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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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Yeah, I guess they don't count then hey?
A young couple waited desperately for a rescue that would never come.
Jessica Kuhn and Johanco Fleischman’s Toyota Hilux had run out of fuel on the N12 W. near Benoni, about 32 km east of Johannesburg.
But instead of salvation, they encountered evil.
As the group awaited rescue, three men – illegal gold miners according to local media reports – walked past their vehicle.
When they returned, one of the men allegedly whispered “umhulungu,” allegedly a derogatory phrase for whites.
Then one of the trio of thugs pulled out a revolver and fired, parking at least nine slugs in Fleischman’s body.
He was 19.
As Kuhn, 23, screamed hysterically, the triggerman cooly leaned into the vehicle and silenced her forever with a single bullet to the head.
https://torontosun.com/news/world/young-white-couple-executed-in-south-africa-race-attack
When they returned, one of the men allegedly whispered “umhulungu,” allegedly a derogatory phrase for whites.
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Instances of isolated hate crimes don't necessarily prove systematic race-based dispossession and violence, though. I haven't studied South Africa deeply enough to be sure on where the truth lies on this, but links like the ones P4S provides do offer credibility to the suggestion that those claims are being majorly overstated in certain quarters.
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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^ crime in general in SA is out of control against whites,blacks,purples and anything in between unfortunately. At the moment in SA it is violence directed at mainly black immigrants from other African countries with struggling economies - we are frequent visitors so tend to keep a bit of an eye on it. The ANC have failed their people in spectacular fashion - turning in his grave would be one Mandella - the greed and corruption of their politicians is truly eye watering!!
The murder of those 2 young folks seems not to be a " hate crime" per se - just the usual organised crime, gang related violence 
https://benonicitytimes.co.za/346647/private-investigator-unravels-incidents-leading-putfontein-double-murder/ |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| pietillidie wrote: | | Jezza wrote: | | swoop42 wrote: | Stabbed in the back. Again!
Sadly predictable move by Trump and the United States. |
How much longer do you want the US occupying Syria?
It's a never ending war. |
No, pathetic defence. Even worse than the arguments offered for invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
If you want to hand over the responsibility of protecting the vulnerable, stop white anting the UN and start supporting them in the role everyone sane has wanted them to take over from the US for decades now.
And to say that as he spends hundreds of millions (billions?) needlessly supporting Saudi Arabia is farcical.
There is no list of talking points that can magically transform this horror. There is no fudging and no moral complexity about it: Trump and his vile cronies were warned a bloodbath would ensue, just as George W. was warned that the Coalition of the Willing would not be welcomed in complex multi-party environments they knew nothing about, and only chaos would ensue.
The corrupt dealings involved in George W's callous decisions have long been exposed; Trump's corrupt dealings are being exposed by the minute. But even if you try to hold back the tide by denying those, the Saudi Arabia troops, a mere five minutes after the Kurd abandonment, are indisputable public fact. 'Tiring of endless war' is an outright lie. |
Speaking of white anting the UN, one odd occurrence is that I read about those great allies the US and Russia vetoing a draft UN resolution on Syria a couple of days ago, but it's since fallen off the map in Google, so I can only find it on obscure sites such as this:
https://euobserver.com/foreign/146242
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Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Morrigu wrote: | ^ crime in general in SA is out of control against whites,blacks,purples and anything in between unfortunately. At the moment in SA it is violence directed at mainly black immigrants from other African countries with struggling economies - we are frequent visitors so tend to keep a bit of an eye on it. The ANC have failed their people in spectacular fashion - turning in his grave would be one Mandella - the greed and corruption of their politicians is truly eye watering!!
The murder of those 2 young folks seems not to be a " hate crime" per se - just the usual organised crime, gang related violence
https://benonicitytimes.co.za/346647/private-investigator-unravels-incidents-leading-putfontein-double-murder/ |
Mugabe started off with saying the right things and turned into a corrupt dictator who destroyed a country.
Mandella started off saying the right things, and stuck to it. He was never corrupted (as far as I know) but it grew around him and once he was gone........
Democracy doesn't work when the people are only used to a single ruler situation. 
