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Biden won't penalize Saudi Prince for the killing of journalist Khasahoggi.

oldbadger

Skanky Old Mongrel!

Mock Turtle

Oh my, did I say that!
Premium Member
How about Putin? Who has been implicated in the assassination (or attempted such) of several outside of Russia (and inside). Or does the level of one's power prevent any comebacks? Isn't MBS a bit like Putin?
 

Duke_Leto

Active Member
What would President Trump have done?

It's so easy to sit back in an armchair and tell us all what you would do. During WWII President Roosevelt and PM Churchill took food and drink with Stalin.

Get it?

“The other side is worse” doesn’t seem to me a very persuasive defense of the man. This isn’t a complicated situation. Biden isn’t doing anything because the Saudis are a valuable American vassal state that helps further the cause of American imperialism. Anyone opposed to what the US is doing in the middle east ought to condemn Biden.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
“The other side is worse” doesn’t seem to me a very persuasive defense of the man. This isn’t a complicated situation. Biden isn’t doing anything because the Saudis are a valuable American vassal state that helps further the cause of American imperialism. Anyone opposed to what the US is doing in the middle east ought to condemn Biden.
Why should I condemn Biden specifically, when he is simply doing what I would have expected any POTUS do in his position?
 

oldbadger

Skanky Old Mongrel!
“The other side is worse” doesn’t seem to me a very persuasive defense of the man. This isn’t a complicated situation. Biden isn’t doing anything because the Saudis are a valuable American vassal state that helps further the cause of American imperialism.
There..... You answered your own question.
Anyone opposed to what the US is doing in the middle east ought to condemn Biden.
So you do have an agenda!
Anyone opposed should do one thing, anyone in support should do something else, eh?

That's political motivation rather than about believing in justice .
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach

My my.

Politics before humanity and justice.

Biden is full of surprises so far. Wonder what in store next?
Realpolitik won't go away just because the USA now has a rational president.

But I admit I am rather disappointed. I have thought for some time that the USA ought to be distancing itself from KSA and getting closer to Iran. As we move away from an oil-dependent world, the Saudis cease to have the pivotal importance they were once seen to have. And it is high time some serious pressure was brought to bear on the Kingdom to reform. Deera Square - Wikipedia
 

Terrywoodenpic

Oldest Heretic
The crown prince is the defacto though proxy head of state. what he does is in the name and with the authority of the King.
No other government ever takes action against other heads of state. Even in war situations it is rare to target a head of state.
Though governments often encourage others to do so.

Of course wars would be a lot shorter if heads of state were the prime target.. but all heads of state fear they will become the target themselves. at one time they nominated champions to fight for them. today they keep their heads down and let others fight.

Biden is doing exactly what his predecessors have done. but we do not have any Idea what will go on behind the scenes. Nor will we.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Got two questions that I'm expecting will be unlikely to be given reasonably intellectually honest answers by most anyone posting anywhere on the net today, right or left, but I've always been willing to annoy nearly everyone, if I can rationalize my life-long love of annoying my two brothers into some kind of excuse for seeing myself as attractively standing upright in babe-admirable fashion to defend my core values.

Yeah, I usually am that bored with city life here in the Springs. It's the small town I was raised in, over-grown small town, always collapsing, version of the thing. Here's the first question that I just created such an annoying stage for introducing it...

Would Trump have been more likely, in your own understanding, to have penalized the prince, or to have smeared the intelligence report in some way more or less along the lines of being his at-the-moment best, off-the-cuff or off-the-wall, take on how to do the most possible damage to both undermine the report, and to destroy the credibility of anyone who might support whatever is the truth of it?

If you can understand that sentence, you have a shot at offering an intellectually honest answer to those people on this Forum you yourself have called your 'friends'. If you just react or lash out at me, you will not seem likely to me to be committed to intellectual honesty. Instead, I am apt to see your reaction in terms of my own personal idea of 'fake news', and most often ignore it accordingly.​

Second question: If you cannot see either Biden's or Trump's behavior as some kind of universally human behavior that even you somehow have it in you to do your own personal version of it, then on what grounds do you suppose you understand either man well enough to understand why they did what they did, or would have likely done?

BONUS: Should anyone listen to you for actual insights into yourself, their selves, or anyone else?

