[thechat] happy imbeciles

[Martin Burns]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, rudy wrote:

> "You cannot have a war when there is nothing to fight against, when
> it's essentially going to be a huge U.S. military  stomping/bombing
> exercise, when, just like Afghanistan, we stand to suffer zero U.S.
> casualties (except for those we seem to kill ourselves), and we just bomb
> and bomb and kill and kill and shrug.
> ...
> This is a Mack truck versus a Pinto. This is an F-16 versus a paper
> airplane, a Tomahawk missile versus a spit wad. There is no contest.
> "War" is exactly the wrong term. The U.S. attack on Iraq will be, of course,
> a massacre. Go team."

cf Derrida's argument that there was no Gulf War in 1991. Not that nothing
happened, but that what happened wasn't a war.

Cheers
Martin

--
"Names, once they are in common use, quickly
 become mere sounds, their etymology being
 buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
 beneath the dust of habit." - Salman Rushdie