Living with Death in a Surreal Matrix
« on: 2005-11-12 17:21:46 »
La vie avec la mort dans une Matrice surréaliste
In Paris the young men are burning cars In Paris the young men are black The cars are very pretty when they burn Flames flickering and dancing before all is still But what a waste
The learned American says that the young men of Paris are Islamites The learned American says The only reason they do these things is that Islam inspires them But that is not what is said by the young men
The young men are the children of the immigrants from Algiers and Senegal and Morocco They are children of the streets, children of the tower blocks, young men today, adults tomorrow The young men are bored, so they play video games and watch The Matrix Deal their drugs, sleep in the day, and at night, at night they play with les flics But what a waste
The learned American says that the children of Paris are terrorists And ought to be shot dead. The learned American says that they hate us The learned American says The learned American's crazy, fear has taken over his head
"We are against the state because the state doesn't want us. We are nothing in this world." That is what the young men, the black young men of Paris have hurled Back at the society that molded them, into the faces that said We have no place for you, why can't you be invisible, decently dead But what a waste
The learned American read exactly, what the French policeman had said And you could see from the excited bobbing Of that learned American head He agreed that the French should wash the dirt off their streets That's what the learned American Francophile said.
The young men have their reasons, please don't roll your eyes, "I am going to get them back for all the times I was hauled in to the police station for nothing," You see I warned you, it should not come as a surprise Young men are pretty much the same the world over, We see it again and again, Unless the young man in question, is an American
The learned American hates them, the young men that are not really missed Whether dark crazy young men of the ghettos, all young men that are real, who get pissed The learned American hates them, but he hates his own young men more He fucks up their minds with his mouthing, then sends them all off to war
In Fallujah the American soldiers are burning children In Fallujah the children are the color of rich toffee The children are very pretty before they burn Flames flickering and dancing before all is still But what a waste
The learned American cheers on his troops, he scribbles away more and more A bead of sweat on his temple, he shouts and rages, spittle dribbles down his chin to the floor Kill all of them, they frighten me, I'm a good person and don't deserve this Kill all of the little Islamites, before they grow up to be terrorists
The children of the city of Fallujah were burning with their mothers The children of the city of Fallujah were burning with their brothers The children of the city of Fallujah were burning for our war Don't tell me of Saddam's evils, for we have done far more
The above poem was inspired by recent floods of rhetoric about the underlying reasons for the riots in France (I suggest boredom, unemployment, poverty and prejudice) shortly after watching this video (which IMO is necessary viewing to fully comprehend "The Joy of the American War against Iraq"). The stupid notion that the recent French riots were inspired by Islam is as ridiculous as asserting that the American race riots following the acquittal of the officers involved in the Rodney King case were caused by Christianity.In both cases, the violence was “senseless” only to those without a clue. I was going to illustrate it with some appropriate images. From here. And from here. Sites filled with images which make rotten.com appear to be in rather good taste. And all our own work. I wonder if we are meant to feel proud or something. So I declined. But in the video, notice the woman carrying the burned baby.
Source: The Expatica Authors: Hugh Schofield, Laurence Boutreux and Emma Charlton Dated: 2005-11-12
Les Cités: where the riots come from
The dilapidated high-rise estates known collectively as Les Cités were built in the booming 1960s to house a newly urbanized workforce. But today, they are synonymous with unemployment and social deprivation and now they are world-famous as the source of the Paris riots of 2005.
Not much like what most people imagine when they think of Paris
Apartment block complexes with evocative names like the 'Quarter of the Pointed Oak' and 'Quarter of the Pyramids', they were once praised as a daring concept in town design -- creating self-sufficient communities with easy access to shops and other amenities.
But by the late 1980s, when the first of France's suburban rioting broke out, it was clear that they were the focus of the country's most pressing social ills.
Intended originally to house low-income families from all ethnic origins -- ex-farmers from the emptying countryside as well as workers from the former north African colonies -- the worst estates became immigrant ghettos, as those who had made money moved out.
Invariably situated in the outskirts or 'banlieues' of France's major cities, the estates were far from the gaze of politicians and tourists -- which meant that the growing alienation of young people there passed unnoticed for many years.
The violence that has grabbed international headlines over the last nearly two weeks has been unusual for its duration -- but the ritual of car-burning and clashing with police and fire services is well-established.
More than 1,400 vehicles were torched in France in one night this week
For some 15 years there have been major outbreaks of rioting around Paris and other cities at a rate of about one a year -- often sparked as now by rumors surrounding the deaths of local youths. In addition there are countless minor incidents that go unreported.
For Miloud, 39, who runs a local fruit and vegetable market stall, "They should arrest the architect who created all this. He has created ghettos, these places are prisons."
