmed, though.

No, the argument wasn't explicit. I still think it was there.

CCR is a leftist, anti-American organization that has no fundamental understanding of Constitutional law.

What does CCR have to do with anything? That was the audience, it's irrelevant. That's not what that video was about.

Maybe this will sit better with you, unless you think Congress has no fundamental understanding of Constitutional law:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcjsYutrxXc

The video on "war crimes" shows a lack of understanding of what war crimes are -- and what war actually entails. Civilian deaths and injuries in time of conflict are not inherently war crimes and never have been -- by that logic, every soldier in history has been a war criminal. If you believe that, then you're naive and misguided.

The use of chemical weapons is a war crime regardless of the target, intended or not. Most of the victims were insurgents. They didn't hide that fact. They didn't have to.

[Ragoczy]

No, the argument wasn't explicit. I still think it was there.

So provide an example, otherwise the statement is useless rhetoric.

What does CCR have to do with anything? That was the audience, it's irrelevant. That's not what that video was about.

CCR is the source of the video. The source influences the content, just as in the video from the original post, and must be considered. CCR supports the UN Declaration on Human Rights, one of the most reprehensible documents on "rights" ever created. As such, their understanding of "rights" is rather limited.

Maybe this will sit better with you, unless you think Congress has no fundamental understanding of Constitutional law

The US Congress has no fundamental understanding of the US Constitution. This has been an established fact since the first entitlement program and has been getting steadily worse.

The use of chemical weapons is a war crime regardless of the target, intended or not. Most of the victims were insurgents. They didn't hide that fact. They didn't have to.

By the definition presented in the video, all explosives would be considered chemical weapons. Further, you're relying a freakin' YouTube video here -- where's the documentation of the source and that the guy speaking isn't some freak living in his mom's basement?

[Shwenn]

So provide an example, otherwise the statement is useless rhetoric.

I apologize but I don't have enough faith in your intellectual honesty to pursue this.

CCR is the source of the video. The source influences the content, just as in the video from the original post, and must be considered. CCR supports the UN Declaration on Human Rights, one of the most reprehensible documents on "rights" ever created. As such, their understanding of "rights" is rather limited.

The US Congress has no fundamental understanding of the US Constitution. This has been an established fact since the first entitlement program and has been getting steadily worse.

Who does this guy have to tell the story to before you will address the story? You tell me who the audience has to be and I will try to find a video of him telling this story to that audience. FIRST, you have to explain to me how the same guy telling the same story is of no concern to you unless and until you believe he's telling the story to people who understand constitutional law.

By the definition presented in the video, all explosives would be considered chemical weapons. Further, you're relying a freakin' YouTube video here -- where's the documentation of the source and that the guy speaking isn't some freak living in his mom's basement?

I actually have a very intimate knowledge of the whole White Phosphorus scandal and international outrage. The video is a snippet from an Italian documentary on the subject. The U.S. government finally admitted using it in the face of overwhelming evidence, after lying about it repeatedly.

It was a huge deal that you somehow managed to completely miss. The fact that you are unfamiliar with it has somehow convinced you that I am an idiot. Again, I don't see how that follows.

[hopperboo]

Yes, there are complete morons on both sides of the fence. I think we're all aware of that.

Oh, I totally agree. 100%.

But I was asking about the specific video.

[Ragoczy]

Protest in the public square is the ultimate American act; there's a quote from a movie from the Nineties (Rude Awakening) where a protester's patriotism is challenged and he replies: I am a patriot; I love my country; I am duty-bound to make it better.

On either side of the issue are either the blind "patriots" who see nothing America does as ever being bad and those who, for some reason, really despise America and see nothing good in it. Both attitudes are, ultimately, unAmerican -- and pretty stupid.

The anti-war protesters who have an honest belief that their country is doing something wrong in Iraq have not only a right but a responsibility to speak out against it. I think they're misguided and naive, but that doesn't make them less patriotic.

On the other hand, there're those who are simply opposed to anything American; those who've never been proud of their country in their adult lives and still aren't (because their spouses aren't running for President yet, I presume). They aren't patriots for speaking out, they're enemies.

This protest was likely made up of both groups, but only the latter made it into the final video, because that's what the filmmaker wanted to portray. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's the nature of documentary film-making that the clips that support the creator's agenda are those that are included, but it is why all documentaries, especially those you agree with, should be taken with a grain of salt. The exception to this rule, of course, is anything by Micheal Moore, which should be taken with Pepto Bismol.

