Will Saddam be killed? Yes
Total Iraqi civillian casualties: 500 dead
Total military casualties Iraq: 3000 dead
Total military casualties U.S.: 15 dead
Will the Iraqi army regulars hold the lines? No
Will the Republican Guard fight to the end? No
Will chem/bio weapons be used on invading troops?: Yes
Will Saddam launch attacks on the Kurds? Yes
Will Saddam launch attacks on Israel? No
-If yes; will Isreal retaliate harshly? Yes
Will Saddam sacrifice Baghdad (gas/nuke it)? No
Will the Kurds make a grab for independence? Yes
Will Iran do anything silly like try for land? Yes
Will Saddam burn the oil fields? Yes
How long will the US be occupying Iraq? ~15 years
Will the Iraq war catalyze increased terrorism in America?No
In the long run, will this war be good or bad for the world? Good
We have to look at what those civilian casualties are- just because they're civilian doesn't make them innocent! Lets take a look at a few possibilities:
1) A civilian walking down the street to market gets killed by a cruise missile fired at the market.
2) A civilian asleep in their house is killed when their house is targetting by a smart bomb and blown up.
OK, these two are regrettable innocents being killed- but since the US doesn't make a habit of targetting markets or houses, they're very small in number!
3) A civilian working at a chemical weapon factory gets killed when the chemical weapon plant is bombed.
4) A civilian security guard at a weapons depot is killed when the weapons explode.
5) A civilian contractor repairing a tank is killed by a MOAB dropped on the unit.
6) A civilian engineer is killed when the military command center he works at is destroyed.
7) A civilian delivering snackiecakes to the baghdad bunker vending machines eats a 5,000lb bunker buster.
etc, etc. The list goes on. My point is that there are a lot of civilians directly supporting the military that aren't exactly "innocent" and would be mire rightly counted among the military casualties than civilian. I'm a civilian and work for the US military, but I acknowledge I'm also a valid military target because of what I do. And I think the vast majority of civilian casualties in this campaign will not be innocent.
Crow posted:hey drwhat maybe if you spent more time learning about the victorious proletariat peoples and less time doing monopoly finance capital bULL FUCKIN sHIT, u wouldnt consider Bertolt Brecht "pretentious" U ass.
i'm working on it. in the meantime the continued fascination of the left with inscrutable esoterica is counterproductive to actually getting anyone else involved. if we already know counterintelligence programs have been encouraging leftists to be paranoid shut-ins for the past 50+ years, it doesn't seem so much of a stretch to imagine they have also been encouraging leftists to be totally inscrutable jerkoffs as well. jargon and obscure reference actively work against wider understanding. either you want other people involved or you don't.
Crow posted:Actually, Brecht is easy and simple to read. Cheers.
Um, five consonants in six letters? Easy? Are you fucking joking?
Crow posted:Actually, Brecht is easy and simple to read. Cheers.
he's really cool and good as well, his theories about theatre are still relevant (and taught) and he made genuinely accessible proletarian art (3 penny opera, for example).
shriekingviolet posted:Yeah as much as cointel has poisoned the well with regards to the use of revolutionary vocabulary, trying to skirt around it with vague wording and avoidance of naming a clear platform is the actual path the left took and it absolutely destroyed them. You need to take a strong, unambiguous line with the masses or you'll mean nothing to them, and you need to internally organize groups around a strong, unambiguous plan and tenets or you'll be a sitting duck for subversion and division. The only feasible answer to the problem is to confront narrative opposition directly and agitate for the legitimacy of our claims and the truth of the world's revolutionary history, not to abandon it.
this is really good to keep in mind when people tell you to read gramsci for some reason. hundreds of interpretations for stuff thats interesting but ultimately eh and leads many to really bad practice
it's not a matter of jargon i dont think, but moreso conceptual understanding.
cars posted:bhpn/Petrol if you're interested, that entire 2050 report is a free download, which is good because that's what a lot of their conclusions are worth anyway http://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=ForecastingTo2050 you just have to give them a fake name and email, or if you're feeling generous i'm sure they'd accept a contribution to their rhizzone alumni endowment
that link worked without having to enter anything. which is a shame because i was excited about finally havign a use for this reagan,com address
Crow posted:
I wonder if the blind oracle they keep chained in the back of The Onion's offices gets good benefits.
shriekingviolet posted:Yeah as much as cointel has poisoned the well with regards to the use of revolutionary vocabulary, trying to skirt around it with vague wording and avoidance of naming a clear platform is the actual path the left took and it absolutely destroyed them. You need to take a strong, unambiguous line with the masses or you'll mean nothing to them, and you need to internally organize groups around a strong, unambiguous plan and tenets or you'll be a sitting duck for subversion and division. The only feasible answer to the problem is to confront narrative opposition directly and agitate for the legitimacy of our claims and the truth of the world's revolutionary history, not to abandon it.