"People living packed together like this, it is bound to create tensions."
One young man described the town as "the most rotten, the poorest in the region" with "no train station, no swimming pool, no cinema -- nothing worthwhile".
Recognizing the architectural failure of the complexes, the French government has undertaken a program of gradual replacement -- with tower-blocks dynamited and low-cost houses being built instead. Some 30,000 apartment homes are to be destroyed under the programme by 2008.
Home to anger
But while the long-term plan waits to be implemented, the youth who live here act out their angst and try to dispel their boredom.
Outside a row of dilapidated tower blocks, burnt out cars dotted here and there, six young men who fought street battles against the police here this week say they plan to continue defying them.
"We have found our thrills: playing with riot police in the evening," one 22-year-old told AFP, under cover of anonymity.
"As long as the police come and provoke us in the evening, we'll bring out the Molotov cocktails, stones, pétanque balls, planks," he said. [ Hermit: And I'm sure if the police don't “come and provoke us” that – depending on how long the current incompetent, err, incumbent holds the position of Minister of the Interior, they will be able to invite the police to provoke them. ]
Around him, half a dozen youths nodded in agreement.
"In the day we sleep, go see our girlfriends, play video games... And in the evening we have a good time: at 9pm we go and fight the police," said one.
"It's like being in Matrix," the science-fiction film, he said, adding that he liked to see the "riot police in a panic, hiding behind their shields."
Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor, high-immigration suburb northeast of Paris, was the epicentre of a week-long surge of violence in the Paris suburbs -- set off on Thursday by the deaths by electrocution of two local youths, who thought they were being chased by police.
'We are nothing in this world'
Anger at the boys' deaths has combined with growing resentment over hardline new law-and-order policies put forward by interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
"Before now, the police could not come into the neighborhood. Now, they catch you, take you away, insult you about your origins -- they can do anything they like," said one of the group of young men.
Residents of the tower blocks where nightly battles have taken place are torn between anger at the authorities -- whom many accuse of provoking the violence -- and frustration with the rioters.
At a nearby market stall, Mouloud, 70, said he was deeply shocked by the interior minister's comments last month, when he vowed to "clean up" the "rabble" in the suburbs, using a water-cannon.
"For Sarkozy, people are dirt," he charged. "All the young immigrants heard that and now they are getting into trouble."
Salih Sabrer, 60, nodded in agreement. "That word was a shame for France. A minister should not be saying that kind of thing."
Walking past, Aissatou Silla, 18, said she thought the riots were justified, as a response both to the boys' deaths and the mosque incident, but "useless" all the same.
"This is the wrong way to vent their anger. They can't change anything this way," said the young woman, born to a Senegalese father and French mother.
She says the neighborhood is usually quiet -- "the young people here all get on well" -- but that there are serious tensions between local youths and the police.
"They get beaten up for nothing, accused of 'rebelling' against the police. Because we're young and from the tower blocks, they take advantage. They spot a group of black or Arab kids and they pick them up."
Born to immigrant families from Senegal and Morocco, two of the group of young men who joined the riots have regular jobs, while the four others say they live "pretty well" from dealing cannabis.
Tonight, Karim, 18, said he intended to fight the police again.
"I am going to get them back for all the times I was hauled in to the police station for nothing," said the young man, one of a family of six children whose father, a former cleaner, is unemployed.
He admits that he has dabbled in petty crime, but says he was often arrested for no reason, accused of talking back to police.
"We are against the state because the state doesn't want us. We are nothing in this world." 'Sensitive Urban Zones' There are some 750 such zones in France from Paris to Marseille to Lille, but also around smaller towns. Some five million people are reckoned to live here, out of an overall population of 60 million.
According to statistics from the Zones Urbaine Sensibles (ZUS) Observatory, the unemployment rate in these areas is 20.7 percent -- nearly twice the national average. But among young men between 15 and 25, the rate is 36 percent -- and even higher if only young Arab men are counted.
The average yearly income here is EUR 10,500 euros compared to a national average of EUR 17,180 euros.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
This potboilerplate doggerel gift with which Hermit inflicted the list is, of course, worse than propaganda, because propaganda can be true, and the slime-rick was, most definitely, not. As would be surpassingly obvious to the author, or at least anyone with at least a double digit IQ measurement, if he simply read my last post (not a cut and paste) on the Paris thread. But I'll just fisk the last verse:
The first people toffie-fied in Fallujah were four US civilian contractors, and they were toffie-fied by Baathist thugs and/or immigrant Al Qaedan jihadists. The US delayed an invasion of Fallujah for months, in response to Sunni please, and concerned that civilians might be unintentionally killed by them, or intentionally used as human shields by the brave foreign mujaheddin. However, when the city was transformed into a warren of carbomb and truckbomb factories, the primary destination for infiltrating jihadis, and a base of operations from which to stage countrywide attacks, that transformation had to be forcibly reversed.
