1. Why should we trust Syrian officials?
2. Powell didn’t lie about WMDs. He reported on the intelligence he was given. In some cases the intelligence was wrong or not accurate but reporting what it said, not knowing things weren’t true isn’t lying.
We couldn’t be fooled into another war, could we? could we?
Well, they certainly don't care about the Syrian Christians who will get slaughtered.
This is just another example:
I sit here before a computer screen. On this screen are pixels of different hues and intensities.
Some are black against white, and represent written or spoken words, attributed to someone I’ve never met, and who might have who-knows-what motive for writing them.
Some of the colored pixel are organized to represent a visual scene, but I have no way of verifying that either, nor do I know the motives of the people who are responsible. Sometimes my computer’s speakers make a human-like sound that is supposed to reinforce the reality of the pixels.
The words and images are about people and a place and events that I have no way of verifying, and further pixels arguing to the validity of the words and images is likewise of questionable validity and motive.
The assumption is that I should care about all this, that these pixels should motivate me to support or not support some proposed action that will affect my life, affect those I actually know and care about, or my freedom, or my purchasing power, or my lifestyle, or my patriotic pride or sense of morality.
But time and again these assumption have not turned out to be accurate. It turns out I do not know the motives of those who create these conglomeration of pixels, nor the validity of what they are trying to say, nor the true impact it will have on my reality.
Indeed, experience over the past sixty years has taught me not to trust one bit of it.
In this example, I am supposed to spend mental energy, and probably money/taxes, and probably to give up freedoms, to stop someone I don’t know or care about, in a land I don’t know or care about, from doing something supposedly horrible that I can’t verify to people I don’t know or care about and can’t verify. I can’t verify a single bit of it, and in fact I suspect the whole mess and the motives of the people who brought the story to me with their collection of pixels.
What I do know is that I spent most of the morning working in the garden, and that I will now go pray and meditate for an hour, and then go have surgery on my hand this afternoon, and then come home and take it easy until my wife returns from work this evening. That’s real. My friends and neighbors are real. My dog and chickens are real. The view from my porch is real.
The pixels? Do they represent reality? Who knows, and who cares.
Obama’s fraud!
First he says he’s watching Syrian storage facilities, and if the Syrians access them, THAT is the “Red Line”.
So, he never acknowledges when they violate that “Red Line”.
Since he would be forced into action if he acknowldedged violation of the “use” Red Line, he claims to not be quite sure, even after his Sec Def has confirmed tests for sarin gas are positive.
Hmmm. Which group of lying Moslems to believe?
Actually, I don’t care. Given the nature of his opposition, I think Assad SHOULD be using WMDs against the Al Qaeda and Moslem Botherhood “rebels.” If he is not, it is his funeral (and that of the Alawite minority, the Druze, the Christians and any other religious minority in Syria...).
We’re supposed to trust ‘unnamed officials’ and AP? They’re more trustworthy than the govt?
WMD’s are Obama’s best reason to send troops. I don’t believe Obama.
Obama wants the currrent Syrian regime to be gone so The Muslim Brotherhood can take over.
Just like he helped them to do in Libya and Egypt and a bunch of other places during “The Arab Spring”
For that reason alone I support the current leader