Friday, June 03, 2011

War

No time for blogging about it, but read this. CNN commits an act of journalism. Too bad that's the exception and not the rule.

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

4 comments:

  1. So WTF did this cop/soldier/killer do to wind up in jail in Jaw-juh? I got to the end of the first "chapter" of the article and it still hadn't gotten to the central fact, so I said "uck fit." I understand the suspense factor of keeping his crime on the QT for a while as the scene is set, but damned if I'm going to plough through three web pages of text in the hopes of finding a nugget. It might be journalism, but it's not PERFECT journalism.

    BTW, this guy's trajectory -- being a policeman who's sent to become a killer, and then comes back broken and (maybe?) bloodthirsty -- is what I've been predicting for the U.S. for a while now. How many po-leece, prison guards, even rent-a-cops are going to be walking with the streets with a lowered threshold to doing ultra-violence against heir fellow Americans? Time to come up with a new monicker to replace "baby killer," something that would describe a "hero" with a hair-trigger. I feel sorry for them that they were used up and wasted by W's wicked war, but that doesn't make them any less scary.

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  2. I've made it through page 1, and I needed a breather (it's still open in a tab) before I go on to page 2. I can't imagine the pain of having eight people -- that I hang out with, joke with, have whatever fun we can find in Hell with -- snuffed out so quickly and easily. And the horror of not knowing whether I was shooting at combatants or at their human shields, and how many I might have killed...

    Why, oh why, can't we declare victory and get the hell out?

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  3. For many war is not hell. Living afterwards is.

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  4. Badtux, thanks for posting that story. PTSD takes many lives, not only soldiers but others who have lived through life-changing trauma and have not been able to make peace with it. War is like that. My Dad had been a great guy before WW2. He drank to keep the "wolves of the night" away. May we find that space for the world where war is obsolete.

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