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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watt price tully
Joined: 15 May 2007
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Chris Uhlmann's analysis unfortunately continues to nail it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_ckWZCHW4
Hope you get run over by the next bus Trump, you murderous c*nt (& p*ick)
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I don't want to play devil's advocate for the sake of it, but are we to assign the responsibility for all civilian deaths that occurred in Iraq after the withdrawal of US troops in 2011 to Barack Obama? Most have probably forgotten this, but 72 civilians were killed in co-ordinated attacks just four days after the withdrawal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_December_2011_Baghdad_bombings
And that's not just hindsight talking – I recall expressing misgivings about US withdrawal from Iraq before then, because of the risk of things like this happening (and you can read exchanges on that very question here: http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?t=59912). Even if withdrawal was the right decision, as it probably ultimately was, it was a supremely difficult one without easy answers. The US's presence in northern Syria is not much different.
Certainly, Trump's decision to pull out without warning has enabled these attacks to occur. But can we please assign the blame for the murders where it actually belongs: the Turks. Doing otherwise actually plays into the pro-intervention, white-man's-burden view of the world that has fostered so many US invasions. Erdogan and his stooges are not agency-free babies incapable of making ethical decisions without American input, and it's actually a form of subtle racism to treat the US as the only determining actor here.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Rundle takes a different view:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/10/11/donald-trump-turkey-kurds-invasion/
| Quote: | Political punditry, if you don’t keep your eye on the prize, can easily get you confused; a piece of self-reproach as much as anything. This writer dislikes those who criticise everything Trump does. Equally, the propagandist notion of the US as a force for freedom is also irritating.
But then comes something like Trump’s sudden withdrawal of US special forces from Rojava (Kurdish Syria), and it’s the temporarily pro-Trump “left” who are wrong. Let’s deal with the alleged inconsistency of supporting US forces from the left in a moment. This is a ghastly act, conceived as either distraction from impeachment, or masking State Department realpolitik, or Trump being played by Turkey’s President Erdogan like a cheap hurdy-gurdy, or a mix of all three.
To take Trump being done over by Erdogan as part of consistent withdrawal from the US’ “forever wars” is to let this symbolic but consequential act substitute for genuine demobilisation. The small US contingent was there as a place marker, primarily: to make it impossible for Turkey, Russia or Iran to nip off territory. Yes, no one is fooled by US interest in the Kurds. Iraqi Kurdistan and Rojava were being gussied up to serve as a useful little US base should they achieve some sort of independence.
But there are more things no one is fooled by: Sunni Turkish denials of support for Sunni ISIS, when Ankara was allowing them to supply from Turkey; the fact that the Kurdish YPG is… erm… very close to the PKK, which mounts violent guerrilla attacks in Turkey; or repeated US claims that they did not directly support the PKK in northern Iraq, for years after 2003. It’s a mess, but for the fact that the Rojavan Kurds have built something worth defending out of two decades of horror. The dismantling of ISIS and the prospect that elements of it could reassemble — its Turkey-Syria supply and command lines restored — should surely give anyone pause.
Trump’s sudden withdrawal of the special forces obviously has nothing deliberate to do with honouring his never-consistent “end foreign wars” election rhetoric. Nothing in the series of White House confidential now pouring out suggests that he has much cunning at the foreign policy level; he assumes the shape of the last person who sat on him. When John Bolton was appointed, Trump was all ready to go to war with Venezuela. It was only Bolton’s hubris that finely riled Trump to sack him.
Having warned Erdogan that he could destroy Turkey’s economy if the Kurds were harmed, he has now parroted a Breitbart-esque article about the fleetingness of the US-Kurdish alliance and taken a rhetorical flourish as literal, bizarrely announcing that the Kurds “didn’t help in Normandy”.
(I know I should ration myself on these things, but if you want to see a real neocon farrago of a treatment, check out Greg Sheridan’s account of this in the Oz. From his sudden conversion to troop withdrawal, his adoption of the official, blatantly false PKK/YPG division, the fake Obama comparisons and, in a first draft that disappeared overnight, included something like: Trump’s actions are usually smart, however they appear; it is difficult to see how this is. Has the word gone out that this is too stupid even for News Corp to defend?)
