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View Full Version : Having lunch with an extreme neo-con




DeadtoSin
06-21-2008, 09:24 PM
Tommorow I'll be meeting with a good friend of mine, but unfortunately he is more hardcore than any Republican I've ever met about foreign interventionism. If he had a choice he would take the interventionism much farther. (I think his experiences in Vietnam has scarred him. He talks about having to pile bodies up, and being spit on when he got back from Vietnam.)

He actually is very articulate and so I am understandably a bit nervous. Is there any place I can go to touch up my arguments on foreign policy? I have and am currently reading quite a bit on it, but I'd like a summary to base my discussion on so I can have a more focused discussion.

Is there anything like this?

constitutional
06-21-2008, 09:28 PM
You need to tell him, Americans are dumb as hell. The fact that they spit on you even though it wasn't your fault. It's the president and Congress that declare and wage wars.

And tell him about Vietnam today. Aren't they prosperous with out us?

DeadtoSin
06-21-2008, 09:29 PM
That's a good idea. I think he associated anti-war people as those same ones that spit on him. So maybe I could make some headway in that area..

constitutional
06-21-2008, 09:40 PM
http://www.nolanchart.com/article1149.html

pinkmandy
06-22-2008, 12:08 AM
And give him the book. DARE him to read it. :)

WRellim
06-22-2008, 12:29 AM
That's a good idea. I think he associated anti-war people as those same ones that spit on him. So maybe I could make some headway in that area..


Go rent (or buy) "Sir, No Sir!" (http://www.sirnosir.com/)

Here's a snippet: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5459669199356402963




The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.


Yet few today know of these history-changing events.


Sir! No Sir! will change all that. The film does four things:

1) Brings to life the history of the GI movement through the stories of those who were part of it;

2) Reveals the explosion of defiance that the movement gave birth to with never-before-seen archival material;

3) Explores the profound impact that movement had on the military and the war itself; and

4) The feature, 90 minute version, also tells the story of how and why the GI Movement has been erased from the public memory.

Eric21ND
06-22-2008, 12:55 AM
Read Michael Schuer. The strongest evidence is from CIA. Use that in your argument. Make the point there will always be crazy people willing to kill others, site the DC snipers, Tim McViegh, Osama Bin Laden, but if we change our foriegn policy it will undercut their recruitment, so we'll only have a handful of threats instead of terrorist organizations.

asgardshill
06-22-2008, 01:02 AM
//

TastyWheat
06-22-2008, 02:19 AM
Kind of a weak argument, but too someone not so neo-con I'd say, "How can Republicans have a conservative domestic policy and a liberal foreign policy?" We supposedly think individual responsibility is a good thing so why are we intervening and assuming the responsibilities of foreign citizens? Are only Americans smart enough to manage their own lives?

freelance
06-22-2008, 05:31 AM
Kind of a weak argument, but too someone not so neo-con I'd say, "How can Republicans have a conservative domestic policy and a liberal foreign policy?" We supposedly think individual responsibility is a good thing so why are we intervening and assuming the responsibilities of foreign citizens? Are only Americans smart enough to manage their own lives?

What conservative domestic policy? No Child Left Behind? Spying? Real ID? SWAT teams everywhere with federalized local police? The lack of everything states rights? The support of eminent domain as a vacuum cleaner?

Help me out here, because I'm trying real hard to find anything conservative about the current Republican party!

kombayn
06-22-2008, 05:37 AM
It'll be tricky but my favorite example is us getting involved in World War I to defeat Germany and then looked what happened in World War II as we took a neutral stance until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It should have been vice-versa. After World War II, we left Germany in shambles which created the Berlin Wall separating West from East and when it was torn down during the "Cold War" actual war was not even raised.

Also, how can he agree that we should be liberating the Iraqi people when we can't even liberate people in our own ghetto's, poverty stricken small towns and our infestation of illegal immigration. They want to talk about how America is so safe, well how the hell can you explain a bunch of Mexicans crossing the border? If terrorists wanted to do some fucked up shit, they could probably get away with it.

So intervention has no positive results, only when you're attacked and we were meant to go after terrorists on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, not rage war and then attack another country that was innocent of any wrong doing in that particular terrorist attack. I don't know man... Just use logic, you won't get through to him but shit if you talk long enough a few words will get through but still won't change his politics.

