discipline posted:

you can tell this is bullshit because everyone knows that atlanta is the gay capital of the south so why is NO there?

aerdil posted:
U.S. hospitality: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_mourners/singleton/

They also kill people for simply visiting a place where Al Qaeda is known to be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/20/AR2011022002975_3.html?sid=ST2011022104355

Officials cite other factors as well, including a shift in CIA targeting procedures, moving beyond the pursuit of specific individuals to militants who meet secret criteria the agency refers to as "pattern of life."

In its early years, the drone campaign was mainly focused on finding and killing militants whose names appeared on a list maintained by the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. But since 2008, the agency has increasingly fired missiles when it sees certain "signatures," such as travel in or out of a known al-Qaeda compound or possession of explosives.

The more I read the more I wish the federal government was as oppressive as the hick trash who join the military claim. If an event like Waco was a monthly event they'd understand what true oppression meant.

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
lol @ la ville reine having only 7% of the votes

it's a very dramatic picture of toronto, i wish it always looked like that. we need more giant lake waves to wash away this city

babyfinland posted:
thank you british man for this opinion abou frenches

have you ever lived for three months in the french countryside, or, read la terre by zola

Groulxsmith posted:

internationalist posted:
The more I read the more I wish the federal government was as oppressive as the hick trash who join the military claim.

hahahaha what are you talking about

Why do some of you pretend to be stupid?

You've never heard of a right-winger from the South or Midwest complain about the federal government? Have you heard of the United States?

internationalist posted:

deadken posted:
hick trash. im a marxist

No, you're a nationalist from a rich country who isn't subject to what the U.S. military does in truly oppressed nations.

Bush was acting like a piece of hick trash and he was a millionaire. Soldiers join for social mobility so they can lord their new status over people on the left who disagree with them since they "give" their opponents their ability to speak out by murdering people who were never a threat to that ability in the first place. They act all folksy so they seem innocent since they just don't know no better 'aw shucks, just tryin' ta do what's right' but the reality is they're middle and upper class and live infinitely better with infinitely more rights than the new niggers they found in whatever peasant country they're abusing.

No doubt you're one of those leftist idiots/cowards who think soldiers were "tricked" into joining but if you want to know who is actually poor and deserves sympathy and who were actually tricked into going into Iraq and Afghanistan then read the following article about indentured servants from poor nations tricked into working on U.S. bases since U.S. companies subcontract to nations who engage in human trafficking.

I quoted the most relevant parts and I put parts in bold and underlined them since you likely don't care enough to read the whole article.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_stillman

Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (AAFES’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The process of outsourcing begins at major government entities, notably the Pentagon, which awarded its most recent prime logistics contract (worth as much as fifteen billion dollars a year) to three U.S.-based private military behemoths: K.B.R. (the former Halliburton subsidiary), DynCorp International, and Fluor. These “prime venders” then shop out the bulk of their contracts to hundreds of global subcontractors, many based in Middle Eastern countries that are on the U.S. State Department’s human-trafficking noncompliance list. Finally, these firms call upon thousands of Third World “manpower agencies”—small recruiting operations like Meridian Services.

A common recruiting story involves a tempting ad for Middle East “Salad Men” torn out of a newspaper, or an online job posting that promises “openings for cooks/chefs/master chefs for one of the best . . . middle east jobs.” Given the desperate circumstances of many applicants, few questions are asked, and some subcontractors sneak workers to U.S. bases without security clearances, seeking to bypass basic wage and welfare regulations.

Such sums are hardly unusual. A typical manpower agency charges applicants between two thousand and four thousand dollars, a small fortune in the countries where subcontractors recruit. To raise the money, workers may pawn heirlooms, sell their wedding rings or land or livestock, and take out high-interest loans. U.S. military guidelines prohibit such “excessive” fees. But, in hundreds of interviews with T.C.N.s, I seldom met a worker who had paid less than a thousand dollars for his or her job, and I never learned of a case in which anyone was penalized for charging these fees.

It’s equally uncommon to meet a worker who receives the salary he or she was promised. A twenty-five-year-old Taco Bell employee on a major U.S. base in Iraq told me that he had paid a recruiting agency in Nepal four thousand dollars. “You’ll make the money back so quick in Iraq!” he was assured. When he arrived in Baghdad, in May, 2009, he was housed in a shipping container behind the U.S. Embassy, in the Green Zone, where he slept on soiled mattresses with twenty-five other migrants from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Many learned that they were to earn as little as two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month as cooks and servers for U.S. soldiers—a fraction of what they’d been promised, and a tiny sliver of what U.S. taxpayers are billed for their labor.

Constantine Rodriguez, a soft-spoken thirty-eight-year-old from the former Portuguese colony of Goa, was working at a Pizza Hut at Camp Taji, Iraq, when an insurgent’s rocket struck. Two of his Bangladeshi co-workers died, according to a former boss, and Rodriguez lost an eye and a leg. Disabled, he was sent back to southern India, where he had a young wife and a baby to support. Although employees who are injured on U.S. bases are usually entitled to medical care and disability compensation, few foreign workers are aware of their rights, and fewer still are able to navigate the byzantine process required to receive payment.

Vinnie, Lydia, and the other Fijian beauticians landed in Dubai just before dawn in October, 2007. At the airport, they say, they were met by someone associated with Kulak Construction Company, a Turkish firm with millions of dollars in Pentagon subcontracts to do everything from building bowling alleys for troops to maintaining facilities on bases. The women were driven to a private hospital in the heart of the city. “It was very quiet there, because it was Ramadan,” Vinnie recalls. In a small examination room, nurses gave them a series of blood tests and vaccinations. Vinnie asked what all the poking and prodding was for. “You’ll need these for Iraq,” one of the nurses explained.