Not talking morals here. Just understandings.
Enjoy the OP if you wish, but please don't fail to consider whether it's just a bit of entertainment, not useful otherwise. The world really does not need you to voluntarily sacrifice yourself to become another one of it's fools. There's already a whole public relations industry rolling fools off its assembly lines night and day, designed and targeted to somehow support their owner's personal interests and agenda. Truth is your only truest ally and defense. Not me. Truth.




Every human community is in one way or another stiffing to anyone living in it, in terms of how that community will impose on them the in-the-box thinking that amounts to being the limits to how its members are permitted to see reality, before they become strangers and outsiders in the community's eyes. It's one way social animals evolve to help them unite as a group in order to survive. If you aren't aware of this, you're corralled. No escape, friend, until you at least can see the fences you need to jump.



Folks who see themselves as strong freedom-loving individuals staunchly opposed to socialist tyranny are the right's version of people who can look at themselves while not knowing they are only seeing their fences, and not who they really are as persons in any way autonomous and free to be true to themselves. The left is even better at deceiving itself. It's statistically better educated than the right -- hence, more likely to have all sorts of things that are potentially suicidal weapons for self-deception, laying about the house.

But I got to wonder what kind of crazy idea for suicide by proxy it is to attack scholars and scholarship as personal enemies because one is somehow capable of seeing in their local human version of being a snob about how they think of their egos, as an actual reason to refuse to accept any useful truth from them that they pass out to anyone more or less free, and upon request, in the books they write. In any Age of Lies, not just this one, honest scholars are everyone's warriors, and they know it -- with the usual, routine consequences for when any ape gets it into their head they are somehow the big ape by virtue of their own touchy-feely sense of the worth of their personal virtue to every other ape.

Scholars show their respect for you by the effort and lengths they go to in order to get it right, spot on, and intellectually honest in what they say to you. Are you so needy that you can't accept they respect you unless they also kow-tow to your ego? Since when we're you better?

The Lakota put to death the scouts that lied to them in their nation that had no concept of a rightful and legitimate death penalty. The same Lakota believed Truth was the universal, cosmic mother of its warriors, for its warriors were defined by the one and only one duty they actually owed to the nation -- all they had to do in life was to fight for everyone equally, and against all odds, no matter what it cost them. How does circulating lies about scholars stack up as honor against that notion of manhood?

I don't even see myself as coming close to that notion of what it means to be an adult, male version.



When you think about anyone's intellectual allegiance to any community of any sort, you might wish to consider taking into consideration that they are in some fundamental way you -- as expressed by the Human genome in its currently present, individual version of you.


After that undoubtedly alarming moment of coming within a few miles of seeing both yourself and someone else as 'human', you've done what I would consider something along the lines of showing some decent measure of genuine respect for yourself. At least that.

After that, I usually go on to skim the next post, see if I want to slow down enough to read it with understanding, while background plotting my next barroom gambit to pick up babes. I'm only likely to post when I want to practice my writing skills using the OP or whatever as a prompt. It's then, I start looking to understand the post well enough that I can see if there's anything I'd like to say.

Make of this my 2 cents, if you're that desperate for any sum at all of pixelated money. If so, forget my post -- this is a much better way to calm yourself...

 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
The crown prince is the defacto though proxy head of state. what he does is in the name and with the authority of the King.
No other government ever takes action against other heads of state. Even in war situations it is rare to target a head of state.
Though governments often encourage others to do so.
US agenies were actively involved in the planning of both the assassination of several heads of state/government, as well as several coups that directly resulted in the deaths of foreign heads of state/governmnent. So it's not like the US sees those kind of actions as beyond the pale when the people being targeted are considered enemies to US interests.

Here, of course, lies the crucial factor: The US only tends to pull out the stops against governments it perceives as enemies, and typically only against those it perceives as unable to retaliate in kind.
 

Lyndon

"Peace is the answer" quote: GOD, 2014
Premium Member
Trump ignored the obvious evidence against the crown prince and doubled down by authorizing something like a billion dollars in arms sales to the kingdom. Biden has cut off the arms sales, sanctioned multiple government officials in the KSA, and accused the Crown Prince of complicity in murder, that seems like a pretty big difference in policy between the two Presidents.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
Khasahoggi was killed on trumps watch. I don't remember him doing much to penalise saudi...

Saudi is a "friend" and very useful base for the US. Possibly why both trump and biden stepped back from punitive measures
 

Lyndon

"Peace is the answer" quote: GOD, 2014
Premium Member
If you read the OP's link thoroughly Biden is applying extensive punitive measures to the KSA, polar opposite to Trump who aimed to reward them.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Khasahoggi was killed on trumps watch. I don't remember him doing much to penalise saudi...