[hopperboo]

The exception to this rule, of course, is anything by Micheal Moore, which should be taken with Pepto Bismol.

LOL, great!

[Shwenn]

Ragoczy,

I think what we have here is an internet forum equivalent of "Jinx, buy me a coke."

[gagged_Louise]

On either side of the issue are either the blind "patriots" who see nothing America does as ever being bad and those who, for some reason, really despise America and see nothing good in it. Both attitudes are, ultimately, unAmerican -- and pretty stupid.

The anti-war protesters who have an honest belief that their country is doing something wrong in Iraq have not only a right but a responsibility to speak out against it. I think they're misguided and naive, but that doesn't make them less patriotic.

Yes, on both sides there's these all-out guys who really don't care about any moral issues but revenge and hate. True outside of the US too - you'd be surprised how freely the brand "America haters" has been waved about in the European media for the past five years. Still, no one would expect the people interviewed on camera at a rally like this to be totally exhaustive about why they are there. They know that whatever they say will be cut down to soundbites and punchlines, so of course they tend to paint in broad strokes sometimes. And as the general mood in the US media has been so heavily pro-war for the past five or six years, they are merely using their right to speak up. For them as citizens this is a moral duty, as Ragoczy pointed out, and it's not cheap.

I think they are right in implying that the media ignore the number of civilian deaths since 2003 and before it (due to the embargos on medicine etc). It's the same outside the US, ten US soldiers dead is much more news than the continuous bloodletting around the country.

Besides, this kind of protest is motivated by knowing that you're not getting through in the mainstream media with any sensible questions. Any war polarizes in this way today, at least in a democracy - the time when you could unite the country behind a war against an inherently evil regime is long gone, especially when this regime is on the other side of the planet and is no real threat at all to the USA (true of both North Vietnam/FNL in the '60s and Iraq in 2003). So opinion unity has to be created, you have to sell the war and the sense of unity.

The guy who is interviewing mentions the 1971 Winter Soldier event (at Detroit) to look into the possible US war crimes and excess brutalities in Vietnam - that one was ignored by all the national media when it happened it seems (though it was later referred to in th US Congress). Not being American I had to look it up on Wikipedia. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Sometimes, being a patriot has to mean that you don't accept all things just because "right or wrong, it's my country". I think we're at one on that vital point Ragoczy.

What does CCR have to do with anything? That was the audience, it's irrelevant. That's not what that video was about

.

CCR is the source of the video. The source influences the content, just as in the video from the original post, and must be considered. CCR supports the UN Declaration on Human Rights, one of the most reprehensible documents on "rights" ever created.

Isn't it obvious that the people who shot, edited and posted that video are affiliated with the Republican party and strong supporters of the Iraq war? The reference to John Kerry and hos taking part in the anti-war movement of the 70s is very telling (unlike Bush jr Kerry had seen actual frontier service). Watching a video is not the same as actually being there on the spot, so editing and picking what to show matters a lot with any film, especially documentary/news footage. This one has a heavy biased wish to portray the protesters (not just at that particular rally) as ignorant hippies and total pacifist "pussies".

That the United Nations declaration of human rights is an abhorrent document - well, you're entitled to your view of course.

[Ragoczy]

That the United Nations declaration of human rights is an abhorrent document - well, you're entitled to your view of course.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

I draw your attention to Article 29(3):

"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

If your exercising your rights is contrary to the purposes of the UN, you can't do it. I find this abhorrent.

It's the argument of natural vs. granted rights. The US Constitution does not grant rights, it grants power to government. The enumeration of rights is considered a recognition, not a grant. The difference is that a granted right may be revoked by the granter, whereas a natural right is inherent in the individual.

The UN takes a wholly granter approach to human rights, with no recognition of natural rights. Therefore, the UN reserves to itself the power to violate the rights of the individual if their exercising that right is contrary to the UN's purpose.

[gagged_Louise]

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

I draw your attention to Article 29(3):

"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

If your exercising your rights is contrary to the purposes of the UN, you can't do it. I find this abhorrent.

It's the argument of natural vs. granted rights. The US Constitution does not grant rights, it grants power to government. The enumeration of rights is considered a recognition, not a grant. The difference is that a granted right may be revoked by the granter, whereas a natural right is inherent in the individual.

The UN takes a wholly granter approach to human rights, with no recognition of natural rights. Therefore, the UN reserves to itself the power to violate the rights of the individual if their exercising that right is contrary to the UN's purpose.