i think this makes sense and i am not suggesting abandoning unambiguous difference or not demonstrating intellectual coherence. i sincerely appreciate the work people put into this.
it is just my thing that i have to bitch about every few months, because i am not completely stupid and i read things as much as i have time for (i.e. not much), but without a university education once in a while these conversations become a fucking swamp and it shouldn't have to be like that. "read a book" is great and all but when things are said which could obviously be translated into some more widely accessible vernacular or without sly references that you'd have to have Read The Book™ to get, i end up wondering if the motivation is really communication or just textual in-group posturing. language is class too, i'm sure that's obvious to everyone here.
i don't want to have a big knock down fight about it tho. we are all doing our best i think.
shriekingviolet posted:Crow posted:I wonder if the blind oracle they keep chained in the back of The Onion's offices gets good benefits.
I mean I hear cia takes care of its own
drwhat posted:shriekingviolet posted:Yeah as much as cointel has poisoned the well with regards to the use of revolutionary vocabulary, trying to skirt around it with vague wording and avoidance of naming a clear platform is the actual path the left took and it absolutely destroyed them. You need to take a strong, unambiguous line with the masses or you'll mean nothing to them, and you need to internally organize groups around a strong, unambiguous plan and tenets or you'll be a sitting duck for subversion and division. The only feasible answer to the problem is to confront narrative opposition directly and agitate for the legitimacy of our claims and the truth of the world's revolutionary history, not to abandon it.
i think this makes sense and i am not suggesting abandoning unambiguous difference or not demonstrating intellectual coherence. i sincerely appreciate the work people put into this.
it is just my thing that i have to bitch about every few months, because i am not completely stupid and i read things as much as i have time for (i.e. not much), but without a university education once in a while these conversations become a fucking swamp and it shouldn't have to be like that. "read a book" is great and all but when things are said which could obviously be translated into some more widely accessible vernacular or without sly references that you'd have to have Read The Book™ to get, i end up wondering if the motivation is really communication or just textual in-group posturing. language is class too, i'm sure that's obvious to everyone here.
i don't want to have a big knock down fight about it tho. we are all doing our best i think.
you don't need a college education to read marxist-leninists. Read that.
Urbandale posted:shriekingviolet posted:Yeah as much as cointel has poisoned the well with regards to the use of revolutionary vocabulary, trying to skirt around it with vague wording and avoidance of naming a clear platform is the actual path the left took and it absolutely destroyed them. You need to take a strong, unambiguous line with the masses or you'll mean nothing to them, and you need to internally organize groups around a strong, unambiguous plan and tenets or you'll be a sitting duck for subversion and division. The only feasible answer to the problem is to confront narrative opposition directly and agitate for the legitimacy of our claims and the truth of the world's revolutionary history, not to abandon it.
this is really good to keep in mind when people tell you to read gramsci for some reason. hundreds of interpretations for stuff thats interesting but ultimately eh and leads many to really bad practice
Wow blasphemy 
Crow posted:drwhat posted:shriekingviolet posted:Yeah as much as cointel has poisoned the well with regards to the use of revolutionary vocabulary, trying to skirt around it with vague wording and avoidance of naming a clear platform is the actual path the left took and it absolutely destroyed them. You need to take a strong, unambiguous line with the masses or you'll mean nothing to them, and you need to internally organize groups around a strong, unambiguous plan and tenets or you'll be a sitting duck for subversion and division. The only feasible answer to the problem is to confront narrative opposition directly and agitate for the legitimacy of our claims and the truth of the world's revolutionary history, not to abandon it.
i think this makes sense and i am not suggesting abandoning unambiguous difference or not demonstrating intellectual coherence. i sincerely appreciate the work people put into this.
it is just my thing that i have to bitch about every few months, because i am not completely stupid and i read things as much as i have time for (i.e. not much), but without a university education once in a while these conversations become a fucking swamp and it shouldn't have to be like that. "read a book" is great and all but when things are said which could obviously be translated into some more widely accessible vernacular or without sly references that you'd have to have Read The Book™ to get, i end up wondering if the motivation is really communication or just textual in-group posturing. language is class too, i'm sure that's obvious to everyone here.
i don't want to have a big knock down fight about it tho. we are all doing our best i think.you don't need a college education to read marxist-leninists. Read that.