Saudi is a "friend" and very useful base for the US. Possibly why both trump and biden stepped back from punitive measures

I guess there just cannot be enough wars in the Middle East using Saudi Arabia as base and kick off to attack more than just Iraq. I mean, I thought those wars might more or less inform Americans of how we value protecting Europe's major source of oil. Kind of a comment on how a hundred years of the public relations industry has crippled American's ability to see in the world their government in action.

Did you notice a few years ago, Christine, the under-reported news that Tony Blair had become a paid consultant to a Central Asian dictator in order to advise him how to best use the British/American invention of 'public relations' as a tool for saving bullets while domesticating the subjects and citizens of his, or any, government?

As I recall, the news was spun on this side of the pond in some meaningfully shallow and misleading way. It came across as sort of like Tony had never heard of public relations used as a tool to control people until, you know, you had a vague sense he got it from a crash course he'd taken after leaving office. That is, Tony was presented as having retooled himself for his new career.

There was not even a suggestion that he'd ever had any political skills more advanced than any bright person would have flying by trial and error learning alone. The reports here were almost as theoretical as a guiding principle of libertarian or neoliberal economics is from nuts and bolts reality.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
I guess there just cannot be enough wars in the Middle East using Saudi Arabia as base and kick off to attack more than just Iraq. I mean, I thought those wars might more or less inform Americans of how we value protecting Europe's major source of oil. Kind of a comment on how a hundred years of the public relations industry has crippled American's ability to see in the world their government in action.

Did you notice a few years ago, Christine, the under-reported news that Tony Blair had become a paid consultant to a Central Asian dictator in order to advise him how to best use the British/American invention of 'public relations' as a tool for saving bullets while domesticating the subjects and citizens of his, or any, government?

As I recall, the news was spun on this side of the pond in some meaningfully shallow and misleading way. It came across as sort of like Tony had never heard of public relations used as a tool to control people until, you know, you had a vague sense he got it from a crash course he'd taken after leaving office. That is, Tony was presented as having retooled himself for his new career.

There was not even a suggestion that he'd ever had any political skills more advanced than any bright person would have flying by trial and error learning alone. The reports here were almost as theoretical as a guiding principle of libertarian or neoliberal economics is from nuts and bolts reality.

To my shame i once voted for him, he wouldn't have been my first choice but there was no alternative.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
Realpolitik won't go away just because the USA now has a rational president.

But I admit I am rather disappointed. I have thought for some time that the USA ought to be distancing itself from KSA and getting closer to Iran. As we move away from an oil-dependent world, the Saudis cease to have the pivotal importance they were once seen to have. And it is high time some serious pressure was brought to bear on the Kingdom to reform. Deera Square - Wikipedia


In general I agree. It would be nice, in the long run, for the US and Iran to work together.

But that isn't the case today. And it isn't likely to be the case in the near future.

And, currently, SA and Iran are at loggerheads. The choices are pretty much to choose a side or step back and watch the carnage. The latter choice diminishes the US influence in the region over time (which may well happen anyway). Iran also has influence in Iraq, complicating things there (to say the least) as well as Lebanon and Syria.

So the political calculation pushes the US towards the Saudis. Yes, they are a vile regime. And their abuses should NOT be ignored. But find a major power in the region that is NOT a vile regime.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
What would President Trump have done?

It's so easy to sit back in an armchair and tell us all what you would do. During WWII President Roosevelt and PM Churchill took food and drink with Stalin.

Get it?
Post #2 converted the thread to Trump.

I expect that Biden has bigger fish to fry than the
Saudis murdering one journalist, evil though that be.
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
The crown prince is the defacto though proxy head of state. what he does is in the name and with the authority of the King.
No other government ever takes action against other heads of state. Even in war situations it is rare to target a head of state.
Though governments often encourage others to do so.

Of course wars would be a lot shorter if heads of state were the prime target.. but all heads of state fear they will become the target themselves. at one time they nominated champions to fight for them. today they keep their heads down and let others fight.

Biden is doing exactly what his predecessors have done. but we do not have any Idea what will go on behind the scenes. Nor will we.
Of course, once upon a time in the not so distant past there was this man named Gaddafi. Hillary stepped in and gave a helping hand and Gaddafi went away.
 
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