Moonbox

There's no question that the Soviet Union affected the area. It's not much of a leap, however, to say the region would have been a mess regardless. The powers of greater Persia, the Indian subcontinent and the asian Steppes have struggled for control of the area for thousands of years. The region's history is one of consistent back and forth conquest spanning 4000 years, with Afghans on occasion doing the conquering themselves. Eventually, sure. How long and how much violence that takes is really the question, since there's a lot more going on than a simple East/West divide. North America was perfectly suited for a speedy resolution. The British controlled the Sea and that's pretty much the end of the story. From that point on, their dominance of North America was unassailable, which ensured that their culture and way of life proliferated.

He was saying that left-of-centre voters need to be more mindful of the budget when discussing social spending. In some cases yes and in some cases no. There's such a thing as wasteful and incompetent spending and each example of this diminishes the capacity for productive social programs. It also gives the Right something to rally around/against.

Simple geography is a source of a lot of the violence. The name of the region itself demonstrates this. The Middle East is a point of convergence for three continents and a wide array of cultures, ethnicities and traditional spheres of influence. The Balkan and Caucusus regions share these similarities and the predictably chronic tensions. Add the fact that the Middle East was the birthplace of numerous major religions and you add fuel to the fire. Nobody said they couldn't, but it's silly to believe these regions wouldn't be troubled without recent western/imperial/colonial interference.

The British (and their allies) use the Troubles as a "template" for counter-insurgency training because they didn't have a large sample of recent experiences to work with. While there are similarities and certainly lessons to draw from the Troubles, you're drawing a pretty broad picture to conclude that the fighting in Northern Ireland and Helmand province were similar. By virtually all accounts, the British were not adequately prepared for the fighting in Helmand despite their experience in Ulster and the supposed similarities.

That doesn't even make sense. Making common cause with someone that shares an enemy with you isn't wrong. It's fairly basic reasoning. Your brutal ignorance of how people, how the economy, and how the world in general function is what helps fabricate the fantasy on which you base your screwy "principles". which is why we haven't murdered tens of millions or committed mass-genocide like the Soviets did. At the time, and likely to this day, halting the advance of the Soviet Union was imminently important. You can pretend everything would have been fine without doing anything about them, but that's your fantasty-land talking, not reasonable thinking.

No, but you're suggesting that the conflicts are very similar. Bringing up the size difference, along with the fact that the GWOT is engaged on a multitude of "fronts", should serve to highlight how much of a logistical, cultural and political challenge it presents. Each theatre presents unique challenges and requires different approaches, and while there are certainly similarities with each to the "Troubles", there are just as many if not more differences. PIRA certainly offered valuable lessons for future western counter-insurgency operations, but suggesting that the same tactics and approaches will work in the Middle East is dangerous and foolish.

Have you ever heard of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Of course you haven't, you live in fantasy land. Better than the Soviets? Absolutely. The tens of millions of people who were murdered within the Soviet Union alone would support that belief. The millions who died in Romania, Poland and other 'friendly' states would also lend that idea weight. Clearly you're ignorant of just who and what the Soviets were, just like you're ignorant of who and what groups like ISIS/Al-Qaeda are. With any education or knowledge of history, you'd understand that bad stuff can and often does happen when you don't intervene. Your arguments make me laugh. They demonstrate childish logic and juvenile oversimplification. For someone who crying about being called a terrorist sympathizer in the past, you clearly fail to see the hypocrisy in telling me I 'celebrate' western crimes. No, al Qaeda wants to plunge the Middle East back into medieval fundamentalism and expand outwards from there. Their ideology aims to eliminate the type of nationalism we saw in Northern Ireland, along with any manner of socialism, capitalism, or alternative religion. Don't worry though, nobody expected you to actually know what you're talking about.

Not in any way near the same scale as the GWOT. Any way you want to look at it, it was Irish nationalists stirring crap up in Northern Ireland. Whether they received funding or training from abroad doesn't change that their goals and operations were purely Irish. The SAS wasn't fighting in Pakistan, nor were Iraqis blowing themselves up in Belfast. The British weren't conducting air strikes or strafing suspected PIRA convoys. The Shoot-to-Kill policies also resulted in only a handful of deaths (the vast majority being enemy agents and in cases like the Loughgall ambush while being caught in an attack). Air strikes, on the other hand, are not nearly as discriminate. As for leveraging divides, that's a parallel you could draw with virtually every conflict ever, so it's not a really strong link. It was, however, 20x easier for British security forces to get cooperation in Northern Ireland than in Iraq because a huge portion of the population considered themselves British and/or were part of the security forces stationed there already. I'll say again, the motivations, ideology, goals and resolve of the two groups couldn't have been much more different. The PIRA wasn't on a religious crusade, did not aim to murder or convert the protestant population, nor were they aiming to establish religious rule in the region and beyond. They wanted the Crown out of Northern Ireland.