“Oh, we went crazy when we heard that,” the youngest of the Fijian women, a petite twenty-two-year-old former resort hostess named Melanie Gonebale, told me later. We spoke in her flimsy living quarters on Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tal Afar, in northern Iraq. A Kevlar helmet and bulletproof vest sat at the foot of her bed. “We’d watched on TV every day about Iraq—the bombs, people dying.” That night, the women contemplated running away. But a number of them had taken out loans to cover their recruiting fees, and Meridian had reportedly threatened some with more than a thousand dollars in early-termination fines if they left.

The next morning, Vinnie, Lydia, and the other women flew to Iraq and found themselves on a convoy bound for Balad, forty miles north of Baghdad. There, on a U.S. base called Camp Anaconda—and known to soldiers as Mortaritaville, for its constant barrage of incoming mortar fire—they got more bad news. Instead of earning between fifteen hundred and thirty-eight hundred dollars a month, as they had been promised, the women were told that they would make only seven hundred dollars a month, a sum that was later reduced, under another subcontractor, to three hundred and fifty. “We were just all dumbstruck,” Chanel Joy, who had earned several times as much working as a certified beauty therapist at a Fijian resort, recalled. “It was ridiculous, really, slave labor, absolutely ridiculous out here in a war zone.” In the contract they signed in Iraq, their working hours were specified as “Twelve (12) hours per day and seven (7) days a week.” Their “vacation” was a “Return ticket after the completion of the service.” Appended to the contract was a legal waiver: “I am willingly and of my own free will have decided to go and work in Iraq, and I declare that no one in Fiji or out of Fiji has approach me to work in Iraq. . . . I am contented with my job. . . . I want to complete my contract, till then, I will not go back home.”

Not every third-country national makes it home safely. Since 2001, more than two thousand contractor fatalities and more than fifty-one thousand injuries have been reported in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the first time in American history, private-contractor losses are now on a par with those of U.S. troops in both war zones, amounting to fifty-three per cent of reported fatalities in the first six months of 2010. Since many T.C.N. deaths and injuries are never tallied—contractors are expected to self-report, with spotty compliance—the actual numbers are presumed to be higher.

Late one night in early April, 2008, I knocked on the door of Lydia and Vinnie’s shipping container to find Lydia curled up on the floor, knees to chest, chin to knees, crying. Vinnie told me, after some hesitation, that a supervisor had “had his way with” Lydia. According to the two women’s tearful account, non-consensual sex had become a regular feature of Lydia’s life. They said the man would taunt Lydia, calling her a “fucking bitch” and describing the various acts he would like to see her perform. Lydia trembled, her normally confident figure crumpled inward. “If he comes tonight, you have to scream,” Vinnie told Lydia, tapping her fist against the aluminum siding of the shipping container. “Bang on this wall here and scream!”

The next day, I dialled the U.S. Army’s emergency sexual-assault hot line, printed on a pamphlet distributed across the base that read, “Stand Up Against Sexual Assault . . . Make a Difference.” Nobody answered. Despite several calls over several days, the number simply rang and rang.

That April, George W. Casey, then the commanding general for Iraq, issued an order to private contractors and subcontractors there, seeking to establish guidelines for humane treatment. For the first time, T.C.N.s were entitled to “measurable, enforceable standards for living conditions (e.g. sanitation, health, safety, etc.),” including “50 feet as the minimum acceptable square footage of personal living space per worker.” All U.S. troops would receive training to help them recognize human trafficking and abuse, and major contractors were ordered to design a mandatory anti-trafficking awareness session for their employees.

But the Pentagon’s “zero tolerance” policy for violators proved largely toothless. In one incident, in December, 2008, U.S. military personnel discovered that a warehouse operated off the base by a K.B.R. subcontractor, Najlaa International Catering, was filled with more than a thousand workers who appeared to be human-trafficking victims. Many of the men were sent home, but Najlaa retained its service contracts and won a new multimillion-dollar deal for operating a U.S.A.I.D. dining facility in the Green Zone.

However, in some cases managers have clearly been dissuaded by their superiors from taking an interest in such matters. Soon after Mike Land, an American who was a K.B.R. foreman, complained about the living conditions of his Filipino and Indian men, he received an official reprimand: “You are expected to refrain from further involvement regarding the working and living conditions of the sub-contract workers as that is not your responsibility. . . . Any future interference with operations will result in additional action up to and including termination.” In Afghanistan, one high-ranking contracting officer told me that labor law “doesn’t exist here,” and that enforcement would be hard to prioritize if it did: the job “is to get the war fighters what they need.”

“Army policy opposes any and all activities associated with human trafficking,” the briefing notes, adding, in red ink, “No leader will turn a blind eye to this issue!”

Yet, when reporters asked the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (C.I.D.) for details last summer, they were told that allegations of the women’s mistreatment had been investigated earlier and were “not substantiated.” (According to an internal AAFES report, “allegations of rape never surfaced” in the organization’s prior investigation of the women’s recruitment.) C.I.D. officials declined to say whether any victims had been interviewed, and, when reached recently, a C.I.D. spokesman apologized for being unable to locate any record of the case. According to the spokesman, “C.I.D. takes allegations of sexual assault very seriously and fully investigates allegations where there is credible information that a crime may have occurred involving Army personnel or others accompanying the force.” Lydia and Vinnie both say that no one from the military or AAFES spoke with them about the sexual-assault claims.

didnt read but my guess is its more class chauvinism and stereotyping along with a healthy dose of the kind of teenage bu$hbashing that was passé in 2004. go to moldova, at once