But that is perhaps irrelevant to the question of the Kurds themselves. Some of the left support for the quasi-independent entity of Rojava — with its modernising revolution, sexual equality, self-managing “cantons” — has always relied on selective blindness. The Rojavans/YPG and PKK won the fight against ISIS, but only with US air support, YPG fighters directing the bombing of Kobani from the ground. Support for this seems politically unproblematic to me, an extension of the principle at play in Libya in 2011 — US involvement isn’t always the worst thing (arguing which I’m happy to pile on in the comments section).
There is probably still a fair bit of Marxism-Leninism beneath the Kurds new-found anarchism. But they destroyed ISIS — the group whose radical evil, we were told, affirmed the truth of Western civilisation blah blah, I didn’t see the Ramsay Centre forming a brigade — while building a modern but still-Islamic society at the same time. Which is of course one other reason why Erdogan wants to crush Rojava: it is a standing rebuke to his de-modernising, de-Ataturkising Islamism, by showing that religion and rights can co-exist.
With unerring aim, Trump has removed one of the few garrisons doing any good, while leaving the real “forever war” in Afghanistan to grind on. As we leave the Cold War fully behind, and as a multipolar world emerges, the reflex to demand the US get out will have exceptions — not perhaps that many — and simply keeping silent when that’s the case won’t be enough.
The American empire has not been stood down by this; this is a crappy brain-fart of an action. Or yes, I know, simply realpolitik, repeating the Ford-Kissinger betrayal of the Kurds in ’75, and with Trump’s clown act as cover for the State Department and mustering all the futility and funk that has become Trump’s signature in the world.
The Rojavan Kurds represented humanity for a time; as did those from elsewhere — including Australians — who saw something worth fighting for, joined them and died there. There are forever wars, and then there are those that have to be fought, and it’s important not to get confused. |
While Bernard Keane, from the same publication, disagrees:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/10/10/trump-is-right-on-syria/
| Quote: | One of the problems for people who rail against Trump is that the First Toddler is so wildly inconsistent. As such, a “Trump is wrong on all things all the time” mindset is apt to induce inconsistency on the part of those who hold it.
The same is true for his diehard supporters — much comment has been made about Senate leader Mitch McConnell, normally a diehard Trump supporter, excoriating the president’s Sunday night “decision” to clear the way for Turkey’s murderous Erdoğan regime to invade Syria and attack Kurdish groups, most of whom have been helping Western forces destroy Islamic State. “It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars,” Trump tweeted, before going on to refer, Mao-like, to his “great and unmatched wisdom” in promising to punish Turkey if it does anything untoward.
Trump officials then scrambled, as they have scrambled so often before, to explain his tweets: the US wasn’t actually leaving Syria, but merely moving a small number of troops out the path of Erdoğan’s plan to exterminate as many Kurds as he could — a plan the Turkish president promptly implemented. The collective reaction to Trump’s move — from right to left, Republican to Democrat, US and abroad, Trump supporter to bitter critic — was that this was a disaster. The US had once again betrayed the Kurds; its credibility was now so tattered no ally could depend on it; the Turkish attack on the Kurds would release hundreds of IS fighters and create new areas from which they could launch attacks.
Here, the Australian government had to express a different view. Having outsourced our entire Middle Eastern foreign policy to the White House, the Netanyahu regime and the mass murderers of Riyadh, Scott Morrison had to reflexively support Trump despite being taken entirely by surprise. The prime minister tempered his support by hilariously urging “restraint of all of those who are involved”. Particularly the Kurds, one assumes, who should restrain from getting in the way of Turkish bullets and bombs.
By and large, though, the reaction from the foreign policy establishment was summed up by Nine’s Chris Uhlmann — a regular and savage critic of Trump — who argued “if an alliance that is measured in a sea of blood has no value to Trump, then what price does he put on defence relationships built on pledges of burden-sharing made by nations such as Australia?”
Trump, as on everything else, is entirely inconsistent about “Endless Wars”: at the behest of the Saudi tyranny and his former national security adviser John Bolton, he has prepared the ground for a war against Iran, which Morrison has eagerly signed us up for (Bolton’s departure hasn’t removed his toxic presence, by the way: only this week we learnt the US would be abandoning the “open skies” arms control treaty). But Trump’s shuffling of troops around Syria has exposed how fragile — and facile — the arguments are for maintaining Western forces in yet another Middle Eastern country.
Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley argued that the US had to continue to, in effect, guarantee Kurdish security because of their contribution to the defeat of IS. But think that logic through: IS was created as a direct result of the illegal Western attack on Iraq by George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and other miscreants. IS then became the pretext for another military venture in the Middle East in 2014. Now we’re told that, as a consequence of that secondary venture, Western forces must remain there.
These are literally “Endless Wars”, with each one creating the pretext for another venture justified by neoconservatives and the foreign policy establishment as crucial to security, stability and that precious commodity of “credibility”. For Trump’s critics there will never be a point at which the US, and other Western countries, should end their interventionism.
The same circular logic applies to the argument that continued Western involvement is crucial to prevent the establishment of safe havens for terrorists. But we’re still in Afghanistan more than 15 years after invading it for that very reason, and continue to be there because our invasion created more terrorists. The Iraq invasion created an entirely new generation of terrorists around the world, as did Islamic State. As Patrick Buchanan notes, “al-Qaeda and ISIS are in many more places today than they were when we intervened in the Middle East”. Interventionism, as Crikey has argued for years, simply creates more terrorists, which become the pretext for more interventions.
Trump is rarely right, and when he is, you just need to wait five minutes and he’ll change his mind, or his officials will brief something different. But his resistance to “Endless Wars” — at least those he hasn’t started himself — is a rare moment of open challenge to the doctrine that has given us nearly two decades of a multitrillion-dollar War On Terror with no end in sight. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Once you're there, and you've insinuated yourself into the ecology, the moral responsibility is significantly yours to bear. The key is not to physically engage opaque, complex, historical, multi-party messes, especially when there is a risk of commercial conflict of interest, except in a diplomatic/peacekeeping/development capacity.
The absolutely last thing you do is rightly oppose endless wars of interference, only to suddenly abandon a situation you have already taken responsibility for (even if in error), and then go out and take on yet another war elsewhere.
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Last edited by pietillidie on Mon Oct 14, 2019 11:54 am; edited 1 time in total |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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PTID, I completely share your revulsion with Trump's military support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But isn't that just whataboutery in this context? Surely the pressing question at hand is how this specific situation should have been handled. Some may rightfully ask, if the US had a moral obligation to stay in northern Syria, was it an eternal one? Would the risk of Turkish reprisals, surely planned ages ago for the very minute US forces left, ever go away?
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | PTID, I completely share your revulsion with Trump's military support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But isn't that just whataboutery in this context? Surely the pressing question at hand is how this specific situation should have been handled. Some may rightfully ask, if the US had a moral obligation to stay in northern Syria, was it an indefinite one? Would the risk of Turkish reprisals, surely planned ages ago for the very minute US forced left, ever go away? |
No, it's gross moral failure. As explained, you've already insinuated yourself and taken on the moral responsibility. Moreover, you know exactly what is about to happen.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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We've had years to work this out since Afghanistan, and people are still getting distracted by the partisan nonsense. Apparently, rather than learning from experience and developing more robust ideas and principles, people's brains simply reset between disasters.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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I have similar feelings David, the US can't and shouldn't stay forever and as we see in Afghanistan, trying to stay until the place is up and running and can take care of itself is a long and bloody process.
The USA had no reason to be in Syria in the first place, it's Russia's sphere of influence and they were doing the heavy lifting there. While I think the Kurds have a right to feel led on, it was political naivety to think that Syria, Iraq and Turkey would just allow them to create an independent state from the chaos of Isis and the Syrian Civil War.
FWIW it looks like they're going to take the option of surrendering to Assad and allowing the SAA in, backed by the RuAF. A unified Syria is probably the best option. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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^ That does seem to be what's happening now – the Kurds have struck a deal with Assad, which appears to mean that they will cede towns to the Syrian government and the Syrian army will handle the situation with Turkey. In a way, this does represent a preservation of territorial integrity and prioritisation of regional solutions over US hegemony, for whatever that's worth; I suspect that one's view on how good or bad that outcome is will depend on the view one holds on what role the US should play in the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/13/kurds-reach-deal-with-damascus-in-face-of-turkish-offensive
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