No, your problem is your insistence that Western created the problem as if problems didn't exist there or would not have existed otherwise, or as if Soviet Union interference would have led to a better outcome (how are things in Syria btw?). Your endless tirade against Western Imperialism and how it's to blame for all of the region's violence shows how ignorant you are of all the other problems and tension in the region. That was just an example of me mocking you and how virtually all of your arguments (in this thread and others) don't go much further than criticizing "the man". Whether it's Western Imperialism, corporations or some variation of greedy capitalist power-monger, your arguments generally boil down to a rant against the establishment.

Read back. I answered the same question for Michael.

You're bringing up a bunch of things that some other people might have said. How am I supposed to comment on that? I didn't say it's Clinton's fault. I didn't say the Iranian coup didn't happen, or that the CIA didn't supply Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen. I haven't even said that the West (particularly the Americans) haven't made huge mistakes, so why on earth are you tossing out those red herrings? Where you and I differ is that you draw a direct cause and effect relationship between western mistakes and blame them directly for the rise of ISIS etc. I paint them as huge blunders that likely made an existing problem worse, but one that nevertheless needs attention. You don't offend me, don't worry. You make me laugh. You say a lot of ridiculous stuff and that's why people look down on your gibbering. Your personal Imperialist/Corporate bogeymen and the giant amorphous blob of evil you blame for all of the world's (and your own) problems are not reasonable bases for debate.

If we were talking about Israel then yes, you're right. We're not talking about just Israel though. We're talking about a truly global conflict spanning continents and all of the different peoples that live across them. No doubt, but people don't strap on suicide vests and blow themselves up for that. However you want to look at it, religion is one of the, if not the, biggest driver of the conflict. That was not the case in Ireland. I maybe didn't explain properly, but I wasn't trying to imply anything. In terms of the resolution in Ireland it was merely meant to explain how similarities in culture make the eventual reconciliation easier. I think one of the biggest problems I have with such conflicts is that people don't make enough of an attempt to understand how much different people can be across regions and cultures. Despite your objections, there is in a sense an otherness to some of these people. They think differently than a lot of us do because they were brought up in an entirely different environment with an entirely different set of values that simply cannot be ignored.

I'm sure you and Derek can both think of a lot of them yourselves, but okay. First, the Troubles were confined to a relatively tiny geographic area with relatively homogeneous cultures. The conflict, as you are aware, was centred in Northern Ireland, rather than being global, which simplifies things tremendously. Second, the UK was dealing with a domestic insurgency within their own realm. As you can probably imagine, fighting a domestic insurgency is completely different. It's far, far easier to find informants and sympathizers, particularly if there is already strong/sizeable public support for the government. This entirely changes the nature of the campaign, since moving against a target usually means sending a tactical squad to make arrests rather than launching airstrikes and hoping your intel was good. Consider the repercussions of bad intel in Northern Ireland vs Iraq/Syria. Third, the two 'conflicts' couldn't have had bigger ideological differences. Where the Troubles was almost entirely a political conflict aimed at independence and change in government, the GWOT is fighting a religious movement. The Irish nationalists were certainly guilty of some awful violence, but they had secular educations, (mostly) secular motivations and they were raised in Western morality. Motivation is an integral part of understanding a conflict, as it helps determine a group's goals, resolve, justifications and their ruthlessness. These are just a sample of some of the differences between the two conflicts, and as far as I'm concerned they're a lot more important than the fact that they may have received some similar training or used some similar tactics.

eyeball I don't know what folks told you back in the day, but whatever you were saying at the time was probably ridiculous and you likely deserved whatever mockery was being directed at you. What the heck is my side? That's how the world works to you doesn't it? There's the people who agree with all of the screwy things you say, and then there's the other side. Believe it or not, but most people have the reasoning skills to take a variety of different positions on a whole host of issues. They're actually capable of moving the debate beyond garden variety anti-establishment protesting. Things are generally a lot more nuanced than the default "This is bad and it's because of Imperialism/Corporations/the Man" garbage you like to peddle.

