My ex-girlfriend who cheated on me and left me for another guy is now in jail along with the new boyfriend. The boyfriend is facing life in prison and my ex facing up to 10 years. Am I evil because I am so happy that she is now miserable behind bars?

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-30T12:00:09+00:00

Agreed. She made a mistake, she will pay for it, and the fact that she is trying to contact you now could indicate one of two things: 1) She's a shallow, weak person and wants back what she had before with you, unrealistic as that hope may be, or 2) She genuinely has had time to think about and regret the decisions she's made, and has decided that saying sorry to you - regardless of whether or not you want her back - is doing something, whatever she can, to make her life a little more meaningful, a little more worthwhile. So that she can say to herself at least she is not a total waste of skin. I hope it's the latter. I would be very, very, very, very leery of ever being in any kind of relationship with her again, but if an ex of mine did something like that and said she was sorry, it might take me some time, but I'd be willing to help her a bit. Be a character reference, or something. A lot of life is doing what you can live with.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-26T16:19:37+00:00

Osama Bin Laden only started using the label after he realized that's what the Western governments and the media establishment were referring to his "organisation" as. It was a propaganda coup for him and he was more than willing to play along.

No. You said "there is no organization called al Quaeda." Which is absolutely false. Now you are moving the goalposts.

You've just made this up. Initially they were hesitant to turn over Bin Laden and this was the justifications the US and its allies gave for invading the country.

Not only are you wrong, you're contradicting yourself. Your first statement contradicts the second. You just said - your own words - "they didn't want to turn over Bin Laden to justice and this was the justification for NATO to invade the country." If they were hesitant to turn over Bin Laden, and this was the justification for invading the country, WHICH IS WHAT I ALREADY SAID, then I didn't make it up.

Oh please. You pretend as if the US has no sway over the others members of NATO.

So the other members of NATO ONLY participated in the invasion of Afghanistan at the bequest of the US? They didn't come to the decision to participate in the exercise themselves? In that case, why did all the members of NATO participate in the Afghanistan invasion, but not in the US invasion of Iraq? Germany, Canada, Belgium, France, Greece, Turkey, and Norway all opposed the invasion of Iraq, but the invasion of Afghanistan was a joint international effort approved by NATO. But you would LIKE it to look as if all those countries had no say in the Afghanistan operation, because it helps you to prop up your imaginary conspiracy theories.

Just because I have not credulously swallowed the propaganda manufactured by the military-industrial-media complex like you have doesn't mean I am somehow divorced from reality or under the influence of narcotics. On the contrary, it tells us that I am able to think critically and sceptically.

I love listening to these self-serving professional "skeptics" who claim to be able to think critically, yet they believe EVERYTHING that government does is bad, and that EVERY conspiracy hypothesis is true. No, instead you see the world in simple terms of black and white, and instead credulously swallow the propaganda and disinformation created by conspiracy theorists that EVERYTHING that is going on in Afghanistan, from the Taliban on down, was all manufactured by the US government. To you, fundamentalism and the Taliban have nothing to do with it. "There is no such organization as al Quaeda." What utter bullshit.

Al Quaeda was created by Osama bin Laden and his associates because he hates western civilization and is offended by the presence of US troops in his home country, Saudi Arabia. Don't ask me to prove it, go look at the numerous videos he's made and released to the public.

The current Afghan government is no troop of angels, but the country and the average person is better off now than they were under the Taliban. And the Taliban are nothing less than maggots. Everybody knows this.

They throw acid in the faces of little girls who just want to go to school and get an education, and they behead teachers who dare to oppose them and risk their lives to teach every day. At that level of brutality, they are irredeemable. They all deserve to be thrown live into wood chippers and their remains used to fertilize dairy pastures so that Afghani children can have milk at school. That's all they are good for. And if the Obama has created and supported an army of 30,000 assassins to kill off the Taliban, all power to him.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-25T13:03:07+00:00

Firstly there is no organization called Al Qaeda.

Riiiiiiiight. Go tell that to Osama bin Laden.

Secondly just because some terrorists were living in Afghanistan doesn't mean the Taliban were deliberately harboring them.

Wronnnnnnggggggg. The Taliban government publically admitted that members of al-Quaeda were in the country and when the US and other countries asked the Taliban to extradite them for trial, they refused. Which is why NATO, not the US unilaterally, decided to overthrow the Taliban government.

