With Half a Brain They're Dangerous

A while back, I devoted an entire page to an internet commentator "Warwick" as I thought that he had half-a-brain. "Warwick" was able to construct an interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that arguably justified summary executions. (He argued that torturing prisoners violated other Canadian and international statutes, so all the "leftards" who talked about violations of the Geneva Conventions were, well, "leftards." Unfortunaely for "Warwick," it appears that US military courts and the US Supreme Court must be full of "leftards" because decision after decision has upheld the rights of the Guantanamo detainees unilaterally pronounced "illegal combatants" by the bush II regime and called for the enjoyment of those rights under the Geneva Conventions.)

What's noteworthy about "Warwick" is that while he's obviously only possessed of half-a-brain, this puts him light years ahead of most of the inhabitants of the Canadian right-wing, and, surrounded by companions who are absolute dullards, "Warwick" must imagine himself some sort of god. This is the reason for his completely unjustified arrogance.

Recently, I came across another example of this phenomenon. I'll call him "PR" and I won't link to him because he is one of the most insufferable pompous asses I've ever met and I don't want him showing up here and bombarding me with tiresome, long-winded diatribes about how he's an "intellectual heavyweight" who is completely dominating me only I'm too stupid to recognize my own defeat, etc., etc.,

The following is an interaction between "PR" and another commentator from "Red Tory"'s site:

The farce in Afghanistan will end soon enough and then you’ll be doing mental gymnastic to try and justify why we wasted soldiers’ lives… Americans are slowing waking up to the monumental waste Iraq is and that they are no in more danger from “terrorists” than before.


Hooo boy. It's the Iraq theorem again. I've dispelled this with every other mindless twerp who's come at me with it, so I might as well explain the situation to you. Afghanistan is not Iraq.

Afghanistan is:

-UN-mandated

-Based on accurate intelligence

-Actually involves foreign policy objectives vis a vis the removal of regimes that harbour terrorists

-Actually involves foreign policy objectives vis a vis international peace and stability

-Actually involves foreign policy objectives vis a vis internationalist principles, and

-Spreads freedom to a people that otherwise didn't have it (although this is really just a nice bonus)


Iraq is

-Not UN-mandated

-Based on no solid foreign policy objectives save a foolhardy politically engineering project in the Middle East and

-Based on faulty and manipulated intelligence in terms of WMDs and Saddam Hussein's (demonstrably lack of) relationship with terrorists.

See the difference?

Where to begin? First of all, the original commentator never said they were the same thing. He said Afghanistan was a waste of Canadian soldiers' lives and that even the Americans are slowly throwing off the corporate brainwashing and realizing that Iraq is a waste of their soldiers' lives.

[Which renders everything else that "PR" typed as pointless, but let's continue ...]

Afghanistan is UN-mandated, but who cares, since that's not why "the mission" is a failure. It's a failure because we're propping-up an unpopular regime that depends on mass-murdering warlords for its survival. None of the things "PR" says about Afghanistan matter because the West didn't finance Afghanistan's reconstruction by more than a fraction of what it needed, and we're spending ten times as much money on our military "solutions" than we are on getting the country on its feet, and the last time anyone checked WE WERE KILLING MORE CIVILIANS THAN THE TALIBAN! And the thing is, anyone with more than half-a-brain would expect our governments to all perform like the shit-heads they are, and that's one huge reason to have opposed our going in there with a military presence.

But "PR" only has half a brain so he couldn't have anticipated this clusterfuck. Now that it's clearly right in front of him, his monumental, but unjustified, arrogance is blinding him to the enormity of his error.