Bay 12 Games Forum

we're not shelling any "pirate villages", because the United States, contrary to either conspiracy theorists or supremacists, is not in the business of lobbing military ordinance at any group of people that happen to be near someone who's suspected of what is really criminality and not an act of war.

It seems like every day I see a new article about how some camel herder got blown up in Iraq because his son's wedding ceremony involved the firing of AK-47s, and some American soldiers quite reasonably assumed that it was "insurgent" activity and responded with overwhelming firepower.  I personally know a guy who was involved in an incident where a wedding party that got a little out of hand was ended with a high-explosive tank shell.  I'm a patriotic, moderate American citizen, and even I recognize that overwhelming firepower and "collateral damage" (a disgusting euphemism if ever there was one) is how we do things.  We try to be less brutal than the Soviet Union was, but we DO have a disturbing penchant for killing brown dudes.

I don't know if your closer was a joke or not, but I hope to god you realize both the impracticality of just shooting anyone who might have pirates among them, and the fact that such a move would accomplish nothing.

Well, it was a joke, but I meant it at the same time.  There ARE entire towns along the Somalian coast whose existence is devoted to supporting Somalia's piracy industry.  I read an article about it a few months back, I could probably find it on CNN's website if you don't feel like digging for it.  They have separate restaurants and living quarters for pirates and hostages, and all kinds of piracy support industry.  And, yes, I AM saying that in my admittedly undereducated opinion, levelling a couple of those towns is a viable strategy.

Ultimately though, piracy will continue as long as it's a viable business strategy.  The answer lies in a combination of making the targets themselves harder to attack, and in (yeah laugh it up) improving the economy of the area so that violent criminality isn't so obvious an option.  In Somalia, yeah I know I know.

By the way, there's been rampant piracy around both the coast of Africa and especially the Straits of Malacca for more than forty years.  Funny what kind of ethnocentrism it takes to grab people's attention.  God forbid a ship registered in America, or a tankerful of oil, happens to be the victim of a systemic world problem instead of somebody else's stuff and lives.

That's why I'm seriously suggesting leveling a couple of towns.  If we try to fix Somalia's economy, we'll just have a repeat of the whole "Black Hawk Down" fiasco from the Clinton era.  Yes, right now, the risks of piracy are acceptable to the pirates, because most of the time, the companies affected pay out the million-dollar ransom.  However, if part-time pirates have to bury a couple thousand of their dead children and relatives, if they come home to a pile of smoking rubble where there used to be a thriving port town, they might re-think the economic viability of piracy when the fish aren't biting.  If we use our typical "blow the shit out of it" strategy here, suddenly piracy will NOT be such a viable business strategy.  Yeah, you COULD get a million-dollar ransom, you could also have a cruiser follow you home and destroy everybody you ever knew.  It's an ugly solution, but I don't see another way of handling it.  We can't arm every cargo ship that passes by there with enough weapons to fight off twenty dudes armed with AK-47s and RPGs.  Sound projectors and the like are humane, nonlethal, and terribly cool, but I don't think they're gonna outfight determined dudes with rocket launchers.

First, a few links, for those not aware of the current situation.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/10/somalia.u.s.ship/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/09/wilkerson.pirates/index.html#cnnSTCText
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/29/pirates/index.html#cnnSTCText

This sort of crap was actually a huge contribution to America building a Navy in the first place.  The phrase "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marines' Hymn is a reference to it.

I'm wondering why on Earth that a ragtag band of Somalis think that they can take American ships without hideous repercussions.  They KNOW that we're the freakin' Empire, if you look at us cross-eyed we'll invade you AND the country next to you just for good measure.  There's entire cities in Somalia whose entire existence is devoted to supporting their piracy industry.  Coincidentally, we just so happen to have in the area a squadron of warships with the ability to hit the license plate of a car with a shell from over the horizon.  I'm wondering why we haven't commenced shelling a couple of those pirate villages yet, or sank a couple of "mother ships".

Now, your thoughts?  What sort of action is called for here?  Do we level a couple of pirate towns, kill a few thousand women and children and a few hundred pirates, or should we just sink a couple of converted cargo ships and call it a day, or what?

Well, I just got back from the doctor, and it's mostly good news.  The ultrasound's supposed to only cost a couple hundred bucks, not the thousand I thought it would cost. The reason they want the ultrasound is that the blood test showed my liver function to be bad enough that it's possible all the antibiotics and acetaminophen I took gave me a stone in my liver.  It's likely that my liver is just mostly shut down from the disease, but they have to eliminate the possibility of there being a stone.  The doctor also gave me today's appointment for free.

