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-- President Barack Hussein Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize
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Originally posted by Krypton So policing the world is what?

A phenomenally vague phrasing that vastly understates the variety of roles the US plays in world affairs.

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Originally posted by Krypton these disease infested, decrepit countries.

Your political opinions are so impressionistic, it's frustrating.

Haha, I'm done with this. Bed time.

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov A phenomenally vague phrasing that vastly understates the variety of roles the US plays in world affairs.

An unsustainable variety of roles. So, a country violates the UN resolution, why is it that our government took it upon itself to enforce it? I understand this balance of power world order we have going, but as you can see, our country is crumbling from the inside out. Our military is mighty, but behind the facade is a country in crisis.

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Your political opinions are so impressionistic, it's frustrating. Haha, I'm done with this. Bed time.

Ninja edited. Heh, handout $15 billion to Africa, but require me to pay my student government loan back at home! Thank you government! I should repay them by taking my productive capacity outside of the country. Wonder if it ever occurred to the Department of Education that it might be not be so beneficial to impose such a barrier to high learning. Something called, productivity, and people wonder why our productive capacity is being outpaced by the likes of China.

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A Perfect Nobel Pick Pop quiz: What do Bertha von Suttner, Henri La Fontaine, Ludwig Quidde, Norman Angell, Arthur Henderson, Eisaku Sato, Alva Myrdal and Joseph Rotblat have in common? Answer: Barack Obama. If you're drawing blanks on most of these names, don't be hard on yourself: They're just some of the worthies of yesteryear who were favored with a Nobel Peace Prize before disappearing into the footnotes of history. On the other hand, if you're among those who think Mr. Obama's Nobel was misjudged and premature, not to say absurd, then you really know nothing about the values and thinking that have informed a century of prize giving. Far from being an aberrant choice, President Obama was the ideal one, Scandinavianally speaking. The peace Nobel is a much misunderstood prize. With the exception of a few really grotesque picks (Le Duc Tho, Rigoberta Mench�, Yasser Arafat), a few inspired ones (Carl von Ossietzky, Norman Borlaug, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi) and some worthy if obvious ones (Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk), most of the prize winners draw from the obscure ranks of the sorts of people the late Oriana Fallaci liked to call "the Goodists." Who are the Goodists? They are the people who believe all conflict stems from avoidable misunderstanding. Who think that the world's evils spring from technologies, systems, complexes (as in "military-industrial") and everything else except from the hearts of men, where love abides. Who mistake wishes for possibilities. Who put a higher premium on their own moral intentions than on the efficacy of their actions. Who champion education as the solution, whatever the problem. Above all, the Goodists are the people who like to be seen to be good. Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, who won the Peace Prize in 1931, was a Goodist. In 1910 he wrote that "to suppose that men and women into whose intellectual and moral instruction and upbuilding have gone the glories of the world's philosophy and art and poetry and religion . . . are to fly at each others' throats to ravage, to kill, in the hope of somehow establishing thereby truth and right and justice is to suppose the universe to be stood upon its apex." The First World War, which began four years later, rendered a less charitable judgment on the benefits of moral and intellectual instruction. Yet Butler later became a leading campaigner for the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as "an instrument of national policy." This monument to hope, which won U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg a Nobel in 1929 (France's Aristide Briand had already won it in 1926 for the equally feckless Locarno Pact), was immediately ratified by dozens of countries, including Japan�which invaded Manchuria in 1931; and Italy�which invaded Abyssinia in 1935; and Germany�which invaded Poland in 1939. Characteristically, the Nobel Committee awarded no Peace Prizes for most of the Second World War: not to Franklin Roosevelt for turning America into an arsenal for democracy; not to Winston Churchill for rallying Britain against the Nazi onslaught; not to Charles de Gaulle for keeping the flame of a free France alive; not to the U.S. Army Rangers for scaling the heights of Pointe du Hoc on a June morning in 1944; not to Douglas MacArthur for turning Japan into a country at peace with itself and its neighbors. These were the soldiers and statesmen who did more than anyone else to assure the survival of freedom in the 20th century. Being Goodists, however, the Nobel Committee chose instead to lavish its honors on people like the wan New England pacifist Emily Greene Balch (in 1946), the tedious British disarmament obsessive Philip Noel-Baker (1959) and the Irish antinuclear campaigner and Lenin Prize Winner Se�n MacBride (1974). These names don't exactly spring to mind as having made a lasting and genuine contribution to world peace. Nor, one suspects, will history lavish its highest honors on Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Wangari Maathai, Mohamed ElBaradei, Al Gore or Martti Ahtisaari, to name some of this decade's winners. They are merely the Frank Kelloggs and Se�n MacBrides of the future. Which brings us, at last, to this year's prize winner. Typical of the laments about Mr. Obama's Nobel is that he's done nothing yet to deserve it. But what, really, did most of the other Goodists do before they won their prizes? Mr. Obama, at least, got himself elected president, the first man to do so on explicitly Goodist terms: hope, change, diplomacy, disarmament, internationalism. He is, so to speak, the son Alfred Nobel never had (minus the dynamite fortune), the best and most significant spokesman for everything the Peace Prize has stood for these 108 years. So let there be no doubt that the Nobel Committee did well in choosing Mr. Obama. What this portends for the kind of peace and security that has been bequeathed to us by the exertions of such non-Nobelists as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan is another question. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB200...0047317314.html

