groin kicking
instapundit just makes me laugh sometimes. like in this post:
HERE'S A REPORT that the Socialists in Spain were ahead even before the 3/11 attacks. Hmm. I'd like to believe that.
i just don't get why he'd 'like to believe it.' i mean...it's not like a magical story that you can choose to believe or not. it was the results of a couple of polls. i don't see the room for interpretation there. and it's not like he offers any proof to the contrary.
and then, this. in comments of the post about the poll results that mr. reynolds linked to:
That's a nice claim. However, it's utterly irrelevant.Do you think al Qaeda believes it? If you do, you're lying to yourself.
Which means that the Socialist victory is still likely to lead to more terrorist attacks, REGARDLESS of whether or not the terrorists actually caused the victory.
And the Spanish people still deserve our contempt.
Because the proper response to the attack was to vote for whoever the terrorists liked the least. But the Spanish people voted for the party the terrorists preferred.
please don't make me throw up and/or kick you in the groin. believe what you want about AQ's motivations or what the ramifications might be, but don't say the spanish deserve our contempt. i've never seen anything so disgusting in my life. i WILL kick you in the balls if you say that. believe me. i've done it before for no reason at all.
i just think it's HYSTERICAL that people who are neither a. spanish nor b. al-quaeda feel so qualified to make comments on this situation. "oh yeah, the spanish definitely voted this way because of this!" or, "oh yeah, AQ bombed madrid because they wanted that!" SHUT UPPPPPPP. YOU DO NOT HAVE A SPECIAL MIND PORTAL INTO THE THOUGHTS OF ANYONE ELSE.
sorry. i'm just having an episode right now. ignore me. let's read a comment on that same post from a spaniard:
Hi!Iīm a Spaniard. So you may want to read my opinion.
The main reason, in my opinion, why the Socialist Pary have won the elections, is not the bombimgs, or the thoguht that participating in a war that we, the mojority of us (as shown on the streets), didnīt want. Not at all. The main reason was the manipulating behaviour of our government (formed by de Popular Party) during the days after the terrorist attacks, claiming that it was ETA when there was proof it wasnīt, because being an islamist group could hurt their results in the elections.
It has been tense here, till the point that people went spontaneisly on the streets on Saturday yo ask our government for answers before voting. The answers didnīt really come. The public television channel did manipulate and hide information. Many (the majority, as seen in the election results) had the terrible feeling of being cheated by our government. Which is more terrible when they lie on the dead.
That was the last thing many of us needed to say "enough!", and the PP has been punished. And itīs not only that we were cheated. Our neigbour countries were, too, when our External Affairs minister send letters to our embassadors encouraging them to announce publicly that the auhotrs of the bombigs were ETA, when they had increasing proof that it was not, making those terrible events a international problem, not only domestic. They should have warned our neighbous to allow them to go on alert. And they didnīt.
We are no cowards. We are not making what Al-Qaeda wants. We have been, in my opinion, very brave, and i feel proud of all those people that went on the street. And iīm proud that my people have chosen a change when we could not stand such a government anymore. Just to let you know, the Socialist Pary was against the Irak war from the very beginning, and thus they are acting now consequently.
another comment from the same person:
Yep, but at the time of voting, how Al-Quaeda thinks is (and iīll explain) not our business. I mean, we have to vote thinking and how our government behaves and if we agree with its decissions. Al-Qaueda may have attacked us whether we had supported the US or not, as they have done in other non-supporting countries. And because, i assume, we are an easy target.
Here: http://www.escolar.net, if you have a good translator, there you have a great following of the events from these past days. And here: http://www.cpinformativos.org/informes/cpi-informe-04.htm , you have a report from the Provisional Informative Council of TVE (the spanish public channel) informing of the manipulation that the same channel did during the elections.
Having lived this things, watched these events "live", the plans of Al-Quaed go to the background in our considerations. More when many of us think that making a financial and economic war (i choose those adjectives because itīs insultive to hear some of our politics saying that to watch dead people in the war, war crude images on the tv news "is not very good towards investors"...), open war on Irak is no solution to terrorism. Thatīs what we said in our demonstrations a year ago.And now we have said that we want an honest government. It has not directly to do, and it does really matters how Al-Quaeda thinks.
Comments
Longest comment ever. Please ignore.
I'm rapidly getting sick of all of these pundits tut-tutting the election results in Spain. "They're encouraging terrorism!" is the objection. "Acknowledging it in any way only encourages more."
They're confusing terrorists with children -- this seems to happen a lot among conservatives. "They hate freedom" / "he hates brussel sprouts" -- similarly nuanced positions. The idea that you can't show any weakness, or the bad behavior will continue; that's how you rear a child and teach him limits. To apply it to adults is supremely patronizing.
I got news for ya: staunch facade or not, the bad behavior *will* continue. Dellis is right, Israel has been consistently unflinching in the face of Palestinian terrorism. Say, how is that conflict going, anyway? Oh. Well, they'll probably wrap it up soon. What's that? Seventeen years? Hmm.
I think human beings will do their best to minimize suffering, both personally and as cultural groups. You can't stop that impulse. The problem is that the disenfranchised groups responsible for terrorism usually have no way to go about fixing things. They're at the mercy of an outside power. Their only option is to increase the suffering of that power's constituency, and hope that it will in turn be spurred to action.
This is why terrorism works: because we are fat and rich. We have the ability to fix their grievances, they do not, and consequently we will either blink first or have to kill them all. We're trying for option 2 right now, but unfortunately it can't work unless we manage to avoid putting their friends and allies into the aggrieved category in the process. This seems unlikely.
An obvious argument against this position would be its potential effects on the US policy toward domestic terrorism -- wouldn't this reasoning trickle down to every maniac with a bomb and a grudge about the latest metro fare hike? No. Mostly, because I genuinely believe that people don't like killing other people, and consequently there is a natural threshhold to prevent terrorist action from applying to increasingly meager grievances -- inflicting suffering on another person necessarily increases your own, for moral and practical reasons. But more importantly, because that metro-protestor is living under the rule of law, under a social contract, and however ineffective the nonviolent remedies available to him may be, they are there and must be pursued. He will try to reduce his suffering; he chose a violent means.
There is no international rule of law. The UN is a joke, there is no specific penalty for a country breaking a treaty, and the international court is really just window dressing to justify whatever we decide to do to our enemies. There are no remedies available to people whose culture is being overrun by the west, or whose land is occuppied by a foreign power, or whose economies are being twisted by the sudden upheaval of globalization.
Of course there's no excuse for taking a human life, and people who commit atrocities like what happened in Spain need to pay for their crimes. I just don't think it will help very much. Global suffering is going to continue to try to reach a homogenous equilibrium. It sucks to admit it, but the western powers are the ones most able to put this process into action. Nobody is saying complete capitulation, appeasement or excusing the enormity of terrorist actions. But to put on blinders and insist we're wrong, they're right, we will not change the way we do anything, goddammit, is just stubbornness. Until something changes, I suspect terrorism is going to stick around.
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