On the bright side, it's most likely NOT too swollen, so all the stuff I said before about not being able to lift weights doesn't necessarily apply.  The doc told me that as of now, I can lift weights, as long as I stick to about half of what I would normally do and I don't bounce the weights off my chest (which you don't do anyway unless you're an idiot, because it's a good way to crack your sternum or collarbone).  So I'll just do the weights that my workout buddies do instead of the weights that I'd normally do.  Can't participate in the yard tard league for at least a month, of course.

She also said that although I can't jog (impact can still potentially burst my spleen), I'm allowed to walk as far as my body will let me.  So my physical fitness won't go to crap while I'm sick.  I can expect anywhere from a week to another month of symptoms, but I'm supposedly through the worst.  I just gotta keep taking Advil to keep down the fever and keep drinking tons of Gatorade to flush out my body.

So, yeah, contrary to what they told me last time, I can indeed work out and will be posting logs in this topic.  Sweet.  I'm not cured, and I may have to put up with this crap for up to another month, but my fitness won't totally crash either.  This is the best news I've heard all year.

(I'm also putting my first-ever donation to Toady in the mail this afternoon, since I got my tax refund yesterday.  What don't go to the Toad will probably go to the doctors, but I couldn't be happier, considering the alternatives.  Now I just need to go find a toad out in my yard for a new avatar to commemorate the experience.)

I want some of whatever that blog writer's been smoking.  At no point has Obama ever said that this proposed "civilian national security force" has to be "as well-armed as the Army".  That's utter idiocy.

Giving kids a break on college tuition in exchange for spending a summer handing out blankets and soup to homeless people, or cleaning up litter on city streets?  I personally don't see the link between that and the Hitler Youth.  But, then, that article links to WorldNetDaily as a reputable source, so I shouldn't be surprised.  Maybe the Hitler Obama Youth can hand out tinfoil hats for people like this along with blankets and soup.

Well, keep us posted.  Just because Strife's filling sandbags and I'm bedridden, anybody else can still post their workout logs in here.  I'll tell you to harden the fuck up while envying your ability to work out without your spleen exploding.

So, yeah, got my lab test results back today.  It's viral mononucleosis, which means that I can't work out or do anything more strenuous than washing the dishes for the next forty days or so.  I go in for a followup appointment tomorrow morning, and then an abdominal ultrasound on Tuesday to find out precisely how fucked up my liver and spleen are.  The OTHER doctor that I went to managed to miss my swollen tonsils and yellow coloration, and prescribed me antibiotics and a liquid diet, the first of which is apparently a contributing factor in how bad off I am now.

An intriguing symptom of this disease is that with my liver not working, if I were to take a drink of alcohol, I would stay drunk for DAYS.  I'm not going to make the experiment, but it's interesting to think about.  I just have to take it easy for thirty or forty more days, then I'll be back running and lifting weights.

The whole "rape is just peachy, as long as the rapist is rich, tall, rich, handsome, and rich" aspect to both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, as well as the insularity of the Objectivist movement ("great literature is exactly what is on the approved list and nothing else"), has pretty much turned me entirely off anything Objectivist-affiliated, and brings me no end of trouble with fellow small-L libertarians.

Rather than reading Rand, if you want something along those lines that's not utterly psychologically repulsive, you're really better off reading Nietzsche.  He's where Rand got most of her ideas in the first place.  He's too dense for me, personally, but he's far less toxic than Rand.

I can second The Gulag Archipelago and Mao:  The Unknown Story, though.

By the way, are we doing any kind of a healthy support structure here? Or are we just listing exercise?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but I'm personally fine with any kind of health or physical fitness advice.

I'm not sure what, exactly, but it seems kind of silly to me, to just confine this to "hey I did X amount of push-ups". I don't see the point or usefulness in this being a simple shared exercise log.

Well, I'm fine with a simple exercise log for two reasons.  First, it's a great motivational factor to look at your exercise log and say, "two months ago, I could barely lift X weight once.  Today I did three sets of five reps at weight X."  Second, for me at least, it keeps me from saying, "not today, I don't really feel like it, maybe I'll work out tomorrow".  Because if I do that on my own, I'm the only one who will know, but if I have an online exercise log, then the whole internet will know I'm a bitch.

Is it unethical to start flamewars (with the intent to lock) in topics that might get enough replies to knock ones thread off of the top spot?

In my opinion, yes, extremely.  Anything which decreases the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet is techically immoral, as far as I'm concerned.  What you are describing is called "Trolling", and is grounds for being banned on virtually every website, including this one.

In the vein of SHB's contributions, here's a site with links to links to online versions of thousands of authors whose copyright has run out, as well as piles of other goodies:

http://www.litgothic.com/index_fl.html