Sorry for dropping the F-bomb in a headline, kiddos, but there’s no other word that can really describe the evil turd-droppings who proudly admit and celebrate that they would drag a 14-year-old girl off of her school bus and shoot her in the head and neck for having the temerity to speak up about her passion to receive an education equal to those of the boys in her country.

FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK!  Where is my colleague Flying ChainSaw to help me articulate the ARRRRRGGGGGHHH inside of me at the news?

Best wishes to Malala Yousafzai, may you heal soon.

And can someone explain why our country dumps billions of dollars in the shithole known as Pakistan?

/SFL is now returning to vigorously petting dogs, shaking up delicious martinis, neurotically monitoring election polls in Ohio,  muttering/shaking her paw at the world, and planning emigration to New Zealand.

22 Comments

@SFL: And can someone explain why our country dumps billions of dollars in the shithole known as Pakistan?

Nope. Not me, nor anyone else.

@RevZafod: To keep those nuclear warheads sheathed?

@ fly on the wall-paper
Forget your condom. One demonstration would do it. A promise to destroy any government that first used nukes by using conventional weapons, not nukes, to take out their government and military HQ should do it. You’ll hit their command and control and let them know it beforehand. Basically, don’t fuck with anyone with nukes or you, personally, are dead and if we don’t get you, personally, with the first round, we’ll get you later. And we’ll string you up in public and if your head survives we’ll impale it and leave it at the city gates till it rots.

Otherwise you’re perpetually giving in to nuclear terrorism from any country. And any country that has nukes and doesn’t control them is open to the same option.

Otherwise, at some time we come to the point where the US is too weak to make good on the threat. And, yes, it would be nice to agree with Russia on this. They don’t need loose nukes any more than we do.

And that goes for anyone who first uses nukes.

Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. Or Pakigeld or Isrealigeld or any othergeld.

At some point, you have to stand up to terrorist threats, and threatening nukes by anyone against anyone is terrorism, freelance or state sponsored.

It calls for cojones, but I don’t see it coming from either candidate or party… tho I’ll vote D because R is a vote for quicker suicide. I’m only 71 and hope to live a bit longer. But not at the price of surrender. Cojones, mofos!

I’ve been in a war zone once in 67-68 and survived. How many of you are ready to stand up with me for what you profess? Or are you just a bunch of parlor pinks from the debating society?

@RevZafod:

I don’t see how that promise changes a thing. Nukes are basically suicide weapons. They are instruments of mutually assured destruction and have been since WWII. I don’t think Pakistan or any third world country with nukes thinks it could get away with using them and not wiped out in retaliation.

As for why we send money to Pakistan, up to now it’s basically been to help prop up a military government that is NOT principally comprised of the sorts of people who would drag a 14 year old girl off a school bus and shoot her in the head for advocating education. Keep in mind that the people who did this are not the central government in Pakistan. They are local tribal leaders whose power derives from violence, ruthlessness and force. They are hardly any different from the drug lords who bloody the streets of Mexican cities on a regular basis. It is precisely their brutality that keeps them in power. It is the fact that they are willing to execute innocents to prove a point that makes the general population fear them. I’m reminded of a story that Col. Kurtz tell in Apocalypse Now:

“I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us. ”

The question is how do we respond to this? Our righteous anger at these sorts of things is justified, but how do we channel that anger? Do we invade? Do we send in 300,000 troops and hunt down every Imam, burn down every mosque, flatten every Madrassa? (The response that Kurtz would seem to favor.) And what have we won if we do? Nothing but the enmity of the people, as we will have killed many fathers, many sons, many wives and many children in doing so. We will leave behind a wrecked ad bleeding nation, not a flowering Democracy. That’s the lesson we learned in Iraq. We went through 10 years of warfare and occupation and left behind a nation that is little changed from what was there before. Does anyone truly believe that Iraq is on a democratic path?

And Pakistan would be ten times as bad. At least Iraq has oil and a reasonable shot at prosperity and industrialization if they put their minds to it. Pakistan is just one step above Afghanistan in the development scale and Afghanistan is barely out of the stone age… literally.

Democracy, human rights, individual liberty… all these things are only possible in a nation with a flourishing middle class and a prosperous economy. They can’t be shoved down people’s throats through the barrel of a gun. Until Pakistan and Afghanistan develop economically it’s a pipe dream to imagine that we’ll see anything more than tribal brutality. What needs to happen is that the urban centers must prosper first, and then send out tendrils to the rural areas, tendrils consisting of both authority and the promise of prosperity for those who would choose to participate in modern society. I wish I had a magic bullet that could save every little girl like Malala who wants to grow and flourish in these places, but I don’t. At best we can help rescue those who are in danger, grant asylum to those who wish to flee, and offer economic incentives to liberal elements and regions to help them develop and lead the country in a path that will allow Malala’s granddaughters to pursue an education without fearing for their lives.

@Serolf Divad: As for why we send money to Pakistan, up to now it’s basically been to help prop up a military government that is NOT principally comprised of the sorts of people who would drag a 14 year old girl off a school bus and shoot her in the head for advocating education.