The overwhelming majority of the children of Fallujah (and their mothers and brothers) who were not killed by the jihadists for violating some nitpicky religious rule or other had fled the city long before the attack commenced; not because of the US military's approach so much as because their city had been seized and converted into a terrorist hellhaven by the foreign mujaheddin. Fewer than two hundred civilians were found by US forces in the city, and the dead ones had been dead for a while, or either were clearly killed by jihadists (machetes, different calibre weapons, etc.). The jihadis did to themselves in Fallujah what they later did to themselves in Husbayah, and in other Iraqi cities, engaged in cruel and callous behavior that made them hated by the cities' legitimate residents.
The lion's share of the residents who have been killed, both in Fallujah and other locations throughout Iraq, have been killed not by the US foreigners, but by the jihadist foreigners, led by the foreign (Jordanian) Al Qaedan Zarqawi; such behavior has been so brutal and widespread as to actually earn him censure from Zawahiri himself, who, he makes it clear, is no lover of the Shiites.
As far as us doing 'far more', this is simple ignorance, and it must be willful ignorance, at that, since the author doesn't want to hear about Saddam's massive and manifold atrocities (such information might cause a cognitive dissonance to be induced, when it conflicts with his cherished hatred-of Bush-fueled phantasy construction). But I'll mention a few things, any way.
The US has not gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds, as Saddam did in Halabja (and as Chemical Ali threatened to do to the Shiites if they got out of line).
The US has not filled mass graves with the corpses of an estimated two million murdered Iraqis during a 21-year reign of terror that ranks equal to Pol Pot and is only eclipsed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
The US has not built and outfitted rape rooms, complete with sausage-dicked designated rapists, to rape, sodomize and defile dissidents' families in front of them, nor has it stripped naked and hung menstruating women upside down in front of their husbands so that their menses flowed over and dried on their bodies.
The US has not constructed brutal childrens' prisons and torture dungeons for its own citizens, and Dubya's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, have not availed themselves of such facilities in order to indulge themselves in sadistic fun and games. No one in this conflict or the wider war on Islamofascist terrorists and purely fascist tyrants has advocated child killing, or has intentionally perpetrated it, except for Saddam's Baathist regime earlier, and, the Islamofascist terrorists themselves, - in Iraq by means of exploding bomb belts, car bombs and IED's, and in mass murder killing field schoolhouses in Beslan and its neighboring areas by all sorts of means, including bombs, knives, and bullets.
The US has not fed people into plastic shredders, making sure they went in feet first so that they would die more slowly, and receive the final-moments benefit of seeing, and feeling, their own bodies being shredded into bloody, bone-bit-decorated mush as they died.
"We" have done far more in Iraq than all of this? The Iraqis themselves testify - and vote - otherwise, except for some Baathist Sunnis who participated in and profited from such genocidal domination. And so would anyone else, outside of Al Qaedan Islamofascists and Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers.
We have indeed done far more than simply liberate a people; we are nurturing a fledgling democracy and rebuilding (and in many cases, building for the first time) infrastructure. We are doing for Iraq (and for Afghanistan)what we did for Japan and Germany - getting the people out from under the iron heels of really brutal, nasty, sadistic, murderous and oppressive regimes and helping them to their functional-infrastructure, self-governing and self-defending feet, after which we shall leave them to pursue their own free direction. And we are doing something for them that was unnecessary to do for Germany and Japan; we are wiping out a jihad composed of vicious fanatical immigrants who wish to seize the countries and convert it into amilitary bases from which to launch wider attacks, as has once already been the case in Afghanistan - kind of a Fallujan hellhaven writ large. But it's not going to happen, because we value safety and security, both ours and theirs, much too much to let that ever happen, however some might desire an immediate withdrawal that would eventuate a terrorist catastrophe of globally devastating consequence, just because they hate, loathe and despise one single man, and it would make him look bad.
