That is not a fair allegation.

Perhaps I should state, then, that it's just my opinion. Sorry if I have offended you.

That is not a fair allegation. My posts are always relevent although often tangential and occaissionally pointed and on rare occaisions humerous.

Got to agree that your posts do often baffle me, and I'm still trying to fathom the context of the Star Wars one.

Zoe, the Bureacracy conversation regarding you starts here. If I were you, I'd go look, but I realize we may handle such situations differently.

It's OK. I know the points I make are sometimes oblique and I do usually try to clarify them. It takes me some time to do so.

Please bear with me. I am looking at Angel (and other shows too) as a form of modern philosophy and trying to tie together ideas without getting too serious about it all. There are fascinating discussions in this thread but it is also the UnAmerican thread. We could create a Politics thread I guess but the idea has, I believe, been vetoed many times.

I'm still trying to fathom the context of the Star Wars one.

It was the passage about pre-emptive strikes which struck me when I read it. I thought it'd be interesting to highlight it in the context of the war in Iraq.

There's been sort of a moratorium on discussing it among me and my friends.

I have found this the case IRL here too. A friend that I haven't seen in months stopped by to visit me yesterday and in the first few minutes he gently inquired as to my feelings on the war. His intention was to not ruin our visit if we were not of the same thinking.

Over the years I have routinely debated opposing views with friends without it harming our rapport. This particular war seems to be a topic that rational adults on opposite sides just can't discuss.

This particular war seems to be a topic that rational adults on opposite sides just can't discuss.

Misha linked to an excellent article on that very topic in her blog the other day.

Thank you for the plug, Angus! (My blog, by the way, is called Hippo Dignity -- I need to buy that URL when I get paid...)

And the article is completely true, and possibly the least annoying thing Neal Pollack has ever written as a result.

I have seen so many of my relationships with people change since 9/11, and the war in particular seems to have brought out the worst, most crazy-making sides of everyone I know. Myself included. And I don't think it's going to end any time soon.

Meanwhile, my truly insane acquaintance Chris Allbritton is now reporting online from Iraqi Kurdistan, if you want to follow along at home.

In Portland about 60% of the people I know are pro-war; and the only reason I know 40% who are not is due to activism - overwhelmingly the majority of my friends (as opposed to political allies) are pro-invasion. So I wish you would look for explanations other than groupthink for disagreement. My life would be much more comfortable if I were pro-war right now.

I just had to post this, from yesterday's (Friday's) NY Times. It's about all the looting (which bugs me about the hospitals but NSM about places like Aziz' palaces):

Caroma the problem with all the looting and lawlessness is that, once again, it is the crooks who benefit not the ordinary people. The wealth and treasures of the palaces that are being looted, as well as the ordinary implements/furnishings of the ordinary Iraqi business people, as well as the stuff from the hotels and other official buildings, all goes to make up the collected wealth of the Iraqi people, the same as it does anywhere else.

Some of these may help you understand the dire economic straits that face Iraq and remember that these are all figures from before this war really started ...

From cornell article.

By 1989 Iraq owed an estimated $80 billion, representing more than 350% of the estimated Iraqi GNP. By contrast: US debt to GNP ratio was roughly 5% in 1990.

Iraq's Debt Burden

Iraq’s financial burden consists of debt amounting to $127bn, pending contracts worth some $57.2bn, and Gulf War compensation of $27.1bn (the difference between compensation awarded and compensation paid out), and whatever is awarded by the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) for the remaining claims totaling $197.4bn. Iraq’s liabilities therefore stand at a total of $211.3bn. Assuming a similar proportion of roughly 30% of remaining claims to the UNCC are approved, resulting in an additional bill of around $60bn, Iraq’s financial burden would reach $271.3bn.

And forget the money side of things for a moment and just consider the history and cultural side of things ...

Iraq is the cradle of civilization -- home of the world's earliest agriculture, its earliest cities and its earliest writing. Abraham lived there, as did Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. Imam Ali, the founder of Shiite Islam, died there.

Iraq is the land of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where Neolithic peoples around 9,000 years ago domesticated animals and developed agriculture, enabling them to form the world's first cities.

Around 3500 B.C., the Sumerians became the world's first great civilization. Cuneiform writing on clay tablets was developed about 3200 B.C. Empires rose and fell in ancient Mesopotamia, from the Akkadians to the Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Parthians and Romans.

Abraham, the patriarch of the Torah and the Old Testament, came from the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur, and Hammurabi, the lawgiver, ruled in Babylon, as did Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and Alexander the Great. Ali died in Kufa in 661 A.D. and was buried in Najaf. Baghdad served as the center of the Abbasid Caliphate for 500 years until it was sacked by the Mongols in 1258 A.D.

"Baghdad itself is a major medieval site," said Columbia University archaeologist and art historian Zainab Bahrani, who was born in Iraq. "The city is filled with [Islamic-era] buildings from the ninth to the 14th centuries."

then the looting and destruction become even more significant than just ripping off a few office chairs, lampshades, and dinnersets. This is all from a Washington Post articlewritten a month ago,

The gravest danger comes afterward, when authority disappears and desperate people cope with chaos by stealing the marketable treasures that reside in museums or in the ground. It happened after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and Iraq never recovered from the experience.

In the war's immediate aftermath, guards were withdrawn from sites and museums and laws became all but unenforceable. Nine of the 13 regional museums in both the north and south were raided by mobs who stole things straight from the cases, at least 3,000 objects disappeared."

In 1996, dealers were offered nine fragments of what in 1990 had been an intact bas relief sculpture from Sennacherib's Palace in the Assyrian city of Nineveh.

Anybody interested in art, history, archeology, civilisation, culture, philosophy, and so on, must surely cringe not laugh when they read things like this ...

There was also a lengthy gun battle near the capital's main museum this morning. Archaeological treasures from the dawn of civilisation lay broken in pieces.