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Like? I would put forth the argument (again) that Obama has achieved a great deal in re-ordering global politics and America's relative standing and cultivating capitulation in world affairs.

FTFY

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r FTFY

IHNIWYATA (I have no idea what you are talking about).

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov IHNIWYATA (I have no idea what you are talking about).

I love trying to guess all of the internets lingo. I think FTFY means "fixed that for you" or something like that.

I am still partial to GTFOOHWTFBS

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Originally posted by Shakka I love trying to guess all of the internets lingo. I think FTFY means "fixed that for you" or something like that. I am still partial to GTFOOHWTFBS

"Go tell Frank our open house was terribly fun before sundown"?

get the fuck out of here what the fucking bull shit

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov "Go tell Frank our open house was terribly fun before sundown"?

Bwahahah! And I didn't even realize you knew Frank! Alas Sunsnail is correct...

In all honesty, I hate the little shorthand things so much it drives me nuts when people type "u" instead of "you."

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Originally posted by Shakka In all honesty, I hate the little shorthand things so much it drives me nuts when people type "u" instead of "you."

what about in text messages? I think different rules apply to text messages. on a cell phone it's much easier to write "u2" than it is to write "you too," but that's just me.

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Originally posted by jerZ07002 what about in text messages? I think different rules apply to text messages. on a cell phone it's much easier to write "u2" than it is to write "you too," but that's just me.

I know what you mean, but it still annoys me--especially if it's in a professional environment. And I have an iPhone so it fixes it for me.

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Originally posted by Shakka I know what you mean, but it still annoys me--especially if it's in a professional environment. And I have an iPhone so it fixes it for me.

I use a BB for work, and I write out full grammatically correct sentences for work emails on my BB (i almost never send professional text messages). Text messages to friends & the woman are totally different.

An interesting point:

"American cultural hegemony persists, even as the economic catastrophe Americans helped feed has taken a bite out of everyone else's peace of mind."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articl..._our_discontent

An article talking mainly about how even in the wake of declining American relative economic and military power, cultural (soft) power is still rising (or at least staying predominant).

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Originally posted by josh4

Talk about a blow smoke up ass, puff piece...that takes the cake. All I need to know of that editorial's agenda are the slights against Thatcher and Reagan and how questionable their Nobel selections supposedly were (at least they got Carter right...how they fail to see the similarity with this current Administration is a bit of a shocker). Both Thatcher and Reagan stood up against the Soviet threat and successfully beat it down (regardless of how much this was due to Soviet economic implosion versus pressure from these 2 figureheads, pretending they made no measurable impact is historical revisionism at best).