However, it is Zarqawi who is looking bad in the Muslim world, as it progressively registers with them that it is he and his imported jihadis, not the Iraqi Liberation Coalition forces, who are murdering, overwhelmingly, Muslims, both in the last attack in Jordan, and in Iraq itself:
Re:Living with Death in a Surreal Matrix
« Reply #2 on: 2005-11-13 00:49:11 »
Given that Mr Dees has already been voted a truly awful vogon poet (See Select your preference, 2003-08-19 01:20:14) I think that I can ignore his opinion and comments on the poetry <snip>. Given that Mr Dees is merely expressing his opinions (invalid as always, in my opinion) in his usual long winded fashion, while ignoring documented issues which tend to counter his unsubstantiated opinions (e.g. voting & democracy was addressed here), I see no need to respond to such <snip>. Finally, Mr Dees introduces a number of red herrings, completely unrelated to the issues mentioned peripherally to the thank-you poem. I see no need to respond to such <snip>. Naturally, the random selection of writings providing opinions on quoted opinions related to the American manufactured boogey man du jour, Zarqawi, not mentioned until Mr Dees saw fit to do so for reasons of his own. may vanish with Mr Dees' verbiage <snip>. Oh, nothing to deal with here. Not one thing.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Ad hominem is no substitute for refutation, but it's all that Hermit's got. His opinion of my opinion is no less of an opinion than my opinion is; the difference between us here is that I backed mine up with facts.
As to Hermit's all-consuming jealousy concerning my poetic superiority (which, combined with a politically partisan campaign againt All Things Joe, prompted those here who share his bizarre and nonsensical politics to vote to support their idol - by the way, few voted, and Hermit lost), I invite the members here to check out my poetic contributions for themselves, and compare them with Hermit's vapid dreck above and elsewhere onlist:
Re:Living with Death in a Surreal Matrix
« Reply #4 on: 2005-11-13 11:05:48 »
bloviate \BLOH-vee-ayt\, intransitive verb: To speak or write at length in a pompous or boastful manner.
Anyone who has ever spent an idle morning watching the Washington talk shows has probably wondered: how did these people become entitled to earn six-figure salaries bloviating about the week's headlines? --Robert Worth, "Quick! The Index!" New York Times, June 3, 2001
After five years as president and thirty years as a political figure, this colossal oaf is still unable to discipline his urge to . . . bloviate. --R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., American Spectator, December 19, 1997
[W]e follow him minute by minute through a day in his office -- bloviating amiably with colleagues on the telephone, letting his secretary rewrite his clumsy letters and worrying about the possible hatred of his subordinates. --John Brooks, "Fiction of the Managerial Class," New York Times, April 8, 1984 Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2001/06/22.html PS Part of the humor of the Vogon Poetry poll is that it is so difficult to tell the difference between the parody and the autoparodeesing Vogon Works that the work and the parody are interchangeable. Those who voted previously knew who the authors were so while left and right are swapped, the opinion of Mr Dees' poetry is clear. The poll remains open, and Virians are invited to continue to provide feedback as they see fit. Given the ponderous Mr Dees' apparent inability to comprehend simple English (which might explain why he is challenged to write anything comprehensible), I am not optimistic that providing feedback is helpful. Nevertheless, we try.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
"It ain't braggin' if you can do what you say" Muhammed Ali.
I can. (At least, publication in the Emerald Coast Review, winning the first-place prize at the Gulf Coast Poetry Contest, and accepted invitations to read at several poetry colloquiums around the southeast would indicate same.)
Hermit can't. He's jealous. So he attacks what he lacks the skill to equal, as if his envious rhetoric against my work could possibly compensate for the inability to produce poetry of comparable calibre on his part.
But it can't.
End of story.
But not quite. If you'll go back and look at the first link of my poetry I referenced, you will note that it was originally posted, and most approvingly so, by this very same Hermit. It seems that he decided that I was a hack rather than an artist about the same time I disagreed with him concerning our liberation of Afghanistan (strange coincidence, that...)
So, Hermit attacks EVERYTHING I say and do, because he has a political disagreement with me on SOME issues. This is a symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), and a good synopsis of it, by an actual clinical psychologist, may be found here:
(PS: one look at "Best of Virus" will clearly demonstrate that poetry is not the only place where Hermit hasn't measured up...and provides another example of where, after we disagreed on Afghanistan, he began the trashing of that forum via his gratuitous, personal and illegitimately ad hominem attacks upon me and everything I subsequently produced here. Our disagreement on Iraq only accelerated this trend. I'm just waiting for him to trash "The Gator Fate"; the assertion contained therein, namely that a major purpose of the CoV is the critical analysis of any and all memeplexes, seems to have fallen by the wayside for many here...)
"It ain't braggin' if you can do what you say" Muhammed Ali.
[Hermit] If you observe what follows, Mr Dees makes a number of "special claims" for himself. I'll comment on this subsequently. He also makes a number of assertions about himself which he does not substantiate. Further, he makes a number of assertions about me, which are clearly his rather nasty opinion and nothing more, as he clearly does not have a clue about what and who I am, and what I have accomplished - and not being given to making post hoc special appeals - always a logical fallacy - I am unlikely to grant Mr Dees access to such information. If I were to challenge Joe Dees to substantiate his assertions about me, he would be in the position of attempting to prove a negative supposition about somebody else. Now the whole world has had an opportunity to see a recent example of this over in Iraq. It seems that rather than "brilliant", Mr Dees is, at least on some issues, as stupid as his ideological dittohead peers. And if the following is not, "To speak or write at length in a pompous or boastful manner" then I'm not sure what would qualify as such. And that, Mr Dees, is the very definition of "bloviate", with which, Mr Dees, you appear synonomous.
