Posted on 04/06/2006 4:33:24 AM PDT by Mr170IQ
We've been having great fun with this thread, at least some of us.
What scares us is that we can visualize at least some of it happening.
Trying to figure out what the three words are has been a way to deal with it in a way that lets us think about the unthinkable with a bit of distance, I suspect.
I can see that the writer of that satire hasn't read enough 50s early 60s SF....or he would know that was SOP...I recently went back and read some of the old Ace Doubles that I read when I was a kid and boy, are they bad...even when they were written by authors I knew would end up writing good stuff later...
I concur. I do believe some of it will happen just by watching and reading the news.
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I read this from the link at theanchoressonline.com before it got on here and almost posted it myself. I figured somebody would, and that the gang would be on it like ugly on Helen Thomas. And I was not wrong.
My guess on the traveler's last words, at least the gist of them? Put it this way. Most of his words, the latter part, were a target list. The Islamic nutters think of us as the Great Satan. Given that, what more obvious target is there than the devil's palace?
It may be necessary and prudent to kill your enemires.Deriving pleasure from torturing them puts you on a lower level.WE had a dog go mad(not rabid) and kill another dog without provocation.Put it down humanely and hated it but knew it was too dangerous to let live.
It is not needed to kill all Muslims,sincere conversions would suffice as long as it is Muslims converting to a religion that respects life,free will, and reason. Any belief which fears all other ideas must be weak.
Yeah? Do you have a Mr Flibble sock puppet?
I see your point...
Force should be used to smash the actual "soldiers",force should be used to ensure that no money,structure or property is being used to train or house terrorists and their weapons.Force should be used to punish those who willingly hide or aid the jihadists.Force should be used to arrest and imprison those who call for attacks on the civilized world.Force should be used to ensure that no one is forced to convert to islam,nor prevented from leaving it. Force should be used against anyone involved in honor killing .
Force includes the death penanlty .
IF we can't even agree to rid America of tens of thousands of convicted murderers and millions of sneaky illegals there is little likelihood we will wipe out a billion people.
Keep in mind those billion people are kept deliberately ignorant and not permitted to hear competing beliefs.
I wonder how many hours of shortwave broadcasting of Christian or other non-islamic religion programs is carried in languages needed ?
This is even partly of our own making by allowing ourselves to be so dependent on the oil ,allowing and promoting fanatics to control it,and for J. Cahtuh mucking up the Middle East. Without the billions we send the fanatics would be plotting uselessly.Money IS power,and we give it away.
Anyone who is at all familiar with history has encountered this argument ad nauseam. It was once solemnly declared to be a hard mathematical inevitability that "the natural increase of the Irish shall place America at the heels of the Pope of Rome before the end of the [nineteeth] century" if they weren't kicked out and kept out.
I have something like a 10-year supply in a box in my basement. I have to read through them. I didn't read so much of them in college and the years after, just a few short stories and the science articles (the ones I could comprehend after the first two pages). Some issues have disappeared on me. I remmeber having to buy another copy of the issue with part 1 of "The Smoke Ring" because I waited for part 4 to start reading it. A couple I put aside to save because I liked some of the stories and I thought that they were good guides to writing good Analog stories. (I haven't written a good Analog story yet. Someday. Maybe. But I doubt it -- I don't know the science part well enough.)
Islam has not won. After 100 years (from 1968, when RFK was assassinated in LA, for Islamic reasons.) the outcome is still in doubt. Even if the author knows what the words are, to not write them, makes the piece more powerful.
I think it is clear from the piece, that the Traveler is the Author's grandson. However, I don't think that "I am [insert pet name here]" would strike terror in any one else. It could be "Remember Los Angeles" or "Remember New York" or Remember some other city, but it is clear from the article that San Francisco and Dallas both got hit with a WMD.
I propose "We nuke Mecca". THAT would strike fear in anyone.
The only quibble I would raise is that, yes, plenty of people did see the cracks and fault lines in the foundations of Communist power (but, as usual, the din raised by Chicken Little and Company tended to drown out the quite voice of rational analysis).
I remember being somewhat taken aback when reading one of the essays in Heinlein's Expanded Universe, in which he described the falling out between the Soviets and the ChiComs as a long-shot stroke of good luck for Western Civilization (rather than a near inevitability once the latter no longer felt that they needed the aid of the former).
Obviously not, unless there's some way to build a time machine out of stone knives and camel skins.
Obviously, the New Testament per se is not required -- Jews today don't go around engaging in massacres of the sort described in the Biblical account of the original conquest of Caanan.
Realistically, what civilizes a religion (or any other major institution) is some counterveiling force that prevents it from wreaking evil, or at least penalizes it significantly for doing so. In the case of Christianity, the civilizing process was a fallout of struggles between Church and State and (particularly after that German monk tacked his notions up on a church door) between church and church.
LOL! Tell that to the surviving relatives of a Shiite killed by a Sunni (or vice versa) in the Iraqi civil war whatever they're calling it this week.
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