haha...hahahahaha!

Yep. But my point was, Vietnam wasn't a *military* defeat. The Tet Offensive
for example was a great example of a crushing military victory for the USA,
but a disastrous political loss.

South Korea is free, whereas the North are currently eating bark off trees.
I'll leave you to guess which of these are successful.

Hardly a war.

Other than tossing Saddam's regime out I guess. The rest is in flux.

Vietnam was useless, Korea wasn't. Somalia wasn't a war and Iraq could go
either way right now. Oh, and that 'best hardware' spending was what lead to
the collapse of the soviet bloc.

Regards,
Tex

 

Merely mentioning it wasn't a military defeat, which is what was said in the
post I responded to.

It is in the sense that the bit that ended up under communist control is a
totalitarian hellhole whereas the south isn't.

Military spending was by far the biggest factor.

 

yeah right!

 

It would if you're in the military


How many times do they have to say it?...it was a POLICE action, not a
WAR, FFS!!!

 

The original post made no such distinction. The introduction of it is
all yours.

Am I going to have to remind you, again, of the street riots which
almost caused the 1988 Olympics to have to be relocated away from Seoul?
I've had to do that once before.

Up until quite recently, South Korea was as much of a playground of
unbridled freedom as, say, Pinochet's Chile.

Either way, a nation which suffered over half the total number of
casualties in World War II was able to keep Americans practising
duck-and-cover techniques for over 40 years.

The Cold War should've been over a lot sooner considering the unequal
starting points for the two protagonists.

....and you_do_know that the factoid about the USSR spending 25% of its
GDP on its armed forces was something the Pentagon made up to scare the
Capitol into funding it better, don't you?

 

When you're at war for 10 years and your forces have suffered almost 60,000
fatalities and over 300,000 casualties, and you're no closer to your aim than
you were a decade earlier, it's hard to imagine anyone but an American spin
doctor calling that anything but a military loss (of course in comparison to
the millions of Vietnamese fatalities it was a resounding military victory).

Nev..
'03 ZX12R

 

....and soon to be joined by his son and daughter who are also facing charges
of insolvent trading over a separate business from Jack. You must admire the
guy though, to 'beat' the NCA the way he did. Got off scott free while the
whistle blower and star witness against JDE and co did 9 months or so in gaol
for the same offences.

Nev..
'03 ZX12R

 

and a resounding victory for the american police there too. No casualties.

Nev..
'03 ZX12R

 

"No one can beat our military [1],"
"[1] Don't mention the (Vietnam) war"


Reply

Street riots 17 years ago vs. North Korea in its current state. I know
which place I'd rather live in.

Even Pinochet's Chile was a playground compared to N.Korea.

Nuclear weapons can have that effect. Not that it saved them in the
end.

OK. Except I didn't mention it.

Regards,
Tex

 

The old-boy network in the "legal" system is doing very nicely, thank you.

 

You seem to be getting rather upset. I recommend prozac.

Funny. Gorbachev and his foreign minister said in the British doco on the
80's negotiations that they simply couldn't afford to compete in the arms
race anymore, and that negotiations were necessary to end it. They were
especially keen to have Reagan cancel the Star Wars program.

I guess Gorby was lying then.

 

did..'

The ABC had a few years ago a british series on the mid-80's negotiations,
in which Gorbachev and his foreign minster discussed how continuing to
compete with the USA would be disastrous on the country's economy, and they
were especially keen to get Star Wars cancelled. All those resources into
useless military spending seemed too wasteful even for the Soviet
leadership, and they finally woke up to it.

 

If I found myself in charge of a place whose people had been
indoctrinated into believing me to be sub-human and who'd just been
dissuaded from putting that into practice at the cost of 30 million of
my countrymen, including, probably, no small number of my friends and
family, I'd probably extract a bit of retribution, too.

Your zero-sum little mind definitely would.

No, they didn't. You're pulling that out of your arse.

Actually, Texie-boy, you might want to Google for "Oleg Gordievski".
He's a KGB colonel who defected in the early 80's and whose debriefing
let the Americans know that Reagan's "Evil Empire"
sabre-rattling/redneck-awing of the time was being interpreted in the
Kremlin as the psyching up of the American population for all-out war,
and that they were considering nipping that in the bud... care you guess
how?