[Dees] I can. (At least, publication in the Emerald Coast Review, winning the first-place prize at the Gulf Coast Poetry Contest, and accepted invitations to read at several poetry colloquiums around the southeast would indicate same.)
[Hermit] A quick google for <<Gulf Coast Poetry Contest>> suggests http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/. The past winners appear to be located at http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/GCContest/gccontest2004.html. Does anybody notice an omission? Perhaps Mr Dees will request a correction or suggest some alternative way of evaluating his claim. Perhaps it happened before he lapsed into his current state of apparant aggressive psychotic senility and concurrent inchoate incoherence.
[Hermit] Now for "Emerald Coast Review". A google for <<"Emerald Coast Review" poetry Dees>> found a number of links back to the Church of Virus, including this precious thread. From whence these, and other omitted gems:
[Hermit -1] In ("RE: Where Joe Dees finds his shit..." 2003-06-12 and 2003-06-13 Joe McPees previously pissed :
[Dees -1] <snip>I am a Mensan (upper 2%) and an Illian (Intertel, just so's you'll know - upper 1%) with the highest GRE (that's Graduate Records Exam, also just so's you'll know) score in the history of my university, at which I won the Outstanding Student Award for Philosophy, in which I earned my magna cum laude BA. My MA is in Humanities Interdisciplinary, with its four major tracks in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and minor tracks in economics, political science and comparative religion. My work has been published in the Journal of Semiotics, the International Journal of Diversity and Synergy, and has been featured on Witchvox.com as a power essay. My poetry has been published in the Emerald Coast Review. Some people don't like me because I have a nasty habit of intervening in the middle of their ideological knee-jerks with inconvenient facts. You might try reading some of my essays, short stories and poems posted onlist before you make an even bigger fool of yourself by continuing to assert, in the face of massive posted evidence, that I lack intelligence or creativity. [Dees -1] Who exactly the fuck are you and just exactly what the fuck have you done? Nothing, I'll wager, except to earn the antipathy of your betters via gratuitous and attention-hungry flaming. <snip> [Dees -1] You are the best argument for retroactive abortion that I have recently encountered. It is amazing to me that millions of years of evolution could culminate in the likes of you. One can only hope that the error will be corrected and you will fail to reproduce. To be called nothing by the likes of you is a badge of honor, as one is known by the calibre of their detractors. By your own admission, you are not wanted here, so why are YOU still sticking around flaming your betters? The answer is, because your attention-whore epithet is a shining example of a psychological projection of your own sick, twisted and demented tendencies. You may call my greeting fake (as if you could know, or as if you know much of anything), but you don't even receive those. And there are many on this board who support me, and have done so in the past; you are just blissfully oblivious of the fact - and, apparently, many others.<snip>
[Hermit] So Mr Dees has still not substantiated an assertion made a long time ago - just keeps on repeating - just as he does here (although with a little less invective this time around, for which small mercy, our thanks).
[Dees] Hermit can't. He's jealous. So he attacks what he lacks the skill to equal, as if his envious rhetoric against my work could possibly compensate for the inability to produce poetry of comparable calibre on his part.
[Hermit] Dees said it before. It appeared to be an invalid internal projection then, and his repeating of it now makes that conclusion more likely to be accurate then and now. From this, in the absense of other indicators, we can only assume that he is still stuck in an infinite regression loop somewhere back there with his now defunct mother. Perhaps he should increase his Lithium intake. <snip> [Dees] If you'll go back and look at the first link of my poetry I references, you will note that it was originally posted, and most approvingly so, by this very same Hermit
[Hermit] I note that "look at the first link of my poetry I references" is not conventional English. Now is this poetry? If so, it isn't very good.
[Hermit] Mr Dees, I'm afraid it really must be senility. I looked at the first link you posted, and didn't find this Vogon Work there at all. Instead I found another. Even worse. Why, I even took issue with it when it was first posted. Way back when. Remember.
To babble broken fragments of mystery Or rambling word association frequently Is a sign that the speaker and those of his kin Are standing without, and wouldst rather be in
And there are signs that all this is simply a babble And not all that is seen is quite on the level Is that one, two or three? There seems to be doubt And unsure of themselves, they all start to shout
In voices bereft of reason or rhyme It used to be seldom, now all of the time They take recourse to mystical speech most elided And if you miss allegorical "truths" you're derided
I must say I once hoped for better than this The memetic mail list, is it just shit and piss?