Sure, starving 19th century Russian peasants were somehow able to figure it out but the modern amerikkkan literate common man just can't crack the code. Can you maybe squeeze it down to 140 characters and a hashtag? We just don't have as much leisure time as they used to back then
Edited by MarxUltor ()
All Russia was learning to read, and reading—politics, economics, history—because the people wanted to know. . . . In every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper—sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts—but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky.—John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
http://isreview.org/issue/82/education-literacy-and-russian-revolution
apparently 60% were illiterate and there was a shitload of pamphlets . someone email drwhat a pamphlet so he can print it out
Anna-Louise Strong, an American journalist who traveled extensively in Russia after the revolution, wrote about her experiences and recounts a conversation with one teacher:
“We call it the Work School,” said a teacher to me. “We base all study on the child’s play and his relation to productive work. We begin with the life around him. How do the people in the village get their living? What do they produce? What tools do they use to produce it? Do they eat it all or exchange some of it? For what do they exchange it? What are horses and their use to man? What are pigs and what makes them fat? What are families and how do they support each other, and what is a village that organizes and cares for the families?”
“This is interesting nature study and sociology,” I replied, “but how do you teach mathematics?” He looked at me in surprise.
“By real problems about real situations,” he answered. “Can we use a textbook in which a lord has ten thousand rubles and puts five thousand out at interest and the children are asked what his profit is? The old mathematics is full of problems the children never see now, of situations and money values which no longer exist, of transactions which we do not wish to encourage. Also it was always purely formal, divorced from existence.
We have simple problems in addition, to find out how many cows there are in the village, by adding the number in each family. Simple problems of division of food, to know how much the village can export. Problems of proportion,—if our village has three hundred families and the next has one thousand, how many red soldiers must each give to the army, how many delegates is each entitled to in the township soviet? The older children work out the food-tax for their families; that really begins to interest the parents in our schools.”
MarxUltor posted:Sure, starving 19th century Russian peasants were somehow able to figure it out but the modern amerikkkan literate common man just can't crack the code. Can you maybe squeeze it down to 140 characters and a hashtag? We just don't have as much leisure time as they used to back then
enriching centrifuges. By the time the administration helped restart the lagging multinational talks in 2013, Iran had almost 20,000, though most use outdated technology from the 1970s.
“The day walked in . . . Iran was already a nuclear threshold state,” said Robert Einhorn, a senior fellow with the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “Full rollback, to zero centrifuges, was not a realistic or obtainable objective.”
Is it possible that the old society's separation of theory from practice can have no influence on us? No, it is not! It is true that none of you students are studying Marxism-Leninism for the sake of advancement and money and or oppressing the exploited. Yet is it possible to maintain that none of you ever entertains the idea that your thoughts, words, deeds and life do not necessarily have to be guided by Marxist-Leninist principles or that you do not intend to put all the principles that you have learned into practice? Is it possible that none of you ever thinks of studying Marxism-Leninism or going deeper into the theory as a means of getting ahead in life, of showing off and becoming famous? I cannot guarantee that none of you thinks along these lines. That kind of thinking runs counter to Marxism-Leninism and to the basic Marxist-Leninist principle of the integration of theory and practice. Certainly we must study theory, but we must also practice what we learn. And it is for the sake of practice, of the Party, of the people, and of the victory of the revolution that we study theory.
NoFreeWill posted:cool part about soviet math education
Anna-Louise Strong, an American journalist who traveled extensively in Russia after the revolution, wrote about her experiences and recounts a conversation with one teacher:
“We call it the Work School,” said a teacher to me. “We base all study on the child’s play and his relation to productive work. We begin with the life around him. How do the people in the village get their living? What do they produce? What tools do they use to produce it? Do they eat it all or exchange some of it? For what do they exchange it? What are horses and their use to man? What are pigs and what makes them fat? What are families and how do they support each other, and what is a village that organizes and cares for the families?”
“This is interesting nature study and sociology,” I replied, “but how do you teach mathematics?” He looked at me in surprise.
“By real problems about real situations,” he answered. “Can we use a textbook in which a lord has ten thousand rubles and puts five thousand out at interest and the children are asked what his profit is? The old mathematics is full of problems the children never see now, of situations and money values which no longer exist, of transactions which we do not wish to encourage. Also it was always purely formal, divorced from existence.
We have simple problems in addition, to find out how many cows there are in the village, by adding the number in each family. Simple problems of division of food, to know how much the village can export. Problems of proportion,—if our village has three hundred families and the next has one thousand, how many red soldiers must each give to the army, how many delegates is each entitled to in the township soviet? The older children work out the food-tax for their families; that really begins to interest the parents in our schools.”
Now we know where the inspiration for common core came from
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:iran seems like a cool place aside from all the gay stuff but it's funny that western countries presume to have moral high ground on that topic. it's like if we justified war with mexico in 1870 based on the fact that they still had slavery
plus, saudi is exactly the same in that way
Saudi works the same way
