I think think that if you go too young they’re not thinking straight, I think it’s different for everyone and they mature at different times. I would have to read more on it to see exactly but I think at least 14.

I am moral.

I am convinced that making claims about a “slippery slope fallacy” is itself a form of the strawman fallacy. Incrementalism has been a political tactic since time out of mind. Only small children ask for everything they want all at once.

Leftist intellectual (((Noam Chomsky))) said that intent can be inferred from predictable outcomes. When our opponents make their plans so obvious that even a child can see, we should believe what we see and not the shrill denials.

I think maybe in some cultures it’s 6. Who am I to judge other cultures if no one is being hurt?

Are you on coke?

I think maybe 9 is the least.

I’ll take your word on that.

to let me have my way with girls.

Sounds like the only thing keeping you from girls is your own personality

You don’t need American currency for oi.

…sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

I believe Saddam wanted to challenge Iran for leadership of the populist anti-Western bloc within Islam. This required lots and lots of theatrics and publicity.

Perhaps he believed the US was bluffing and there would never be any real consequences other than the occasional random cruise missile bombing raid that never reduced his capacity or will to wage war and only made him look sympathetic to other Third Worlders.

The Iraq-Iran war was in the 80s, and it may be where his rivalry with Iran started.

As for the Gulf War, I’m not sure anyone had to trick him into anything. I view it as a naked land grab. He was warned by the State Department that the US didn’t care about what happened between Iraq and Kuwait, but use of force would not be tolerated. I guess he took a calculated risk. I think he thought that the US, having just started the enormous drawdown at the end of the Cold War, where more than half the units in the US Army cased their colors, lacked the means to intervene meaningfully.

As for the Saudis, they had spent most of the Cold War with Saddam’s mechanized armies and their Soviet advisors just across their border, and it was assumed that in the event of a war in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Soviet paratroopers flying out of southern Iraq would seize key ports and then Iraqi mechanized and armored spearheads would, over the course of several days, link up with them, There would be minimal meaningful resistance by the Saudi military, with which Western analysts were a lot more familiar than Saddam’s, and who, it was assumed, would drop their rifles and flee the instant the shooting started. Saudi Arabia would remain a Soviet conquest until the Marines and the 82nd Airborne came to bail them out.

And as another aside here, we see here one of the ideological divides in Islam. Shi’a hate the Sunnis, those who don’t have oil hate those who do, Arabs and Pakistanis hate each other, Arabs and Persians hate each other, Arabs and Berbers hate each other, and the Arab “socialist states” (that is, Soviet puppet Ba’ath-style regimes) hated the monarchies. The Arab world used to have a lot of monarchies, mostly set up by the British as they were abandoning their Empire after the war, almost all of which, inept, corrupt, and clueless about actually governing without British “advisors” and troops backing them up, got overthrown by the KGB almost immediately, mostly and replaced with Soviet-supported local strongmen like Saddam, Qaddafi, Nasser, and the Assads. Currently the only ones left are the Saudis, who are propped up by American troops and “advisors,” like the Shah was until Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance decided to pull the rug out from under him and throw him to the wolves, and Jordanians, who have no oil, so the Soviets didn’t see overthrowing the local royal family and setting up a local puppet government as not a viable expenditure of resources.

Anyway. As it happens, Saddam guessed wrong, and the world got to see the big secret behind decades of Israeli military success: they were fighting Arabs. Strange though it sounds now, during the Cold War, Western analysts for the longest time had this idea that Soviet client states in the Middle East like Syria and Libya and Iraq had powerful militaries, armed with the latest in Soviet gear, “trained to Soviet standards, in Soviet doctrine” and not a cowardly, inept rabble of illiterate Third World peasant conscripts. Right up until the shooting started it was believed that the Iraqis would fight efficiently and effectively instead of dropping their rifles and fleeing. That having been said, I must suspect that, had the balloon gone up in the 1970s or 1980s, Eighth Guards Tank Army and Third Shock Army would have given a much better account of themselves. I suspect the North Koreans might today.

Iraq and Syria both had Ba’athist regimes and were closely allied, and more distantly allied with Libya. All had lots and lots of Soviet advisors at any given time–the beginning of the air phase of the Gulf War had to be delayed while thousands of Soviet advisors evacuated Baghdad, which was not a big enough hint for Saddam to grasp that perhaps he’d erred gravely, nor were diplomatic messages from the Soviet ambassador telling him that the Yankees weren’t bluffing and perhaps he should cool it while he still had a country. He also gave lots of money and weapons to Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations in what could have been an attempt to curry favor with the fickle mobs of Cairo and Beirut.

Demanding equal behavior from people who are not your equals is unjust and unfair. The Negro has an average IQ of 55 and is not capable of contributing to society by any means requiring greater capacity for abstract thought than picking the white bits off the cotton plant and stuffing them in a bag–and this only if a White man with a whip watches over them and reminds them firmly to get back to work whenever their tiny monkey minds wander. We tried for generations to hold them to human standards. They have proven conclusively are not capable of behaving like human beings or integrating into a human society.

But if you are telling us that Russia is better at integrating minorities, please come and take all thirty million of them. You are welcome to them.

haha, communist just means someone who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of private property, so that’s not me.

how do I deviant?I don’t deviate because I am natural and moral.