A better poet (or doggerelist) than I once wrote: When reason's ray shines over all, And puts the saints to rout, Then Peter's holiness will pall, And Paul's will peter out.
I can quite safely suggest that I think that an intelligent alien reading the vomitings of this group would be convinced that he had seen the darkness at the end of the tunnel. I fear me that I don't see any sign of reason, never mind its "ray". And to this observer, it is the "Saints of the COV" who are being routed. [Hermit] Now rather than the sycophantic approval you appear to have read into the fact that I pasted certain works of yours onto the BBS, I simply was attempting to deal evenhandedly with you, as you clearly didn't have a clue how to use the BBS back then and I hoped to provide you - and others - with a clue onto how to use the BBS to help yourself and others. A clue which you were quite clearly incapable of comprehending. For example, almost everyone else figured out that they could put their work on a single thread... But we digress.
[Hermit] Your repetition grows drearily boring. You demonstrate that you are incapable of learning every time you enter into a dialog. You demonstrate your unpleasant nature every time somebody takes issue with you. You bring out the stupidity in others by trolling until we err by responding to your blather. You waste time that others could otherwise use to do things which might have value. You trash other people's work when you disagree with it, with all the empathy of a steam roller. And demonstrate the vision of a starfish.
[Hermit] By the by, perhaps Muhammed (sic) Ali could do what he said. Demonstrably, you cannot even say what you do with any degree of accuracy. Or spell his name correctly. But you do share one characteristic with him:
Well, it ain't braggin' if it's true Yes sir, yes sir It ain't braggin' if it's true Mohammed Ali said that Back when he was a young man Back when he was Casius Clay Before he fought too many fights And left his brain inside the ring
Tiger Woods on Dan Bern's “Fifty Eggs” Album
[Hermit] You are a fighter. But not a very good fighter. Good fighters need their brains. Welcome back to oblivion.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Forsake the dark bedeviled world And glean the light from me. That which no mortal soul can know, I'll tell. I shall the hidden depths of Scriptures plumb. I shall reveal the secrets of the Seven Seals. I shall tease the veils from ageless enigmas Leaving them shorn before you. Like a Thief I shall steal your confidence Passing charisma for wisdom and Welding your will to the fruition of My intentions, the satisfaction of My desires. Joined at head, hip and heart, when the Doubting devils come, they must drag us down Together.
It was originally composed as an attempt to understand how such a pompous hemorrhoidal asshole as Koresh could get that many people to not only give their children over to him to fuck, but also to burn in a terrestrial hell with him. I decided to post it to this list as a warning against any uncritical sycophancy, regardless of its source or destination.
[back to the present] It is an apt warning for people not to become sycophants. I say apt, because there have been those who, in the past, have been so unwise as to become sycophants of Hermit, a poor choice indeed, if one must choose anyone to so elevate and dittohead themselves to.
He is even, amazingly, reduced to such irrelevancies as to point out the word 'references' where I meant to type 'referenced' an easy typo to make, since the s and the d are next to each other on the keyboard. And why is he reduced to such irrelevancies, and to a long and tiresome ad hominem bloviation?
Precisely because I made my point, and substantiated it. In fact, he was most impressed with my work in general before we disagreed on Afghanistan. To substantiate this fact, I only need to point out that he also submitted my essay Tools, Language and Text to the Best of Virus section, which can be found here:
and only began to slag me (on the same thread, no less) when we disagreed politically.
This is all irrefutable proof of my contention that Hermit's political convictions irreparably taint his other perceptions and judgments. Quite simply, he's busted, his own list history busts him, and all he can do, once presented with the evidence and documentation that entails the apodictically certain conclusion that he is hopelessly biased against and viciously condemnatory and slanderous of anyone who dares to disagree with him, is to interminably bark like the bit dog he is.
Oh, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Contest entries were not published in book form, nor was the contest connected with the Gulf Coast Mag, whatever that is.
As to the post he dredges up (once again, without being able to restrain himself from bringing my mother into it and suggesting a medical prescription based upon his own unqualified opinions), it was addressed, I believe, to one Demon, a permanent adolescent frozen in the Freudian mastication stage, who was so vicious to all and sundry, including me (and, I believe, both Hermit and Lucifer) that he was jettisoned from the list, upon which he began his own competing list, which went nowhere.
