The View from the Other Side
Well, isn’t that an interesting image? An Egyptian friend of mine posted it on Facebook. She’s obviously some sort of radical Muslim who hates America for our freedoms. I’d say “snort,” but I’m willing to bet there are many Americans who wouldn’t see it any other way. No, she’s an engineer, and one of the many people who have been working hard to transform Egypt into a democracy. Yes, she is a Muslim. That a person is a Muslim is as revealing about them as saying someone is a Jew or a Christian. IE it means nothing, Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all over the map when it comes to their ideologies … from violent fundamentalists to tolerant moderates working to bring their religion into the 21st century. My friend doesn’t hate America, but she has nothing good to say about Clinton or Obama. And for good reason, they provided aid and comfort (not to mention weapons) to the Mubarak regime long after the writing was on the wall. Imagine if American Tea Party protesters were fired on by tear gas canisters made in Egypt, pretty safe bet many Americans wouldn’t be happy about it.
My friend also had the humanity to say that the text in the image aside, it was still a touching picture of a woman reunited with her child. This is something a lot of Americans seem to lack these days, humanity. At least when it comes to people in foreign countries. They profess “concern” for the state of women in Afghanistan for example, but don’t seem able to grasp that our war is most definitely killing women and children. Not to mention maiming and killing Americans, while leaving others deeply scared psychologically. War is ugly, not some comic book World War Two superhero fantasy where our heroes save the world from a global menace. The Taliban aren’t a global menace, they aren’t even a local menace. In fact they are human beings, with families and kids too. Afghans are actually an incredibly hospitable people, I have a couple of friends travelling around the country now. If you aren’t associated with the occupation forces, or trying to convert people to Christianity, people in Afghanistan are perfectly friendly to foreigners.
Moving right along, even though I haven’t even written a post about chemtrails, the commenters are already into it. Even 9/11 got brought up. Ah well. I was struck by one comment though. Someone pointed out that the collapse of the WTC buildings isn’t “rocket science.” Um, understanding the effects of flying a jet liner at 400 miles an hour into a building certainly sounds like rocket science to me. Sadly it’s already clear to me, even without research, that the proponents of the chemtrails conspiracy theory are approaching the problem the same way 9/11 Truthers approach their problem. In fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is substantial overlap between the two groups. Oh well, I will get around to a chemtrails post. Some day.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, check out this story on the BBC no less: Organic food ‘not any healthier’ This is a wonderful example of how the mainstream media outlets are just propaganda organs for giant corporations. This “study” was carefully set up to give the result they wanted. The participants were only studied for two years, no one claims that organic food confers measurable health benefits in two years. It’s like having two runners race for a meter, then claiming it’s a tie so they must run at the same speed. Worse, it completely ignores the fact that many people buy organic not just for the health benefits, but for many other reasons as well. Organic farms are better for the environment, a desire to avoid giving money to the giant processed food conglomerates, a desire to buy locally, a desire to avoid pesticide exposure, and even the fact that organic food comes in more varieties and is often tastier than the corporate produced all-the-same junk like tomatoes. All of this will be missed by the average reader of the BBC article, who will just see it as more reinforcement of the “those stupid hippies” meme. F**k you BBC and Stanford University.(And anyone who reads my posts at all knows I am not a health food activist, far from it.)
I’ll probably have to hide in the Ecuadoran embassy myself after this post. Well, hopefully it’s not that bad. I didn’t write a post Monday because it was Labour Day, and I was resting from my labours. Thank you labour movement from getting us such things as weekends and vacations.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s all over Facebook so it may be public domain. No clue who to credit it too. There was one other reason I posted the image, and astute regular commenters might be able to discern it. Might. I should also point out that no offence is meant to American service members, it’s America’s leaders and war apologists I am criticizing by publishing the image.)
Doug's Darkworld 
What a wishful thinker you are, Doug.
anton
September 5, 2012 at 6:25 am
If the Talibans love their children too… (Sting)
Doug, for Christ Sake, even skorpions love their children.
nomad
September 5, 2012 at 7:01 am
Whoa nomad.. you make Dougs point for him! Your in that crowd that thinks other people are not human.. insects? You need help.
John Galt
September 5, 2012 at 7:29 am
can you translate into english?
nomad
September 5, 2012 at 7:35 am
Hehe, I like that you adress conspiracy theories Doug, even if I don’t agree with you most of the time ;) …..although I do agree organic tomatoes taste better by far…Monsanto, and companies like them need to be stopped before they kill us all with their poison food…
Pyrodin
September 5, 2012 at 7:46 am
Why not drag out some real atrocity like firebombing of Dresden (just to impress Soviets), Tokyo or even the use of Atomic weapons on a defeated Japanese Empire… Jeez Doug… Im against this stupid war as much or more than you, but Cmon!