There's no doubt that there are some parallels, since they're both terrorist organizations. The differences, however, are much bigger. If you draw an incredibly broad and vague picture, sure.

There's a HUGE difference between the North Ireland liberation movement and radical Islamic militancy. In terms of goals, scale/scope, ideology, methods etc, the two issues could hardly be more different. I didn't say fighting the groups was stupid. I said that calling it a "War on Terror" was foolish, dangerous rhetoric that did little but sound good to the public (at the time). Realistically, the term has done nothing but blur the parameters of the conflict(s) and confuse people. Terror, as has been explained already, is not a defined enemy. It's an emotion, or in this case a set of tactics aimed at provoking that emotion. The GWOT, by definition, is a campaign aimed to fight a tactic. It has no beginning or end and its goals and scope are intentionally vague.

Derek what are you disagreeing with me about? The situation in Northern Ireland was mostly resolved long before the "Global War on Terror". In your example, the British were fighting the IRA. The campaign was fairly well-defined.

START was only established in 2005, and the GTD appears to be established from even later. The "plots of data" as you call them, aren't even close to reliable, as the terminology, methodology and record-keeping of 'terrorism' were all only vaguely established prior to the turn of the century. The graphs you presented, therefore, are enormously misleading. The Global War on Terrorism was conceptually stupid from the start. Terrorism is a tactic, so waging a war against a tactic is just ridiculous. When that's what (not even who) you're waging war against, it's impossible to clearly set goals, measure effectiveness or even define who and what it is you're fighting. So yes, the GWOT is stupid, as were many of its missions (particularly Afghanistan), but you make some fairly giant leaps in logic to determine that ISIS should be ignored and/or was the result of the GWOT. It's not that simple.

Frankly, the referenced material doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The above quote is noted, but on the same page we see them say: Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has estimated that people aged 65 and over accounted for approximately 50% of hospital expenditures by provincial/territorial governments in Canada during 2008, whereas this age group makes up 13.7% of Canada’s population. along with a good number of other quotes indicating that seniors account for much more health spending relative other age groups. The 0.95-1.3% figures are also, upon doing a little outside research, heavily debated. with other studies showing that age accounts for up to 10% or more of increased health care spending. Lastly, one of the most troubling things to consider about these studies is that when the academics are downplaying the effects of age on health care spending, they're doing so by explaining that things like inflating costs of diagnostics and treatments make up a larger portion of increased spending. If this is to be believed, then it's not so much that aging doesn't have much of an effect as it is that inflating costs have more of an effect. The aging population, therefore, will magnify the problem of these inflated costs.

That has always existed everywhere for all of human history. If anything, Canada is far more tolerant than most places. Some groups of immigrants generally struggle less than others. A lot of that has to do with the circumstances of their arrival, but the fact remains. Refugees from troubled nations, unfortunately, are often ill-prepared in comparison.

To be fair it has happened in recent European history as well. The funny thing is that people don't/didn't really object to intervention against those regimes, yet for some reason moving against ISIS or jihadists in Mali etc is a completely different story.

No doubt, but this seems pretty cut and dry. Premier's office, a contract is paid to get computers wiped and we have an obvious motive for having them wiped.

Sectarian violence is a consistent theme for the region going back 1000+ years. Are you saying it's not? Regardless, the level of barbarism we see from ISIS is something that even Al-Qaeda denounces. In order to avoid confusing you, perhaps I should have said, "Middle-Age style barbarism" instead. Whatever my phrasing, the basic point remains the same. These are not peaceful and happy places when left to their own devices, nor have they ever been. Unfortunately it's a terrible assumption that peace and stability would have reigned without western interference, or that modern secular governments would have developed without it. While there are unfortunately examples of the western political interference (like the Iranian Shah as one of the worst and most obvious examples) making things worse, we have far too many examples showing that secularism and tolerance are incredibly unlikely outcomes regardless.

Calling it Wynne's fiscal mismanagement is kind of unfair. Most of the waste was on Dalton's watch, but Wynne definitely seems prepared to continue on the same note. The incompetence of the Ontario Liberals, I would say, appears to be systemic. They make Bob Rae's NDP look good.

Don't you find it unlikely that the premier wasn't aware of the computers in the premier's offices being wiped? Can you give us an idea of how that would even be realistically possible?