On the other hand, Hermit has referred to my now-deceased but then-alive mother as drooling, insane, and the cunt-that-shat-me, among other vomitous epithets, and opined at length concerning an imagined incestuous relationship between us. He also posted a horribly disgusting post of vile spewage, under the pseudonym 'mother', which purported to be her speaking to me and drooling all over the computer screen, and that was so nauseatingly repugnant that it received practically universal condemnation from the CoV membership.
If Hermit wants to go back and dredge up old insults, let's see that nasty piece of work own his own nasty pieces of work.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) - An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.
"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.
"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying.
France was mentioned 15 times in the text, and the Algerian government was also targeted, the officials said.
Nine people detained in a series of raids west of Paris Monday are suspected members of the GSPC, officials have said. They were being questioned for a second day Tuesday at the headquarters of the DST domestic intelligence agency.
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."
The GSPC was created from a split in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the main force in Algeria's long insurgency which was also responsible for a series of bombings in France in 1995.
France Says Extremists Are Enlisting Its Citizens Police Assert Some Trained in Mideast Could Attack Paris
PARIS -- French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.
One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq."
What's new, he said, is that the French cell under investigation "is linked with networks in Iraq, right now, through an individual based in Syria. Now we're finding camps in Syria and Lebanon, and it's the same pattern, training in explosives and chemical weapons, which is an obsession of the jihadists."
In a recent television interview, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the terror risk for Paris "very high," adding, "We know that there are about 10 young Frenchmen in Iraq, ready to become kamikazes."
"One asks himself why a certain number of young French people are in Pakistan in religious schools," Sarkozy said. "It's not normal that an individual who lives in our neighborhoods leaves all of a sudden for four months in Afghanistan, three months in Syria. We want to know who is going where, for how long, and when they come back."
Sarkozy's comments underscore deep concern in Europe that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the world's main terrorist training ground, spreading upheaval across the Middle East to Europe and further radicalizing Muslims everywhere.
"Iraq is a live-fire training ground in urban terrorism, and that's exactly what we fear," said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.
"Islamic terrorism is a much bigger problem in Europe than in the U.S. because you don't have the relatively large Muslim community that we do," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform in London. "What the war in Iraq has done is radicalize these people and make some of them prepared to support terrorism. Iraq is a great recruiting sergeant."
Following bombings in London this year and Madrid last year that together killed more than 240 people, leaders across Europe concluded that no capital was immune to attack. French officials in particular worried that their long history of fighting Algerian extremist groups, their government's ban on Muslim girls wearing head scarves in public schools and feelings of alienation among France's 6 million Muslims made Paris an obvious target. The country's opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq would not protect it, they concluded.
Underscoring that concern, French police recently staged a mock hijacking of a tourist bus at the base of the Eiffel Tower, complete with police snipers in the tower's ironwork and commandos sliding down ropes. A SWAT team from the anti-terror unit and attack dogs stormed the bus to save people posing as passengers.
Sarkozy plans to submit a new anti-terrorism bill to France's Parliament this month that would heighten monitoring of international travel, expand electronic data and video surveillance, lengthen prison terms and otherwise strengthen French terrorism laws, which already are among the toughest in Europe, according to Guillaume Larrive, Sarkozy's legal adviser.
Larrive said that Sarkozy was "impressed by the ability of the U.K. authorities after the tragedy in July to identify the people who committed this act, and he decided to enhance French video laws." British police drew on subway cameras that recorded images of the bombers.
The French proposal would step up video surveillance in airports and train stations and for the first time permit it at private venues that could be targets, such as synagogues, Larrive said.
French officials traced their investigation of the terrorist recruiting and training network to the July arrests of three men on charges of armed robbery and racketeering. They soon discovered that the men were tied to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, known by its French acronym GSPC, the main armed Islamic movement in Algeria, a former French colony.
That led to the arrest of a top GSPC operative by Algerian police in early September, French officials said. The man told Algerian police that there was a cell in France that was going to attack the Paris subway, Orly airport south of the capital and the headquarters of the French intelligence service. The French put their investigation into high gear.
Police here staged more arrests, bringing the total to 16. Seven people have been released, and nine are being held on charges of associating with a terrorist organization and funding terrorism. As the investigation progressed, police discovered that the group was not planning specific attacks, but was organized to hit high-value targets of opportunity, senior law enforcement officials said.
The alleged head of the cell was Safe Bourrada, 35, a GSPC associate who in 1998 was convicted of taking part in a series of bomb attacks three years earlier, including one on the Paris subway that killed seven people, according to Jean-Francois Ricard, a top anti-terrorism judge in France. Bourrada was released from prison in 2003 after serving about half of a 10-year sentence and has been under surveillance by French police ever since.
Ricard said "our biggest concern right now" related to French citizens returning from the Middle East with terrorist training. He and other law enforcement officials declined to go into detail, saying the matter was sensitive and under investigation. But while the number of such cases may be small, he said, there was a steady stream of people going back and forth.
