RaveDeath93

1 day ago

gills

461

(Source: ucantaketheboyoutofthecountry)

2 days ago

sport-naked

394

I wish we’d just go back to swordfighting

3 days ago

Hidden Cost of Drone Program

One expert says the administration is operating drones with a “kill-not-capture” policy, adding that you don’t get intelligence from those killed. But there’s also a human toll â from the pilots who remotely operate the drones to those people who live in the areas that are targeted.

An interesting point is brought up here, noting that the backlash against the illegality of Guantanamo Bay has actually prompted the similarly immoral “kill don’t capture” style of drone warfare so present today.

terrorism war on terror drone drones npr

3 days ago

2

"The missile hits, and after the smoke clears there’s a crater there and you can see body parts from the people. [A] guy that was running from the rear to front, his left leg had been taken off above the knee, and I watched him bleed out.

These guys had no hostile intent. In Montana, everyone has a gun. These guys could have been local people that had to protect themselves. I think we jumped the gun."

—

Former drone operator Brandon Bryant, on his first drone strike.

Bryant quit the drone program after realizing its disregard for life and how numb strikes made him feel, saying he “couldn’t do it anymore.”

drone drones

3 days ago

hipsterlibertarian

296

Chomsky: The Boston Bombings Gave Americans a Taste of the Terrorism the U.S. Inflicts Abroad Every Day

“It’s rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily”

Let this be motivation to work so that neither side must face it again

terrorism

3 days ago

ihatethemedia

65

Western vs Islamic terrorism

Throughout the Islamic world the view that the world should unite to fight Al Qaeda’s terrorism is ridiculed because the USA and Israel are blamed for worse terrorist acts than Al Qaeda’s. The single weakest argument by the West is the one that should be the foundation for the whole strategy: that the civilized world does not practice terrorism.
The Islamic world is right, though: the USA and Israel do practice terrorism. It is a different kind of terrorism, but it is difficult (a semantic nonsense) to claim that the missile shot into a crowded Palestinian street or the carpet bombing from the sky of a city like Baghdad do not constitute terrorism. Any act that terrorize ordinary people is an act of terrorism. When the USA drop powerful bombs on a neighborhood, children are traumatized for years to come. Every time a child hears the roaring of a jet, she panics, knowing that within a few seconds an entire building will be annihilated and families exterminated, and it could be her house and her family.
Modern high-tech warfare is not humane. Ancient warfare at least gave the victim some warning and a chance to escape. Modern high-tech warfare does not. - Piero Scaruffi

America & Israel try and act as if we are at war with Al-Qaeda but Al-Qaeda is not at war with them. They act as if only our actions are acts of war.

war on terror terrorism usa america

3 days ago

BOOTSTRAPS UP FROM HOMELESSNESS

The “Happyness’ story created the false impression that, working diligently, anyone can pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps out of poverty or homelessness.

In its 2006 study of homelessness’ root causes, the Western Regional Advocacy Project’s report “Without Housing” found that:

“It is logically incorrect and misleading to rely on individual biographical factors to explain why societal rates of homelessness suddenly sky-rocketed in the 1980s.

“We must ask ourselves what systemic factors changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to allow so many people to fall through the social safety net and end up living and dying in our streets.”

An early scene established the 1980s time frame and barely suggested a reason for homelessness. Gardner sat before a TV set from which Ronald Reagan addressed the nation about tightening the national budget. His book exposes a mind clearly aware of concurrent social forces like the fleeting, but powerful, face on the screen.

In a section entitled “The Dismantling of Federal Affordable Housing Programs,” WRAP’s charts illustrate that from the 1980s Reagan era to the 2000 Bush administration, new construction of HUD subsidized housing units fell from 125,000 yearly to below 2,500 in 1982 and never rose above that level again. Existing housing stock thinned by attrition and other causes from above 250,000 in 1979 to below 25,000 in 2004.

Below the page 13 chart is written: “The cutbacks in federal funding of affordable housing were the primary precipitating cause of the emergence of massive homelessness in the 1980s through to today. As a result of these cutbacks, millions of single adults, families, and youth found themselves out on the streets and homeless for the first time in decades.”