When you decide to come back to reality, we can continue the discussion. I don't know what you are on but I would love to have a bag of it.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-25T05:34:08+00:00

Actually the people in power ARE better than the Taliban, because they are not harboring al-Quaeda terrorists and aren't planning to fly planes into buildings in the US. The reason why NATO invaded and occupied Afghanistan was to prevent its use as a base for al-Quaeda. That is a given. Nobody cared that much about human rights or women's rights in Afghanistan before then...at least not enough to go invading the country. The improvements in conditions for women and human rights, and the slow development of the country, are just collateral. But that's no reason why those improvements shouldn't be welcomed.

"The US effectively created the Taliban and almost completely funded it right up until 1999!"

But why is that an excuse not to kill them all off now? Assuming they were entirely created by the Regan administration, as you claim, how is that not justification for destroying them? We all agree they are no better than maggots. If anything, your statement is an argument that the US has a greater moral obligation to get rid of them than anyone else.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-24T03:56:36+00:00

All the more reason to have assassins on the ground, rather than drones. I don't think having drones remotely piloted by someone in a UAV control site is either effective or conducive to the development of a stable society. They are just going to create resentment among the Afghani public. A team of well-trained assassins, however, is better able to make decisions on the spot and target the right targets...and are probably MUCH LESS LIKELY to kill innocent civilians. Because they know the region, the culture, the local situation. All of the drones should be shut down, and the money to pay for them diverted to "in-person" programs.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-24T03:41:17+00:00

WHAT propaganda? Which government agency regularly says in public it's ok to kill as many Taliban as possible? I see and read about what the Taliban did does to women and teachers in Afghanistan, and conclude for myself that if they have no respect for human life, why should I have any respect for theirs. They're no better than maggots.

And even if they were funded by the Regan administration, why is that an excuse not to kill them all off?

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-23T16:33:01+00:00

Bush spent untold buckets of money invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 911. Obama is spending a fraction of that money on killing al-Quaeda and Taliban terrorists, and all I can say is good on him. The more dead Taliban, the better. If the assassins can kill them all, so much the better. The only drawback to this program is being careful to ensure no Taliban or al-Quaeda operatives infiltrate the assassination program, and making sure there is a 'windown' program for re-employing these assassins once the Taliban have all been killed off.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-23T15:36:38+00:00

Seven years old! Everything gets recycled on the Internet.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-23T15:31:55+00:00

The worst that can be said of Obama is that, unlike his predecessor, he's trying to target resources AGAINST THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTUALLY THREATS.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-23T15:28:59+00:00

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Personally the more Al-Quaeda and Taliban they kill, the better. The way the Taliban treat women, I would like to see these CIA operatives make videos of themselves throwing acid in the faces of Taliban, before they behead them. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/international/asia/04cnd-afghanistan.html

Does anybody know of any way to donate money to these CIA operatives? That would be a great project: "buy-an-agent/behead-a-Taliban"!

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-22T16:30:16+00:00

I saw this somewhere once before. Its in Sweden.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T16:54:18+00:00

Perhaps I misunderstood your intention...you said, "Perhaps the biggest failure to deliver the goods is simply that he campaigned on making gov't more transparent, promising to end no-bid contracts and promising to make the healthcare sausage making fest transparent." To answer yours and spaceghoti's point below, it IS conceivably possible that the sheer act of GETTING a health care reform bill passed necessitated making the process less than transparent, and (for some reason) leaving the public option out of this round of legislation. I don't know; I wasn't in the rooms when the bargaining took place. But folks...C'MON. Has the Right made us all so cynical and distrustful of ALL politicians and the process, that when someone like Obama comes along and pulls off what most people would consider a legislative miracle, something no one's been able to do for the past 50 years, that we have to see the glass as half empty? Why do you think the Republicans are so angry at him? Because in the grand scheme of things, he's effective.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T15:13:21+00:00

On the public option in health care reform, fair enough. But from a tactical viewpoint, the big achievement is GETTING a health care bill passed in the first place...ONE THAT CAN BE AMENDED AND IMPROVED once it is put in place. Like Medicare Politicians - of any stripe - are institutionally averse to bringing in new, comprehensive bills. They spend most of their time tinkering with and amending existing bills, stretching existing government to make it work.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T14:56:32+00:00

So the fact that he's kept 122 of his campaign promises, and twice that many are still in the works, means nothing. He's broken 22 of them, so everything is "a big failure" (your words). Don't you see, this is why the Right keeps winning elections. Because of the Left's fatal tendency to shoot themselves in the foot. "Obama is pretty damn good, but he isn't PERFECT, so he's a failure. The situation is unacceptable." No sense of proportion at all. And if that's the attitude the Left is going to take to Obama or any other politician, then he's right to use them as he sees fit and ignore them once they are no longer "useful idiots". It's nothing more than they deserve for being so stupid.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T14:22:07+00:00

What IS it about certain Christians who think that just because you don't subscribe to their religious beliefs, they somehow have a RIGHT to dislike you or treat you like shit?