Apparently, a "goodist" is simply one who can vocalize hollow, feel-good promises to a gullible public, and whose end game is to simply be loved on the world stage. This is an untenable position as our very own TX progressive has already accurately alluded that, as the world police force, there will always be some entity that is unhappy with the manner in which we wield military power. Disarming serves to make us more vulnerable to these types of states and is not what one would do in the name of self-interest with these kinds of international players on stage. Proof of that can be seen in today's headline, in fact: Analysis: Washington's overplayed hand on Russia

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Originally posted by vinnie97 Talk about a blow smoke up ass, puff piece...that takes the cake. All I need to know of that editorial's agenda are the slights against Thatcher and Reagan and how questionable their Nobel selections supposedly were (at least they got Carter right...how they fail to see the similarity with this current Administration is a bit of a shocker). Both Thatcher and Reagan stood up against the Soviet threat and successfully beat it down (regardless of how much this was due to Soviet economic implosion versus pressure from these 2 figureheads, pretending they made no measurable impact is historical revisionism at best). Apparently, a "goodist" is simply one who can vocalize hollow, feel-good promises to a gullible public, and whose end game is to simply be loved on the world stage. This is an untenable position as our very own TX progressive has already accurately alluded that, as the world police force, there will always be some entity that is unhappy with the manner in which we wield military power. Disarming serves to make us more vulnerable to these types of states and is not what one would do in the name of self-interest with these kinds of international players on stage. Proof of that can be seen in today's headline, in fact: Analysis: Washington's overplayed hand on Russia

LOL @ Soviet Union collapsing because of Reagan and Thatcher...

Of course a self-professed leftist lib would NEVER admit to such a possibility or even give them an iota of credit.

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Originally posted by vinnie97 Of course a self-professed leftist lib would NEVER admit to such a possibility or even give them an iota of credit.

And of course a nationalist doombot (you) would put the credit of the USSR collapse in the hands of Reagan. Any objective analysis of the political scenario of the time would put the cause of the collapse in the hands of the USSR itself. The USSR would have collapsed with a tree hugging hippie in the White House.

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Originally posted by vinnie97 Of course a self-professed leftist lib would NEVER admit to such a possibility or even give them an iota of credit.

Neither do historians or economists, but I suppose that's irrelevant where political opinions are involved.

Deep Thought: People should stop pretending Obama's the Messiah and get back to bedrock Americanism like praising Ronald Reagan....

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Originally posted by Krypton LOL @ Soviet Union collapsing because of Reagan and Thatcher...

Oh. My. God.

Reagan scared the shit out of them and forced them to blow tons more money than they otherwise would have on military/missle technology. It also didn't hurt that we indirectly kicked their ass by funding and training dozens of groups around the planet that were actively fighting them and dealing devastating blows in places like Afghanistan.

Would they have collapsed anyway? Yeah..cuz socialism = epic fail (something many lefties still refuse to accept). But Reagan certainly accelerated the process.

Republicans worship at the alter of Ronald Reagan just as they assert liberals are to Obama. The USSR imploded in on itself. Reagan's influence is marginal at best. I'll give him this. His speech at the Berlin Wall accelerated the break up of the Warsaw Pact.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Yeah..cuz socialism = epic fail (something many lefties still refuse to accept). But Reagan certainly accelerated the process.

Your use of the word "socialism" is far and above a blanket use of the term and fails to recognize the many types of socialism, many of which have failed, but some of which are successfully practiced today. The many forms of capitalism are no different. Pragmatic governments and societies have realized the need for a mixed economy in which essential services used by all the people are provided for by the government. Just because someone is a socialist doesn't mean they are against free enterprise.

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Originally posted by Krypton Reagan's influence is marginal at best.

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