WRellim
06-22-2008, 05:39 AM
What conservative domestic policy? No Child Left Behind? Spying? Real ID? SWAT teams everywhere with federalized local police? The lack of everything states rights? The support of eminent domain as a vacuum cleaner?

Help me out here, because I'm trying real hard to find anything conservative about the current Republican party!


Ummm... Lower taxes for rich people?

Sorry... that's the best I can think of right now... (Man the current Republicrat party sucks, doesn't it?)

V-rod
06-22-2008, 06:58 AM
Tommorow I'll be meeting with a good friend of mine, but unfortunately he is more hardcore than any Republican I've ever met about foreign interventionism. If he had a choice he would take the interventionism much farther. (I think his experiences in Vietnam has scarred him. He talks about having to pile bodies up, and being spit on when he got back from Vietnam.)

He actually is very articulate and so I am understandably a bit nervous. Is there any place I can go to touch up my arguments on foreign policy? I have and am currently reading quite a bit on it, but I'd like a summary to base my discussion on so I can have a more focused discussion.

Is there anything like this?

Is he cool with big government, welfare state? If he is not, he's not a neo-conservative. He is just a conservative war-hawk.

Neo-Con been turned into the new "Nazi" insult term when it comes to labeling on this forum, people throw that word around too much I think. ;)

DeadtoSin
06-22-2008, 07:41 AM
Is he cool with big government, welfare state? If he is not, he's not a neo-conservative. He is just a conservative war-hawk.

Neo-Con been turned into the new "Nazi" insult term when it comes to labeling on this forum, people throw that word around too much I think. ;)

He is fine with some forms of big government, such as the Patriot Act and things similar to that. I would consider him more of a neo-conservative, but he is also a self-described war hawk.

Wolfgang Bohringer
06-22-2008, 09:37 AM
Is he cool with big government, welfare state? If he is not, he's not a neo-conservative. He is just a conservative war-hawk.

Neo-Con been turned into the new "Nazi" insult term when it comes to labeling on this forum, people throw that word around too much I think.

I recently heard Anti-War Radio's Scott Horton (by way of journalist Jim Lobe) explain that the term "neo-conservative" is actually a biographical term--and not really an ideological term.

This is consistent with my understanding which is that the "neo-conservatives" were a group of former Trotsky-ite anti-Stalinist Communists who sometime after WWII hi-jacked (or allied with) traditional U.S. conservativism and transformed it into a militaristic authoritarian statism bent on violently setting the globe ablaze with "democratic revolution."

Technically, you have to have been a communist first in order to be a "neo-conservative."

So CIA agent William F. Buckley who emerged from WWII as more of a "stay-behind" ally of the Nazis was not a neo-conservative, but many of the writers in his National Review magazine such as Norman Podhoritz and Irving Kristol were neo-cons.

Likewise, former communist and current war hawk Christopher Hitchens can be labeled a neo-con, but Dick Cheney can't.

Incidentally, note that the neo-conservatives are self named. Un-like "Al-Qaeda" as Richard Clark documents, the neo-cons didn't need a U.S. government spy bureaucrat to invent their label. And also note the irony of the neo-cons sometimes objecting to the use of their self-named term as a "code-word", yet I've never heard an ipod-cave-cast from the cave-dwellers complaining about having been given their nom-de-guerre by the script writers from the PR department of Naval "Intelligence."

rpfan2008
06-22-2008, 09:54 AM
neo-cons sometimes objecting to the use of their self-named term as a "code-word",

just kidding, :D please Google "ron paul's code word for" (with the quotes) :eek:

Xchange
06-22-2008, 10:52 AM
Yep...give him a copy of Marching towards Hell, by Michael Schuer...aka ex-CIA/former chief OBL hunter
"Fighting Wars That Are Not Ours To Fight"

He WILL probably see the light after that...

Hell OBL even said in one of his video's....."...Read Michael Schuer and you will see why we attack you..."

mediahasyou
06-22-2008, 01:14 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_shEnY_lcQI

Bruno
06-22-2008, 01:52 PM
Update us. How did your lunch conversation go?