Obama bowing againFollow

Ok, as long as we agree.

This reminds me of Gbaji's assertations during the debates that Obama made huge mistakes by saying that he agreed with McCain on various points. "You never do that! You lose the debate my doing that!" Of course, Obama's polling would go up after each debate and people would say, by a sizable majority, that Obama won the debate but according to Gbaji, it was a big deal that you'd show this weakness by saying your opponent had a good point.

Gbaji's simplistic take on Chamberlain shows that his "study" of history consists of catching bits of the History Channel as he flipped around the dial. It doesn't matter though because the whole "appeasement" thing is just a talking point for the Pubbies anyway. When Pakistan's leaders gave over part of their nation to the Taliban, the GOP was silent about it even though nothing in recent past was more of a mirror than that event. The day it happened, Gbaji was trying to mock Paulsol by comparing him to Chamberlain, I posted about the event and Gbaji was stone silent about it (but kept posting in the thread). Later, when it proved to have been a mistake, Gbaji made some lame "Well, we didn't like it either!" remark despite the complete lack of outcry when it happened. Gbaji doesn't care about Chamberlain or "appeasement", he just spreads the talking points around. In the same way, I don't think Gbaji is particularly racist or homophobic, he just repeats what the blogs and radio stations tell him to say. If the GOP talking point for the day is "Obama's a cotton pickin' *****-child" then Gbaji will defend that to the death. If they somehow mixed up their memos and said "Obama's the balm for a racially divided nation", Gbaji would be swearing that's true and writing lengthy posts defending it. In this event, the blogs are telling him that Obama's bow is a big embarassment for the nation and shows that we're weak and puny (he even linked to a blog saying exactly this and said we'd be ignoring the facts to discount it) and so, sure enough, Gbaji's spin is exactly that.

Edited, Nov 17th 2009 7:43am by Jophiel

The whole "Chamberlain-appeasement" thing is such a joke. The situation at the time was pretty incredibly specific to a certain period. There are extremely few situations which lend themselves to an accurate comparaison with the Chamberlain incident.

And that's if we accept the Chamberlain incident as what it's portrayed. Which isn't entirely accurate. had Chamberlain not signed that piece of paper and waved it about like a ****, the alternative would not have been better. It was pretty much already too late by then. Hitler would still have invaded Europe, they would still have had a huge army, they would still have put the Jews in gas chambers, etc, etc... It's not like the choice was between "appeasement" and "immediate military victory". It's really infuriating as a comparaison. It's just a form of unchallenged Godwin's. Nothing more.

Finally, if the worst thing the GOP and its pundits has to whine about is the way Obama does a Japanese bow, then they must be pretty desperate. When Bush was in power, we compained about proper stuff: war of aggression, internment camps, torture, internal surveillance, clash of civilisations, religious warfare... It surely beats Japanese bows, place of birth, and universal healthcare as contentious talking points.

Can you see how this is a false dichotomy, or should I unleash Pensive on your ***?


In a non-sexual way, ofc. Don't get your hopes up.

You forgot something...

...there ya go. No charge.

I couldn't have put it better. His real mistake was to make people believe there was a possibility of peace, something which most historians agree he didn't himself believe.



Sorry, I got better things to do than dip my fingers in **** and wonder if they'll come out smelling like pancakes.

Maybe tomorrow, though!

Certainly.

That is not the point of meaninglessness. If I am trying to be nice to your sentences, I can figure out what you are talking about. However, if I bother to think about it for two seconds, neither I nor anyone, could figure out the following:

-What it means to fight terrorists
-What an islamic terrorist is
-Where, precisely you intend to fight
-What muslim indoctrination is

These are all things which you are assuming have collective intelligibility and commonly understood referents. They do not. It is a small and easy task to figure out what you probably mean. The point of this exercise is to try to get you to realize that the concepts that you have about terrorism, islam, and war, are grossly obsolete, too simple, and inelegant approximations of cogent foreign policy.