Jamal Khashoggi Is Dead, Saudi Arabia Says (breaking news)

So you did understand the phrase? That's odd. Because you seemed to have not understood. Shall I quote your post again as a refresher?

 

You're calling someone else illiterate but you couldn't crack the code of a simple phrase of "Like it's their day job"?

 

Building a straw man is the tool of the illiterate

 

What are my blubbering about? No knowledge I have got. Me home school.

 

Giftedone:

Reading isn't for everyone. Here's proof.

 

Historically illiterate... Hmm... Sounds like it's going on for ages... hopefully it doesn't go as far as pre-Putin ages because that would be far too long of an illitracy... Even before French people start using toilets... not good...

 

Historically tho...

 

He's a world famous historian. Didn't you know?

 

Jamal Khashoggi

is still dead ​

More News at eleven, ten central.

Moi

Now More Than Ever​

 

Funny fellow

 

Since nothing will be done about it then, it should be dropped.

 

I wasn't referring to the meaning of your sentence you nit.

 

Dude - it is one thing to dislike Russians - join the club. It is quite another to conflate everything Russia does - or has done - with Serbia.

 

Do we get told if Dodgers leave Milwaukee without no homers by then? It's important because I bet 20 bucks on Aguilar hitting for at least once and no Machado at all...
Regards;
Niko of the Tory

 

American diplomats and civilians were held hostage for 444 days. After one week Carter should have sent 111 B-52's and kept up bombing and killing Iranians until they released the American hostages.

 

Were you not able to put together the pieces? Was the post so difficult for you to decode that you had to ask me what I was saying?

BTW, who uses "nit" as an insult these days? Is this 1750's England?

LOL

 

Regan said the say he took office, they were considered prisoners of war.
They were released that day.

 

I use the term One of my favorites. I did not ask you the meaning of your sentence - the question is how it related to the conversation .. nit.

 

They understood that a shatstorm was on the way if they didn't.

 

You asked how an "expression" related to a conversation? You had the audacity to call the other user "illiterate" and you don't understand an expression?

LOL dude. This is too great.

 

If he had been a citizen I'd probably agree, I don't think residence in the US is enough, do we know he was butchered due to his residence? That would make a difference, maybe the fellow at the Guardian who claims to have heard the recording of this guy as he was questioned can tell us if they made any reference to his US residence.

 

Absolutely right.
The British were generally not stupid in the way the handled their colonies. (Unlike the French, who clung on with their fingernails, killed people left and right ... and fought their subjects' liberation movements with a fury that would have been more appropriate in 1940 against the Nazis.) The British got out of their colonies in a more or less orderly way without killing too many people. (If you don't like the British or want to shut up an annoying British anti-American lecturing us about Vietnam or something, there's a lady who has shown that they were not very nice at all in Kenya, but then Africa has the tendency to bring out the worst in everyone for some reason.) So generally their former subjects -- including us! -- don't remember the British with anger and resentment. (Of course the professional Left in these countries and elsewhere do their best to whip it up anti-British sentiment when they can but it hasn't taken.)

But Iran was different. As in many other cases, follow the money. The British Anglo-Iranian Oil company had developed Iran's oil: dug the wells, built the infra-structure, did the marketing of it all over the world. They also took about 75% of the profits, as well as treating their Iranian employees very badly. This all happened under both Conservative and Socialist [Labour] governments, interestingly enough. And the reason was, the money from from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was substantial, and Britain was broke. The British government owned about 50% of the company, so the revenue from it was seen as crucial for them at that time, when they were effectively broke because of the war.

When the Iranian Prime Minister, in the early 50s, tried to nationalize it, the British resisted ferociously, and dragged us in to help them. They were still a major military power in the Middle East, seen as defending it from the Russians, and we couldn't say no. Just as in Indo-China, the United States, the least outright-colonialist of the great powers, looked on initially with hope by many nationalists in the Third World, ended up being involved on the wrong side in these post-colonial conflicts. (The Democrat Woodrow Wilson had started us off on the wrong foot by telling Third World nationalists who had come to the Paris conference after WWI that his famous "right of self determination" was for European nations only... so they turned to the only other major power that would help them, Moscow. We could have been the quiet patrons/friends/clandestine semi-allies of these movements -- as we started out being in China -- but our leaders threw it all away.)

It's a complicated story, but we ended up with a short-term victory -- Mossadeqh (Iranian Prime Minister) overthrown by our CIA, a pliant puppet on the throne in Iran, the British happy -- for a long-term defeat -- the overwhelming majority of Iranians seeing us as just another colonial power, with what consequences we know.

It's all more complicated than that, on many levels. The Shah was not just a puppet, but a genuine Persian nationalist. The British did not get the status quo ante and the Iranians got a better deal than before. The role of the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh Party) seems to have been way exaggerated -- apparently they also opposed Mossadegh, but I haven't been able to find something that appears really reliable on that question.

If you can bear it, there is a long Wiki article on the whole issue. Much better is Daniel Yergin's The Prize, about the whole role of oil in the history of the last century (written in 1989 so a bit dated). They also made a TV series of it. It's quite good. I expected the usual Leftist whine but it's quite objective, so far as I can see.

I believe that when the history of the Cold War is written a century now, when enough time has passed so that it can be viewed objectively, and more archives are opened, it will be seen that our government missed some huge opportunities and gave a great advantage to the Communists which it need not have done. Just like our Founding Fathers, the people of the Third World did not want to be ruled from abroad. And with a couple of small exceptions, that's not what we did. It was the Europeans who did that, but we ended up in many places getting the Name and the Blame for colonialism without the supposed benefits of the Game.

Of course hindsight is 20/20, and both in the US both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, were the authors of our foreign policy -- there was bi-partisan support for it pretty much the whole way through. So it looked like the right thing to do. But it makes you wonder whether anyone in Washington knows what they're doing now.

In my opinion, the real problem is this: the inability to see society as dynamic, not static. We always think that the guy with the guns living in the Presidential Palace will be there forever. So we support him. Or if he's an enemy, we try to replace him with another guy whom we like more.

There is little understanding of the long-term processes 'at the bottom', the changes in society that in the long term are far more important for determining the nature of a regime than who has the guns at the moment. There is not even much understanding of society in other countries in the static sense: how many of our leaders could have told you, in 2002, about the Sunni-Shia split in Iraq? And yet that divide was absolutely central to understanding the country, and in determining what came later.

 

I do understand the expression - you running around building a strawman does not change this ... nit.

 

That was after the revolution was already underway. And killing civilians is not something a civilized country does when othe options are available.

 

What inept government could invade a country, spend trillions of dollars, kill a hundred thousand or so civilians and the lives of three thousand of it's soldiers for imaginary reasons?

The prince clearly thought he could get away with it because the current American President has no moral values except expediency and quite probably owes the Saudis a lot of money. Insuspect that yhe next time he wants to kill an opponent he will be more circumspect.

And just for curiosity sake do you really think Kashoggi was dumb enough to start a fist fight with fifteen professional killers. Talk about an inept explanation.