Steve
September 5, 2012 at 10:54 am
so what’s so great about being human or treating an entity humanely? no other species creates the death and destruction as that bunch. it’s all about survival, folks, wake up. we’ve been good at it so far, look at or numbers. maybe one day our number will be up…
mary s. jackson
September 5, 2012 at 11:26 am
They will never admit to large scale massacres and genocides, they take pride in what they do.
If you tell them they killed 1 million Iraqi civilians, they’ll laugh and say “It was the civil war, the evil terrorists killed them all”
If you tell them they killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians, they’ll say “It was a civil war, the evil commies killed them all”
If you tell them they wiped out the native Americans in the biggest act of genocide in human history (population reduced from 100% in the past to 0.3% today), they’ll snicker “It was diseases that wiped them out”; though strangely, for some reason, these European diseases didn’t wipe out the natives of South America, even though the Spanish carried the same diseases as the English, and the natives of South America didn’t have immunity to those diseases anymore than the natives of North America, and yet the pre-spanish races of South America are still a majority today.
I don’t think it’s just media propaganda, I think people of Northern Europe and all their extension (US Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc…) are inherently evil. And any American who agrees with what I’ve said(except for that last part), probably has some Slavic or South European blood in him.
abdallah
September 5, 2012 at 3:54 pm
You are right Abdallah but you are not entitled to speak. Your lot raided Africa for centuries looking for slaves. Oh, by the way, were not for westerners intervention, muslims would still be practising slavery. Thank to muslim raids Africa was devasted beyond hope. This is the reason of african backwardness. Before looking at the straw in your neighbour’s eye……
nomad
September 6, 2012 at 1:19 am
Diseases didnt kill south american indians??? Do some research, pal… Only about 90% of were wiped out…
Steve
September 5, 2012 at 4:12 pm
I’ve written about Hiroshima on a number of occaisions, amongst other cases of man’s inhumanity to man. And more posts are planned, but honestly they tend to be very hard to write. And yes, the scale with which disease wiped out native American populations, in North and South America, is becoming clearer all the time. And even with the disease, what the settlers did to the natives is beyond sick in so many cases. They were considered vermin and exterminated, what happenned to Ishi’s tribe was a classic example. Four guys rode into his village one day and opened fire, killing all but Ishi and one other. The villager’s crime? Sometimes they would sneak into town and steal clothes off of clotheslines. As for it being all about survival, give me a break. In any event posting the picture above definitely had the desired effect, it inspired discussion. :) —Doug
unitedcats
September 5, 2012 at 6:42 pm
If you don’t believe me you can look it up. Try wikipedia. The native and mestizo populations of South and central America make up the vast majority of the population. So the numbers tell, as bad as the Spanish were, they didn’t have that inherent genocidal nature that the English settlers had so that they could take it the whole way. Else South and Central America would be majority Spanish today. The Spanish concentrated more on converting the natives to Christianity and teaching them Spanish culture, but the English concentrated more on complete genocide as the first phase, then slow genocide by placing them in death camps that were cynically called “Reservations” where the rest of them died out.
Stop trying to deny this fact by claiming that killings were just isolated insignificant events and diseases were the main culprit, you know it’s not true, numbers don’t lie.
abdallah
September 5, 2012 at 7:36 pm
The Cherokee were very good at trying to assimilate and were treated inhumanely, It was all about taking all of the land there was from coast to coast.. manifest destiny was a policy. It was ethnic cleansing by todays definition.
But please do not think that all people of european origin are ‘inherently evil’. It just is not true, but no doubt some are evil.
John Galt
September 5, 2012 at 8:32 pm
I didn’t. I specifically said Northern Europeans.
abdallah
September 5, 2012 at 8:55 pm
So your a racist who stereotypes. Good day sir !
John Galt
September 6, 2012 at 10:08 am
Northern Europeans may be evil, but they built and developed most of the things you take for granted everyday…
Steve
September 6, 2012 at 6:33 pm
I saw the image above and thought “how heart-warming,” and then scrolled down to read the text that ruined it. As someone who was active-duty for four years in the 1980’s, and have thus far served another 24 years as a DoD civilian, I have learned a few things: You can’t use the words “humanity” and “war” in the same sentence, just as you can’t use “military” and “intelligence” together in a sentence. I recently read that in all of recorded history, there have been less than 300 years combined in which no warfare was recorded. I consider that to be a very sad, depressing figure – and it obviously is not getting any better. Human Beings are apparently “pre-dispositioned” to engage in war. To me, it doesn’t matter who started it; which countries are involved or which religions are in question. Here we are, in the 21st Century, with all this new & wonderful Technology, and we are still dragging our knuckles on the ground. It really doesn’t have to be that way, but sadly it seems that we just can’t learn even after thousands of years of mistakes.
Johnny B
February 17, 2013 at 10:25 am
You understand where I’m coming from. thank you. —Doug
unitedcats
February 19, 2013 at 11:18 pm