Retired Insurgents

[SWCAdmin]

First, let me say that, like it or not, Thepartisan's post voices a viewpoint in a coherent way without a deliberate attack. There is a difference between an inflammatory post and a reasonable post recapping a position that inflames you.

Try to keep that in mind in any responses.

...many of you have a capitalistic mentality, or atleast the ones in power. You think everything can be bought, everything has a price, people's lives, peoples dignity. You kill someones brother, mother, child, and you think that throwing money at the issue is going to fix it all.

Second, on some substance, I'll say that I think that widely misses the mark on capitalism as I see it.

In the immortal words of Gordon Gecko, greed is good. And a capitalistic system puts some controls on our exploitation of power and wealth, while still allowing the spoils of success to accrue to the victors in the war of business. Without capitalism, we get a bunch of lazy communists with no reason to do things any better.

Granted, with our US capitalism, we have got a lot of those controls less than right, and we sure as hell don't have the distribution of wealth down. It is vastly imperfect. But still way ahead of whatever is in second place.

With regard to throwing money at death, let me say that is highly unpalatable for Americans. It is also a lot harder to find an American cop to bribe than it is in a lot of the world (but still not nearly hard enough). Your take on underlying American culture is wrong, confused by attempting to comprehend some superficial American acts (which are themselves being done in a cultural jujitsu sense, infinite loop inbound here) through your own cultual lens, which is about as cloudy as mine.

[walrus]

With the greatest respect:

he people whome you fight don't think the same way as you do, they belive in things that you probably can't even comprehend, like honour.

This is true, its called cultural relativism and as a theory it was first expounded by Giambattista Vico in around 1636AD, and later picked up by the German romantic anti rationalist movement led initially by Herder, that finally flowered into Fascism. (read Isiah Berlin on the subject) To paraphrase Berlin: "We cannot understand ancient Rome or Athens because we cannot hear the songs or smell the incence".

In other words, what you are trying to say, I believe is that another culture cannot be understood by anyone outside that culture because they don't have the same concepts, myths, legends, stories, histories and values. The obvious implication appears to me to be "don't even try".

This is false. It is quite possible to immerse yourself in another culture and obtain an understanding of it, by reading their same myths and legends and absorbing their culture and values. People have been doing it for years.

The alternative would mean that there can be no understanding of cultures at all. For example, some hold that the Spartans were noble, proud and honourable warriors to be emulated if possible. The reality is that any study will show you they were also infanticides, slave owners, mean, brutal, racist, and corrupt. Clearly, if you want to study ancient Sparta, you must understand Thermopylae in the context of the society.

It is quite possible to learn about Iraq and its tribes and use that information.

They do not accept bribery, with money or power, because neither of those things is what they are fighting for.

With the greatest respect, about $40 billion in pallets of $100 bills is unaccounted for in Iraq. Go figure.

People don't like to be meddled with, it's not your place not your right, to meddle in the country's affairs.

True, the question then is why do we try?