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I can remember when some were saying Rand Paul was an idiot (not saying anyone here). Now all of a sudden he's becoming a rising star. Politics is a fickle thing.
The Republicans and Democrats are two arms of the same entity. In the end they both have the same goals with only minute philosophical differences. They are interchangeable parts in the larger machine. It doesn't matter who is in power, they both answer to the same lobby interests, money sources, and think tanks. I used to believe in the left-right paradigm, but now I know better. They are controlled opposition…a farce designed to fool the American public into thinking it has a choice in who governs them. At the end of the day, the Banking and Corporate interests will finance whoever is the popular flavor of the month and whoever that candidate ends up being, whether Democrat or Republican, will do their bidding. End of story.
Rand Paul is bucking the GOP establishment when he does stuff like this. If we ever wants to be on an election ticket either as VP or President, he had better get with the program (note I don't want him to join the establishment I'm just saying).
McCain and Graham scolded Rand for doing it. They said he abused the Senate rules. So the GOP isn't really behind Paul's efforts.
To be fair, I do see what Scout is saying, but here is the rub. Genocide, the term, is politically and emotionally charged. It's meant to be to describe the horrors of inhuman suffering and atrocities. It should be emotionally charged to match the hideous nature of racist war. So I also agree with you that there are racist wars. Even the United States fought a racist war in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese. Studs Terkel has a great book narrating the accounts of American bigotry toward their Asian enemy. Pearl Harbor and Bataan had a lot to do with the creation of the bigotry, but those events did not excuse American behavior. It was war, a bitter war to say the least, that actually decided the fate of the planet. The wars against the Native Americans is another example especially the whole culture behind “Manifest Destiny.” So both of you guys are correct to a certain degree.
A guy who fought in Mexico as a lieutenant was a veteran but he was not a veteran general. There is a world of difference between commanding a company or battalion and commanding a brigade, division, or corps.
True, but they were officers in the primary campaigns and they learned modern warfare techniques. They also became battle hardened while becoming accustomed to fighting a professional army. Washington didn't get to participate in that level of combat experience in the French and Indian War. It's really not that important of a point anyway.
Aetheling, why is this topic so important for you? Do you have relatives who went through the holocaust?
Believe it or not guys Brazil is going to be a major player in the new global economy in the coming years. They are clearing the Amazon rain forest at an amazing pace which will greatly increase their industrial output. Brazil is also rich in natural resources and their political situation seems to be stable. Brazil is planning on taking on a greater role in world politics and this is good news for the United States since we cannot shoulder the burden alone anymore.
I do agree that we have to have “some” numbers rather than none at all. The only thing I maintain is that we should always consider them with a grain of salt, and we should always be on the look out for better evidence that can get us that much closer to the actual truth.
Donnie, I agree that statistical figures from the ancient world can be off and therefore can be suspect. But that can apply today as well (didn't the Obama Admin say they were releasing only a few hundred illegal aliens recently, even though the number was actually in the thousands?). So, I ask - what statistics do you think are inherently reliable from different stages of history?
I don't really have an answer for that Phid. I honestly don't know.
I agree with your sentiments in part. I disagree, however, that one needs an actual body count to come up with a figure. I do not think that even Civil War death totals are based merely upon body counts. Would you say those, then, are guesses? Probably not; you would, however, say they were estimates.Also, on what do you base your claim that "most of the people alive in many of these ancient conflicts were not registered with a census"? How could you prove that? Unless you have documentation stating that, aren't you guessing? Incidentally, I'm not disagreeing with your claim, but if you push the bar up too high it becomes one that nobody can surpass. Alright, tell me this - if you had documents from an ancient city stating that its population was 50,000, and that 10,000 men went off to battle; and other documents stating that the army was cut in half; and a year later, the population records show 45,000 population.....do you think you could reasonably conclude that the death total for that city was 5000 men? Obviously this cannot be verified, but there's a certain calculated estimation which historians partake in. These are admitted estimations, based on our best efforts, but they give us a plausible understanding of what happened at that point in time.
Even if I had documents from ancient times I wouldn't trust them because they didn't keep records as efficiently or truthfully as we do in modern times. I know it sounds like a cop out, but records keeping was done to please the king, not to actually record factual data. They wrote down what they hoped the king wanted to read. Even in Vietnam the body count was fudged for political reasons especially as the war entered into the latter unpopular stages. Often bodies were counted twice or more. The Pentagon even admitted it later. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think this didn't happen in the ancient world and then those numbers swelled over time as the war stories were recounted by the poets (remember they didn't have professional number crunchers like we do today). This is all I'm saying.
Donald, what do you think about genocide ?
I think genocide is real and has happened repeatedly throughout history. Usually when one culture is technologically, economically, and numerically superior to another culture the "inferior" culture gets rubbed out. We live on a planet with limited resources, and some of the most valuable resources are concentrated in remote places. This situation breeds competition governed by the rules of force. Scarcity will always necessitate inequality and therefore put some cultures at a disadvantage if they inhabit regions devoid of valuable resources or lack the technology to extract them. Racism is created by many things, but one of the leading causes is technological advancement. When one group perceives itself to be more advanced, it leads to the temptations of feeling superior, which brings with it the sense of entitlement to more than one's fair share of resources. We see this happen over and over again throughout history.