*excusing myself for keeping on this side of the topic, but it seems vital and this is my last post in the thread*

About the UN Declaration, well, nobody denies that it's hard to create a declaration of human rights - whether it's as a "bill of rights" or more generally stated, philosophical - one that's easy to issue and interpret, with sharp lines and easy to use in political reality. Americans are still arguing passionately about the essence of the Bill of Rights written more than 200 years ago, and about its relation to the power machinery of the constitution and to universal human rights. The law codes of many countries have some of the kind of "limit clause" you cited.

The UN was formed by countries with very different ideas of law and how to use the law - even Afghanistan was one of the founding members I think - so there was a need for that kind of clause to make the declaration viable. Both Truman, Hubert Humphrey (who was instrumental in working on the declaration) and Stalin understood that. The declaration isn't legally binding by itself really, but it managed to get a majority in the UN at the time (1948) - the countries who put themselves behind it by virtue of that vote - pledging to accept it - included China, Afghanistan, Britain, Soviet Russia, the USA and Turkey. Not an easy bunch to unite on the issues of human rights!

The UN declaration wasn't written to be used for any politically unified state, and the chances of getting to anyone who violates any of those rights if they are not tried under national law has always been an issue under fire. The new league of nations came about under the principle that every state is sovereign on its own territory and that you can't normally drag a state to court outside its own territory, except in a tribunal of War crimes, genocide and so on (the Nuremberg court, which was put in the deep freeze during the Cold War and emerged again as a plausible idea only in the 1990s as the International Court at The Hague. The other week that court received one of the most notorious warmongers of modern European history, Mr. Radovan Karadzic.

I think we're a bit to the side if we start arguing about whether the rights of US citizens are always natural rights; in practice, many Americans tie them in to the status of citizenship, of being an American. And the risk that some of those rights can be revoked at a time that's judged to be an "age of emergency" is all too clear from what's happened under Bush (Patriot Act etc). They can also be restricted so they won't apply to everyone (earlier racial segregation, which went unopposed for many many years).

The USA is certainly not the only country where people believe in inborn human rights - and that's part of the foundation for what those people at Santa Barbara were doing.

[Ragoczy]

*excusing myself for keeping on this side of the topic, but it seems vital and this is my last post in the thread*

About the UN Declaration, well, nobody denies that it's hard to create a declaration of human rights - whether it's as a "bill of rights" or more generally stated, philosophical - one that's easy to issue and interpret, with sharp lines and easy to use in political reality. Americans are still arguing passionately about the essence of the Bill of Rights written more than 200 years ago, and about its relation to the power machinery of the constitution and to universal human rights. The law codes of many countries have some of the kind of "limit clause" you cited.

The UN was formed by countries with very different ideas of law and how to use the law - even Afghanistan was one of the founding members I think - so there was a need for that kind of clause to make the declaration viable. Both Truman, Hubert Humphrey (who was instrumental in working on the declaration) and Stalin understood that. The declaration isn't legally binding by itself really, but it managed to get a majority in the UN at the time (1948) - the countries who put themselves behind it by virtue of that vote - pleedging to accept it - included China, Afghanistan, Britain, Soviet Russia, the USA and Turkey. Not an easy bunch to unite on the issues of human rights!

The UN declaration wasn't written to be used for any politically unified state, and the chances of getting to anyone who violates any of those rights if they are not tried under national law has always been an issue under fire. The new league of nations came about under the principle that every state is sovereign on its own territory and that you can't normally drag a state to court outside its own territory, except in a tribunal of War crimes, genocide and so on (the Nuremberg court, which was put in the deep freeze during the Cold War and emerged again as a plausible idea only in the 1990s as the International Court at The Hague. The other week that court received one of the most notorious warmongers of modern European history, Mr. Radovan Karadzic.

I think we're a bit to the side if we start arguing about whether the rights of US citizens are always natural rights; in practice, many Americans tie them in to the status of citizenship, of being an American. And the risk that some of those rights can be revoked at a time that's judged to be an "age of emergency" is all too clear from what's happened under under Bush (Patriot Act etc). They can also be restricted so they don't apply to everyone (earlier racial segregation, which went unopposed for many many years).

The USA is certainly not the only country where people believe in inborn human rights - and that's part of the foundation for what those people at Santa Barbara were doing.

Just a couple brief points:

Many of the drafters of the US Constitution didn't want the Bill of Rights included at all -- not because they didn't believe in the rights, but because they feared that enumerating them would lead to a belief that: a) they were granted and not natural; b) that they were the only rights. The latter fear was addressed by Amendment IX, which states that the enumeration does not deny the existence of other rights.