"What worries me the most is the behavior of GSPC, which has described France as their number one target," he said referring to a recent statement by the group's leader, Abdelmalek Droukdal, also known as Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud. That is particularly ominous because the group is "tightly linked" with Iraq's top al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, Ricard said, making an attack on France "inevitable."
Re:Living with Death in a Surreal Matrix
« Reply #11 on: 2005-11-15 03:49:14 »
will you PLEASE stop cutting and pasting the entire fucking article? just give us the link and we have enough brain cells to follow it through..ok?
like this one, for example..how does one respond to something like what you have spewed above..you volunteer NO opinion and there is NOTHING to discuss. maybe you dont have an opinion. if this were to happen irl..imagine that if you can.
joe dees irl clone: "Algerian group calls France 'enemy number one'" says news article.
the rest of us: ok.
joe dees irl clone: "France Says Extremists Are Enlisting Its Citizens. Police Assert Some Trained in Mideast Could Attack Paris." says washingtonpost.
the rest of us: what's your point.
joe dees irl clone: more selective news article quoted
the rest of us: loony.
we will walk away leaving you to talk to yourself.
UNFORTUNATELY, you are squatting in a common ground where the rest of us commune to share and talk and discuss. and keep talking to yourself.
we cannot walk away.
you can.
but you wont.
what would one do in a parallel irl situation?
think about it.
p.s. jonathan davis, i'd be dee-lighted to hear your opinion too.
The points made in the articles are that 1) for some time now, Islamofascists have been transferring French Muslims out France, training them in guerilla and terror tactics, and then returning them back in place, and 2) just a few days before the car-b-ques began, a call went up from Islamofascist leaders in Algeria, the country from which most of the Muslim immigrants to France - or their parents- emigrated - for Muslims to rise up and wage jihad on France from within.
How much effect that had on the riots themselves, I don't know...but it does remind me of the beginning of the last Palestinian intifadeh in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, which the Palestinians maintained was provoked by Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, only to have internal Palestinian Authority documents surface that revealed that Arafat & Co. had been planning to launch one for some time; in fact, ever since Arafat turned down the deal that Clinton brokered between him and Rabin at Camp David, fearing for his life from the radicals within Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and his own PA if he accepted one iota less than 100% of everything, and also fearing that if things actually settled down, a hard look at his massive embezzling of a billion dollars' worth of foreign aid (which was given with the intention that it would benefit the Palestinian people) might ensue. In other words, the purported provocation served the purpose of providing them with a facile excuse to declare their planned intifadeh, and if Sharon had not visited the Temple Mount at all, another excuse would have been substituted. Is it possible that this is also true of the European riots, at least to some degree - that they're just using the self-electrocution of those two boys as a facile excuse to rock and roll? You of course know that there are also riots by immigrant mainly Muslim populations happening in several other European countries besides France - such as Germany, Holland and Denmark...
But I'd rather post the articles, along with their URLs, so people can read them for themselves, than simply summarize them like I just did above, and be called a liar, and worse. I've been there, and had that done to me, too many times here before.
Re:Living with Death in a Surreal Matrix
« Reply #13 on: 2005-11-15 11:41:16 »
i think this is what is called spin. the reason for malcontent among the minority youth in france is because of the unemployment and lack of opportunities. many of them are secular moslems and not even remotely religiously fanatic.
articles like this lack in credibility because they fly in the face of facts that is plastered everywhere else.
i can get you the url links if you want. or you can look it up the net everywhere other than your usual bookmarks. there is plenty of discussion about the whys and why nots.
Surely you've seen the videos of the 'youths' shouting "Allahu Ackbar!" as they torched cars parked on Parisian streets. Of course, they could be yelling that simply because they know it intimidates nonMuslims...
But you must also remember that when the original immigration wave occurred, France signed an agreement with Muslim clerics NOT to actively integrate the immigrants into their culture, as this was seen by the clerics as something that could possibly taint their religious piousness...
But both the out-of-country training and the Algerian Clerics' call for Jihad against France DID in fact occur; you see, either they did or they didn't - it's kinda hard to spin an either/or like that, and these things most definitely DID happen. Now, whether or not the uprising was preplanned and the unfortunate deaths of the two young men were used as a pretext with which to justify its genesis is another matter entirely...I happen to think that police presence was interfering with their underground drug, prostitution and black market merchandise economy, with which they were augmenting their government welfare checks, and they decided to drive the gendarmes out, so that their customers wouldn't feel too self-conscious in front of them to conduct business. However, since the car-burning riots, their former customers refuse to drive in there any more, anyway, so they're screwed either way.
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