Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

It's not like this is unique to Eastwood. Zero Dark Thirty showed torture producing valuable information. No one wants to see a movie where Americans torture people for no useful purpose.

That one is even more galling in that they could have just left the torture out.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

You seem to be trying to prove that you are.

Not clever enough. Because I'd rather be trashing Netanyahu right now but you didn't take the bait.

So what yiddish word best described Netanyahu?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Not clever enough. Because I'd rather be trashing Netanyahu right now but you didn't take the bait.

So what yiddish word best described Netanyahu?

I would say that I'm surprised that Boehner hasn't taken more of a beating for this, but that's probably because the White House figures it only helps him with the conservative wing-nuts to point out what he has done. Whereas Netanyahu could actually lose his election.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Not clever enough. Because I'd rather be trashing Netanyahu right now but you didn't take the bait.

So what yiddish word best described Netanyahu?

Is "douchebag" a Yiddish word?

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

IMHO most people are repulsed at the thought of killing, and even NRA jackasses are a lot of big talk. When we specifically train a person to overcome that repulsion, we owe him or her a duty of compassion because I doubt you ever see the world in quite the same way again. Weirdly, even though we live in a world of talk-it-out therapy, the healthiest war vets I know say things like “I saw a lot of terrible things” but refuse to go into details. They swallow it all, and other than waking up in pools of sweat a couple of times a month, they seem to lead normal lives. I wonder if we’ll one day realize that you can’t talk-therapy your way out of PTSD, and that denial and repression are actually legitimate tools of healing.

But we want this fantasy that Mr. Rogers was once a death-dealing badass, and it’s probably true that if you give your youth to the military, we should have an option for staying in your whole life on a “we broke it we bought it” theory.

Both of my grandfathers, D-Day plus 6 (halftrack driver with 400 percent casualty rate in his unit, cut off at Bastogne) and D-Day plus 4 (surgeon who got to see every horrible thing than can happen to a human body in war) died of substance abuse related causes of death.

OTOH, they really enjoyed talking about it with each other.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

IMHO most people are repulsed at the thought of killing, and even NRA jackasses are a lot of big talk. When we specifically train a person to overcome that repulsion, we owe him or her a duty of compassion because I doubt you ever see the world in quite the same way again. Weirdly, even though we live in a world of talk-it-out therapy, the healthiest war vets I know say things like “I saw a lot of terrible things” but refuse to go into details. They swallow it all, and other than waking up in pools of sweat a couple of times a month, they seem to lead normal lives. I wonder if we’ll one day realize that you can’t talk-therapy your way out of PTSD, and that denial and repression are actually legitimate tools of healing.

But we want this fantasy that Mr. Rogers was once a death-dealing badass, and it’s probably true that if you give your youth to the military, we should have an option for staying in your whole life on a “we broke it we bought it” theory.

when I was young I asked my two uncles who had been in Europe whether they had been in battle. My mom's brother said he had spent the whole war in Iceland. The other uncle told me in detail about his relatively boring experiences. He had not been in any fire fights, and twice shot at Germans far far away.

At my mom's brother funeral his son told us that he had been D-Day plus 2 or 3, had friends killed next to him several times and had seen some horrible shit- he was not about to glorify it or even mention it to scrawny little ass.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

I never knew my grandfather, because he died at Kasserine Pass. But he wrote some very nice poetry about North Africa that had nothing to do with war.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I never knew my grandfather, because he died at Kasserine Pass. But he wrote some very nice poetry about North Africa that had nothing to do with war.

Reading what you all are writing is reminding me that my grandfather was older when he had my father. He could have been drafted at the end of World War I, but wasn't, perhaps because he was the oldest male in the household.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan

Both of my grandfathers, D-Day plus 6 (halftrack driver with 400 percent casualty rate in his unit, cut off at Bastogne) and D-Day plus 4 (surgeon who got to see every horrible thing than can happen to a human body in war) died of substance abuse related causes of death.

OTOH, they really enjoyed talking about it with each other.

As FB friends of mine might remember from a Thanksgiving Day post, I had an alcoholic grandfather whose PTSD and substance dependency was a product of a traumatic experience that was quite like war, but was not-war, so yeah. OTOH, he had a job in middle management and most of his dysfunction (that I know of) was directed around his household.

There is PTSD and there is training someone to overcome what I contend is a strong aversion to killing. I hope we direct good resources toward the ones we do this to, because telling them “Welcome home, hero” is just not doing it. The local transit district has a budget for counseling the train engineers who hear the sickening thud of the suicides, and those are the people who literally couldn't do anything to prevent it. Maybe a quiet seaside village with a mysterious killer balloon to keep the residents compliant?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

Is "douchebag" a Yiddish word?

Yiddish is a welcoming language when it comes to insults, no?

And that Israeli Ambassador - what a putz!

In thinking about this, I came across this site, which pretty much seems devoted to the question of the proper Yiddish curse for Boehner. (My favorite: "May you dream of making aliyah, only to be rejected when you can't produce your long form birth certificate")

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

There is PTSD and there is training someone to overcome what I contend is a strong aversion to killing.

100,000 years ago we needed to kill other tribes people. Coltrane argues that 3,000,000 years of walking upright isn't enough to fix our spines. How could so many fewer years create an aversion?

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

100,000 years ago we needed to kill other tribes people. Coltrane argues that 3,000,000 years of waking upright isn't enough to fix our spines. How could so many fewer years create an aversion?

I didn’t claim the aversion was genetic in origin. I dunno, ask a drill instructor whether it’s easy to get an average guy to kill the enemy. Back in the days of the draft, marksmanship training was a waste of time because 99% of rounds fired were unaimed cover fire.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

I didn’t claim the aversion was genetic in origin. I dunno, ask a drill instructor whether it’s easy to get an average guy to kill the enemy. Back in the days of the draft, marksmanship training was a waste of time because 99% of rounds fired were unaimed cover fire.

Really? Back before there was a FRCP, do you think it would be hard to hand Sidd a spear and convince him to go kill a guy across the field that was encroaching on our hunting grounds?

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

100,000 years ago we needed to kill other tribes people.

Did we? Wish I knew more about the athropology.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

Did we? Wish I knew more about the athropology.

and spelling