The Crow's Eye: Outcomes IV

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 21, 2011

Outcomes IV

Anyone want to wager on how long the NATO forces will remain in newly liberated/partitioned Libya, to battle entrenched AQ type terrorists?

Or to train local forces to defend their newly imposed friendship with the US and Europe?

I'll kick off the bidding: indefinitely.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...: The base-building will begin as soon as we can squeeze some KBR/Shaw Group poindexters in with enough safety to let them examine the territory and imagine where they'd build.

See: Iraq, 2003-onward.; March 21, 2011 at 12:43 PM
fish said...: I will go with "a while."; March 21, 2011 at 12:44 PM
Anonymous said...: Until the Libyans can take care of themselves defined as sell oil, do what they're told, kill Islamists, turn in their weapons, elect the right leaders, the usual metrics.; March 21, 2011 at 1:09 PM
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...: I'm going to take the under.

Idea being that staying in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention all the other military donations to the plutocracy) plus rising oil prices will bust us rather quickly.

Remember how the collapse of the Soviet Union was a total surprise to the neoconmen?

Same thing.
~; March 21, 2011 at 2:37 PM
K. Ron Silkwood said...: Or to take photos with dead civilians as trophies?; March 21, 2011 at 5:14 PM
Anonymous said...: What NATO forces are on the ground? Is this pure speculation like American cable 'news'?; March 21, 2011 at 5:33 PM
Jack Crow said...: Anonymous,

None yet. Is that germane to the wager? Aren't we discussing the conceivable future, not the present?

I don't know about you, but I thought wagers were sort of predicated on future and as yet undetermined outcomes, n'est-ce pas?; March 21, 2011 at 5:38 PM
Jack Crow said...: under,

I don't think we're close to precipitous collapse, yet. Soon enough, but not close.

I'll also just sort of want you to be wrong about that. My kids just ain't old enough, yet.; March 21, 2011 at 5:39 PM
Jack Crow said...: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/21/boots_on_the_ground

via

http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2011/03/great-big-high-explosive-envelope-pushed-on-top-of-dictator.html; March 21, 2011 at 6:08 PM
Randal Graves said...: At least until soylent green.; March 22, 2011 at 9:16 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.