[quote=“dejoh1, post:13, topic:6155, full:true”]
Hey, makes you think twice before stealing an item that’s not yours.
I think these may be habitual thief’s caught many times.
But a little over the top for punishment.
[/quote] In Iran, you aren’t brought to trial unless the convening authorities have already decided you’re guilty. The trial is not adversarial as Westerners know it. It’s an occasion for the authorities to tell you what you’ve already been found guilty of and pronounce punishment. What you’re actually guilty of and what you’re found guilty of need not have any rational relation to each other. Ticking off a well-connected colleague can buy you a one-finger weight-loss plan.
If your strategy for avoiding war involves minimizing injustices for some “greater good”, you may want to re-evaluate your strategy. The CIA torture apologists use the exact same argument. Do you really want to be in their…Company?
The notion that I must convince my own country to correct its injustices before I’m allowed to criticize injustices abroad is the sheerest stupidity. All countries perpetrate injustice. The only people who would suggest living in one delegitimatizes criticizing another are people who don’t want outside criticism at all, or who are otherwise too stupid to understand that that it the result.
You thoroughly miss the point. I purposely minimize nothing nor do I exclude anything for criticism that is worthy of criticism. Did you miss the part where I repeatedly called what the Iranians did barbarism? Is that minimizing or excluding from criticism? No, it is not. The strategy for avoiding war is calling out war propaganda when one sees it and cautioning against having things serve as war propaganda, which is what I did. And the idea that one should put one’s efforts towards correcting wrongs where one can have the greatest influence, i.e., one’s own country, is a simple logical and moral truism. You elided over my points about Saudi Arabia I notice. Do you have anything to say about the fact that the BARBARISM of Iran is consistently highlighted in the US while the BARBARISM of the Saudi sclerotic dictatorship (not to mention the BARBARISM of the US) is consistently excluded? That, my good sir Gulliver, is the logic of the CIA, not mine.
[quote=“Rojo, post:45, topic:6155”]
I purposely minimize nothing nor do I exclude anything for criticism that is worthy of criticism.
[/quote] Yes, you did:
Not only are you Streisanding the very story you claim is war-mongering propaganda (those silly human rights advocates, always thumping the war drums), you’re foolishly suggesting that doing so is a compelling strategy for preventing war. Your reasoning is flawed.
[quote=“Rojo, post:45, topic:6155”]
You elided over my points about Saudi Arabia I notice.
[/quote] No, I replied to the part of your comment with which I disagreed. That it’s not the part you want to talk about is your problem.
[quote=“Rojo, post:45, topic:6155”]
Do you have anything to say about the fact that the BARBARISM of Iran is consistently highlighted in the US while the BARBARISM of the Saudi sclerotic dictatorship (not to mention the BARBARISM of the US) is consistently excluded?
[/quote] Sure, your own explanation is part of the reason why. None of which changes my criticism of the rest of your comment. Anything else towards which you’d like to try and deflect the discussion? Or have you run out of caps?
Like Aaron Swartz then or to some extent Bradley Manning?
[quote=“FFabian, post:49, topic:6155, full:true”]
Like Aaron Swartz then or to some extent Bradley Manning?
[/quote] Indeed, especially like Aaron Swartz
The point of the caps was to try to make it clear, as you still seem incapable of understanding, that calling something “barbarism” is not an attempt at minimization. Just as, for example, if I called you “willfully obtuse,” I would not be praising your debating integrity. But, I’ll spare your delicate posting sensibilities and leave them out of this response.
I was commenting in response to a comment that claimed it was illegitimate to bring up US barbarisms in a discussion of Iranian barbarisms. My point, for the last time, is that a frequent tactic of propagandists is to highlight one kind of barbarism while minimizing the other and therefore it is legitimate, in the context of the geopolitics of media institutions to mention these inconvenient facts (such as US and Saudi Arabian barbarisms) that many would like to ignore. My point, in fact, is that people are being moral relativists on these issues and would do well to look to the beam in their own eye.
I don’t even know what you’re talking about with “Streisanding,” as I’m not trying to get people to ignore Iranian barbarism, I’m trying to get them to pay attention to other barbarisms that are closer to home and that they can greater effect over, were they so willing.
