Luke , enjoy this 80's incubator babies story...get Hitch on it?

steve philion philion at hawaii.edu
Wed Nov 6 15:11:15 PST 2002


dennisp writes: But Steve P's on this "you buy the propaganda, don't ya?" kick, dragging out stuff that no one here, so far as I know, believes in, or ever did.

--uhmmm...luke seemed to believe it or he wouldn't have snidely demanded proof that the toy bombs story was a hoax.

And by focusing solely on the lies, Steve seems to skate over the larger truth of the given topic, i.e., the Kuwaiti incubator story was a hoax, therefore any critique of Saddam should be viewed in that light

--absolutely not, what should be focused on is why the state has to lie to the american people to convince them to go to war. we should want to know the answer to that question.

I just reached for the handy Nazi analogy to show how limited and ultimately ridiculous this line of attack really is.

--not at all, there is much empirical evidence that we can deal with in the Nazi case...little in the case of Iraq's baby killing episodes or comparisons of sadam to hitler, or that the US gov't is genuinely concerned about human rights in Iraq...then again, that seems to be the point, we can say anything we want to about the 'enemy' when we are going to war...then we can avoid harder questions like, 'what are the alternatives?'... you dennis can provide us with all the horror stories you want from the soviet occupation, i would still want to know why Zbigniew felt it was better to provoke the soviets into a vietnam war of their own...or why we felt it was better to support rightwing islamic fundamentalists instead of moderates...those are questions worth answering... assuming that our involvement in afghanistan and they way we involved ourselves had something to do with genuine outrage at atrocities that resulted from the occupation is naive at best... No less naive than believing hoaxes like the incubator babies, satellite photos, or 'toy shaped bombs'....

And it seems that Steve never responded to the Afghan death toll that he laughed off earlier. Or if he did I missed it.

--not at all, i do laugh off the idea that we don't have to question the transparent motives of a Bush or Clinton when they start rambling on about their concerns for human rights....and i certainly don't believe that numbers don't matter or verifiability is moot...



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