The rapprochement of the early 80's was initiated by Reagan backing off
from the brink he'd blundered the world onto without realising it
because neither his advisors nor, definitely, him could think that far.

 

Since a reply along the lines of "So why don't you **** off and move
there, then" would be encroaching on your already feeble range of
retorts, I'll ask a genuine question... What the hell is that sequence
of quotage and snippage supposed to illustrate?
(yes, I know "quotage" is not a real word, numbnuts)

You must have travelled quite extensively through both to be able to
make that assessment. That, or, more likely, your horizons are narrow
enough, and your ego sufficiently bloated for you to think that having
an online subscription to "Time" makes you "informed".

Btw, you do know that repeating your adversary's poetic-license terms
("playground" in the instance at hand) in your rebuttal hints at your
having all the mental nimbleness of a cobblestone, don't you?

That would be because all the empty right-wing chest-thumping you carry
around in your head leaves no room for facts and figures.

 

You really do seem to have your panties in a twist. Take a pill dude......

The point was, simply, South Korea had been a much better place to live than
North Korea. If the best example you can give to the contrary are some riots
that happened 17 years ago, it would indicate you can't actually refute the
point.

Well, I don't read "Time"

North Koreans have murdered or starved a lot more of their population, there
is no freedom of capital, no freedom of travel, no cultural activity. Not to
mention that at least the old thug Pinochet stepped down and finally let
Chile become a democracy. This hasn't happened in North Korea.

And you do know that using insults instead of actual argument doesn't leave
you in a position to lecture, don't you?

So you're refuting an which wasn't made. Gotcha.

(By the way, this "right winger" supports drug legalisation, gay marriage,
legalised prostitution, amongst other things.)

Regards,
Tex

 

Not possible. Gorbachev was a politician. Politicians do not lie.

Reagan wasn't nuts, either. Neither was Richard D Nixon.

 

touché

Then again, why lie about something which would make his motives seem less
impressive? He could have waffled on about the good of humanity. To his
great credit, he didn't.

 

Milhouse.

That's a whoosh, IK

 

"Simply" is such an apt description, too.

No, the point was, and remains, that you're such a reactionary little
twerp that you can't let a throwaway, thoroughly-deserved chide at the
overinflated American sense of self-importance go without launching into
a contorted defense of it... yet again.

How many times have you obligingly scampered through every mini-maze
that's been laid for you like this?

After, oh-the-irony, Paul Wolfowitz, of all people, persuaded the first
Pres. George Bush that the US should stop using support of "friendly"
dictators as a tool of foreign policy.

Without US backing, Pinochet had the option of fleeing to the UK, where
his mate Maggie Thatcher's people still ran things, or meeting the same
fate he meted out to Allende 15 years prior.

I can't quite figure out if you're just using the well-worn right-wing
tactic of cherry-picking facts so they fit in with the conclusion you
prepared earlier, or whether you're just thick enough to have completely
swallowed the products of the same process as carried out by someone else.

When you start coming at me with something more substantial than a
rugged-patriot bumper sticker, we're going to have an argument. Until
then, I'm going to see how many putdowns I can flick at you in any given
post.

That's about the sum total of respect you earn with your kneejerk
sloganeering and the "Saluting our brave corporations" banner, complete
with button-link to the Microsoft homepage immediately below, you have
on your website.

Refuting an what which wasn't made? A helicopter which wasn't made? A
pinecone? A washbasin?

This is quite priceless, actually. You state a vague contention, I knock
it down with a refutation citing actual numbers from which it sprung,
and you turn around and claim that, because your ignorance precluded you
bringing quantities into it yourself,_I'm_the one dangling a red herring.

Quite apart from the fact that boasting your support for legalised
prostitution gives you as much progressive clout as saying you support
reasonably-restricted availability of cigarettes to voting-age adults
(that is to say, it already exists and it's probably quite debatable
whether it's a good idea to begin with), your seeking to justify
yourself this way counts as another potential escape hatch you've
nervously flung open.

What's more, of course you'd would be in support of legal snooch and gay
marriage; that would mean companies like Silk Road Poppies ltd would
list on the stock exchange, allowing materialistic wankers like you who
equate freedom and fulfillment with the ability to purchase whatever
irrelevant crap gets dangled before your pink eyes to get in on the
action. Gay marriage would lead to a boom in the demand for tuxedo
rentals. Dry cleaning agencies and associated businesses would also
experience healthy growth.