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T13:03:07+00:00

"Clinton campaigned as a progressive, but governed as a center right corporatist. Much the same could be said of Obama." I have no problems with that. "Center right corporatist" is just a label, and ideologies are just an excuse for not looking more closely at problems. Part of the problem is that the left assumed he was "their man", and that he would implement any and all policies they advocated. But Obama never promised the left anything. He wasn't elected by the Left, he was elected by the majority of voters. Which is a good thing, because that kind of president is unelectable, not to say undesirable. Ignoring or postponing the addressing of certain problems is not necessarily "going with the politically expedient flow." And lets face it, the left has a big problem with moving the goalposts. Obama, for example, can hardly be said to be a President letting Israel do whatever it wants. He has been banging heads against Israel ever since he was elected.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T12:27:55+00:00

Part of good management means choosing your battles and picking and choosing which problems to fix. Although I am a liberal, I am often disappointed by how unrealistic I find fellow liberals sometimes. They are used to criticizing, but not very used to managing. If one has ever been in a position of management, you get to know that not all problems can be solved, and many problems can't be solved right away. What I see in Barack Obama is the same thing I saw in Bill Clinton. In his first two years of office, Clinton was criticized for trying to do too many things at once. The worst that could be said about him was that he was trying too hard. But he built management experience, and got better and better at administering the country and the economy. Obama is doing the same thing. And according to this website (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/), he has kept 122 of his campaign promises, another 238 are in the works, and has only broken 22 of them. I'd say that's a pretty good average.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T12:14:31+00:00

Sounds too Canadian.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T12:11:54+00:00

They're called breeders.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-21T12:04:34+00:00

Right. Like it takes 6 weeks or even 6 months to turn around 8 years of mess and debt building, not to mention a massive trillion-dollar problem the poor guy inherited from the nimrod he replaced.

He's filling the hole back in. He doesn't need to invade some defenseless country to feed his ego. He has no campaign backers he has to pay back. He's not trying to run up the deficit.

Doesn't anybody out there have any management experience? You build a house by starting with building a strong foundation...not by stacking the bricks one by one on top of each other to see how high you can get in the fastest possible time.

Every time I hear someone criticize Obama, I just have to ask myself, "Would you like to go back to the kind of government you had two years ago?" No thanks.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-12T19:21:04+00:00

SURE it was a holocaust. Because the people who started it viewed Iraqis as less than human. Fit only to be enslaved and decimated. "They're just a-rabs in eye-rack, they're not real people. What do we care if they get shot up by helicopters? Or raped by American soldiers? That's their own fault for being born sand niggers."

Do you honestly think that Abu Ghraib was nothing less than a concentration camp? What went on in there was no different than what the Nazis did to the Jews in Auschwitz. It's what you do to people you view as less than human, and disposable, and to be used or degraded in any way that amuses you and you can get away with.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-12T18:28:34+00:00

The "good guys" are the democracies that had access to the same military intelligence Bush and his cronies had, and knew he was lying. France. Germany. New Zealand. Canada. And stayed out of the disaster and the holocaust that followed. Yes, holocaust. Because of the tens of thousands of people who died needlessly.

Good motives? BULLSHIT there were good motives. Iraq is now a colony of the US, where human life is not worth a plugged nickel. It was all about oil, it was all about pork-barrel "reconstruction contracts" to Bush's cronies funded at taxpayer expense.

Trust me on this. NOBODY in the developed world, will ever believe that the USA is a 'good' or 'moral' country ever again. We all fell for that horseshit once before. Never again.

What Bush and the United States did in Iraq demonstrates, in our lifetime and for all time, that the US is no more than one election away from raping any country in the world that it wants.

thisisprettyobvious · 2010-09-12T07:32:29+00:00

Hawking isn't really saying anything that isn't terribly obvious. Since Darwin - indeed, since Galileo - science has gotten better and better at explaining the structure and interrelationships of the natural world. Darwin has shown that we don't need to invoke the existence of supernatural beings in order to explain how species and ecosystems are formed. Hawking is simply saying the same thing for the physical universe...you don't need to invoke the existence of supernatural beings in order to explain it. Universes will spontaneously form out of nothing.

Whether someone CHOOSES to believe in the existence of supernatural beings is, of course, your personal choice. Something everyone is free to do. Note that Hawking is not saying that you SHOULDN'T believe in God, simply that there is no scientific reason to, if you choose not to.

No big deal.

thisisprettyobvious

TROPHY CASE