Both of these fears have become realized in the US. I can't count the number of times I've heard "That's not in the Constitution!" by someone denying that something's a right and our public school systems often teach that the Constitution "gives" us our rights. Unfortunately, most people don't make enough of a study on the topic to know any better.

American citizens, deliberately kept ignorant on the subject by a school system founded to educate people just enough to take instruction in factories, may have trouble with the concept, but legal precedent is clear: Constitutional protections apply to individuals, whether citizens or not, where the US has sovereignty. And in Boumediene (the Guantanamo decision), the protections were clarified to apply to individuals where US sovereignty was de facto as well as de jure.

My issue with the UN DOHR is that the inclusion of that exception gives the UN the power to deny someone a right because the UN says so. I have the same issue with any constitution -- if a country's constitution provides the government with the option to arbitrarily deny a right, then the rights aren't worth anything. The reason being that these documents, the rule of law, is there to protect the individual from the police powers of the State -- if the State gets to decide when those rights apply, then the protection doesn't exist.

With regard to the Patriot Act: I've actually read the entirety of the legislation (there's a fun evening) and although I have some issues with the language being vague enough for abuse, I've seen no practical application that I feel was unconstitutional, especially with its sunset provisions. Now, keep in mind that this is coming from someone who spent 10-years as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and reads Supreme Court decisions for leisure -- I take my Constitution pretty seriously.

The rights that are most often mentioned with regard to the Patriot Act are privacy rights and habeus corpus. Habeus was addressed by Boumediene, and the rule of law decided that the right applies to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo -- the Government didn't get to say "but that's contrary to the interests of the government" and make the decision go away, because the US Constitution contains no clause granting the government the power to do so: habeus rights are inherent in the US, regardless of the US' interests. (Yes, there's a provision to suspend habeus, but that hasn't been done at this time.)

But, yes, I understand that there's sometimes a balancing act necessary in order to maintain a political whole. Since you brought up race in the US, I'll go back to the beginning when the issue almost destroyed the country before it was even formed. If the Northern States had pushed, as most wanted, for the abolition of slavery from the start, the Southern States would not have joined the Union and we'd all be speaking english here right now ... erm, well, the funny kind from across the Pond, not the good english we have now.

The misconceptions around slavery in the US and the extent to which that balancing act went are incredible. One of the examples of this is the 3/5 clause in the Constitution, which most people here in America consider to be racist and pro-slavery, when in actuality it helped to abolish slavery earlier than would otherwise have been possible.

I'm going to stop now.

And, yes, for me, this was brief. Imagine if I decided to be verbose.

[Ragoczy]

And this is why I don't like getting involved in political threads. I wind up pissing people off and I really don't have the time for it.

I just wanted to point out to hopper that protest and disagreement are not inherently unAmerican, but are, ultimately, patriotic -- and look what I got myself into.

It's all her fault, someone should spank her.

[Flaming_Redhead]

I think the video is retarded. It's not very well done. Of course, protesters always seem to be the type of people you'd see on "Jerry Springer," so I didn't imagine we'd hear a lot of well-thought-out answers. The interviewer seemed to be nothing more than an anti-Kerry protester, so his objectivity is out the window for doing a serious interview anyway. Regardless, it's a free country. If you don't like it, you're free to leave, but when the country you go to locks you in a 3 x 6 cell and beats you for calling their president a liar, don't call us to bail your sorry ass out!

As far as the other videos, they're not any better. I don't know why anyone would attempt to get credible information from a site such as YouTube. They don't list their sources of information. Before they claim that we refused to sign a human rights bill with the UN, did they actually read the bill to see if it was even worth signing? I'm not worried about white phosphorus or any of the other stuff they put into bombs. The citizens were warned to leave the city. By refusing to evacuate, they signed their own death sentences. As for INS, the next time a bunch of illegal aliens gather for a protest like they did in New York, which they have no right to do here since they're not citizens, they need to round them all up and ship them back to where they came from. I'm sorry that Syria is such a horrible place, but if the guy was a citizen of Canada, we would've sent him back there instead.

[Torq]

OK, Folks

Agree and or dis-agree on the TOPIC!!!!

There is only a LITTLE latitude given in this Politics Forum,key word LITTLE!!

Please curb the unecessary "shots" at each other,,stay on TOPIC.

Please Read: http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=14615

Thank You,,Allllll

T

ps: I'll steal a line from hooperboo::: If I promise not to kill you can I have a hug? LOL