D’accord. The “they may be sumbitches, but they are our sumbitches” rule applies here, as does the General Containment theory that if the military and moneyed elite can be held together in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, then the tribal areas will be reasonably policed. Sadly, these kinds of human rights abuses would have be filed well under the radar of most media before our New Millennium experiment in fucking around the Middle East and Central Asia. How many people remember the Christians who were taken hostage by the Taliban in early 2001, or the destruction of the Giant Buddha of Bamiyan, in a similar period?

@Serolf Divad: I agree with you, but I don’t see anything wrong with establishing a foundation or a governmental agency that would help get the girls that wanted to leave out of the country and into American homes. I feel the same way about Ugandan homosexuals and North Korean refugees- particularly those escaping from prison camps that have now existed for over 40 years (by comparison, Auschwitz was in operation for 2 years). Just because we can’t use soldiers doesn’t mean we can’t help.

@Dodgerblue: IOKIYAR with a pregnant mistress. Some lives are more sacred than others.

@Dodgerblue: Meh. This is playground-league stuff for the Tea Party. Huffpo calls out “serial philanderer” like it’s completely unusual. As far as I can tell, every third politician is a serial philanderer. If you’ll pardon the diversion to Chainsaw territory, alert me when the skull-fucking starts.

I knew it was you, Lefty, when I saw the photo and headline. (And when is an F-bomb ever appropriate, if not for this?) Part of me wants Malala and her family to apply for and receive political asylum elsewhere, but part of me wants them to stay and continue to be models for how girls and women should be treated in every society. There is just no easy answer here.

Sport TJ: Why are the Nationals letting themselves get shut out at home?

@mellbell: Zito is starting for the Giants. Lefty must be nervous.

I had to verify which *particular* turd-droppings you were referring to, SFL – thought it was this home-grown one for a bit.

Home-grown yahoo sez this, in a passage that was probably better written in the original Pashto:

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21

This will probably get me kicked out of Liberalville (with its generous benefits and retirement plan) but kill these fuckers. Honor killings? For me line ’em up with torturers like Yoo and Addington and shoot ’em. No cigarette, no blindfold.

Ah, the whole lot of us – our entire species – is completely devoid of any hope of a future at this point. Look what we’ve done to our oceans:

http://youtu.be/qX9uvyF58U0

Nothing humanity does anymore makes much sense – we’ve overpopulated and polluted the shit out of the place to the point that we’re driving 200 species a DAY to extinction. One of these days this will all catch up to us and it won’t be fun or pretty.

Enjoy your evening.

@tomfoolery: like Carlin said – the planet will be fine (eventually) WE’RE fucked.

@al2o3cr: Mr. SFL and I were discussing just a few minutes ago that we are sick and fucking tired of fundamentalists, we don’t really see the difference as to whether they’re fundamentalist Christians, Jews, or Muslims, these ignorant asshats seem to be united in one common idea that all evil in the world seems to emanate from the vaginas that simultaneously scare them yet they all wish they could crawl back into.

Oh, and speaking of vaginas against fundamentalists, I saw Cecile Richards talk to the Commonwealth Club tonight at the Castro Theater. Keep an eye on her kids. I’ve seen/known her since 1994, she’s going up and up. Kicking ass and taking names at Planned Parenthood. I’d put my money on her going up for national office in 2020 or 2024.

@blogenfreude: Like I said, where’s my Chainsaw when I really need him?

@Dodgerblue: Maybe Timmy needs to pitch relief for a few games to get his groove back.

UPDATE: So many good thoughts from Nick Kristof on Malala:

These events coincide with the first international Day of the Girl on Thursday, and they remind us that the global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century, equivalent to the campaigns against slavery in the 19th century and against totalitarianism in the 20th century.

[…]

We also don’t appreciate the way incidents like the attack on Tuesday in Pakistan represent a broad argument about whether girls deserve human rights and equality of education. Malala was a leader of the camp that said “yes.” After earlier aspiring to be a doctor, more recently she said she wanted to be a politician — modeled on President Obama, one of her heroes — to advance the cause of girls’ education.

Pakistan is a country that has historically suffered from timid and ineffectual leadership, unwilling to stand up to militants. Instead, true leadership emerged from a courageous 14-year-old girl.

On the other side are the Taliban, who understand the stakes perfectly. They shot Malala because girls’ education threatens everything that they stand for. The greatest risk for violent extremists in Pakistan isn’t American drones. It’s educated girls.

[…]

One of my greatest frustrations when I travel to Pakistan is that I routinely spot extremist madrassas, or schools, financed by medieval misogynists from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. They provide meals, free tuition and sometimes scholarships to lure boys — because their donors understand perfectly that education shapes countries.

In contrast, American aid is mainly about supporting the Pakistani Army. We have tripled aid to Pakistani education to $170 million annually, and that’s terrific. But that’s less than one-tenth of our security aid to Pakistan.

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