As for “those silly human rights activists,” you are right that I am greatly skeptical of the motivations of many of the self-labeled “human rights activists,” such as those wonderful scumbags in the State Department. But beyond US government stooges, there are other examples. Human Rights Watch, certainly, has long served the needs of US geopolitical propaganda interests since its Cold War beginnings as Helsinki Watch and nothing has changed with its highly selective views there. Israel massacres hundreds in Lebanon invasions and HRW calls for “restraint on both sides.” But, oh, for the official enemies, the mere prospect of conflict leads to the strident warnings of “human rights catastrophes,” justifying western interventions that mostly make the problems worse. Amnesty International, unfortunately, seems to be following along in the same vein. So yes, I charge a large portion of the self-styled, “human rights activists” with hypocrisy and making the problems they pretend to care about worse. Or, heck, many of them probably delude themselves into thinking they are making things better, but they are not. Iraq certainly would have been better off if they had been left to themselves to get rid of Saddam, rather than the charnel house that the US delivered in the name of stopping Saddam’s horrific human rights criminality (“horrific human rights criminality,” by the way, is a phrase of condemnation, since you seem to have a problem with that concept) which HRW and other US-allied “human rights” organizations reported on in great detail while ignoring the similarly horrific acts of US allies. We’ve seen this again with the Arab uprisings. Much reporting, in great detail, on Assad’s crimes (also a term of condemnation, just to be sure you understand), and total silence on the crimes of the (al-Qaeda-backed for fuck’s sake) opposition or the brutal suppression of Bahraini protesters, etc. etc. etc.
That concludes my debate on this subject with you. Be my guest and have at the last word.
[quote=“Rojo, post:51, topic:6155”]
Be my guest and have at the last word.
[/quote] Why bother? You’ve clearly got everyone all figured out, and I have other threads to read from our war-mongering hosts. Cheerio.
I would like to restate my earlier Post…“I posted this on Facebook…
Call me cynical if you like (and I certainly am no supporter of the Iranian Regime!) but this post from Cory Doctrow at http://boingboing.net/2 is too much. The post comes from The Telegraph (written by a journalist in Tel Aviv) and purports to be a set of images issued by the Iranian government itself! The sheer theatricality of the images and the industrial-grade grunt of that machine also make me think that this is an elaborate hoax. I normally enjoy boingboing’s postings and am an admirer of Doctrow but this is disappointing…I will apologise if I am proved wrong!”…I am repeating this because it has been suggested that other sources such as ABC also reported this item. Indeed ABC did report this as a fact. O the other hand The Blaze and The Telegraph (UK) also reported on this but said that the images “appeared” to show a man having his fingers amputated. The source quoted for these reports (from January, 2013) was the “official Government” journal the “Iranian Student’s News Agency” but a search of their archives for January 2013 and December 2012 showed no such report.
I would therefore conclude that the images are staged and I would restate my view that Boing Boing does itself and its readers a real disservice by simply reposting unsubstantiated “news”.
Here’s one of many sources:
http://cironline.org/reports/female-inmates-sterilized-california-prisons-without-approval-4917
Overstatement. This isn’t an actual video of finger removal.
Indeed. I suspect having one’s fingers amputated by a machine that uses the state media agency to do so would be especially painful.
I think it’s the elite-led confluence of federal government and corporate media that is doing its best to remind the world that Iran is supposedly batshit crazy, and more to the point, to ignore the higher levels of batshit craziness and consequent abuse in client states like Saudi Arabia.
I do wish more people (Cory included) would question why they’re being fed these particular horror stories, and not others, before passing them on.
I can assure you that there are still thousands of these flywheel presses in use in light and heavy industry throughout the US. Also, they chop fingers like nobody’s business.
Spot on. I’d love to like you more.
In other news from Iran, Former president Ahmadinejad has stepped down in favor of a more moderate President. Now don’t you think that is the more important piece of news coming from Iran today?
1 Like
Not if Khamenei is still there. Ah my dinner jacket was basically the Mouth of Sauron.
Edit: Well, yes, it probably is important news, although I doubt it will lead to much.
Thank you! I had to read that one about 8 times before I figured out what they were saying. Someone please edit that sentence!
Ohhh! The number of paper cuts just to remove one digit! Maybe a broken floppy disc?
