lostfan

QUOTE (joesaiditstrue @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 08:41 PM) alcohol Touche.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 08:39 PM) They were replaying the first pitch of the Nats game from Monday on the scoreboard at that exact moment. lol

QUOTE (chw42 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 08:38 PM) It looks like Peavy really tried to bust him inside there. Yeah, he put too much on it.

Why is the crowd booing that? It's not like it was a bad call... Peavy hit him in the foot pretty plainly.

Paulie hit that hard, not hard enough for 3 runs, but enough for 1.

Carmona having trouble finding the plate.

Did Pierre catch all 3 of those outs?

QUOTE (chw42 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 08:13 PM) It's somewhere. I'll try to find it. Awesome. Thanks. Best part was the Alexei grand slam

QUOTE (chw42 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 08:09 PM) I made something like that from 08 footage. That was you? Do you still have the clip? It got taken off Youtube a couple of days later.

This opening montage reminds me of a video clip a poster here put up before Opening Day last year.

My wife stayed up until 4 am reading one of those Twilight books instead of putting out.

So excited to see today's game. I haven't gotten to watch Peavy pitch yet.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 06:37 PM) wow. Really, just read this. I remember reading an article like this when I was about 13. The NL apparently has a different formula of mud than the AL.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 05:07 PM) Thankfully, the heavy snow over 1/5th of the country this winter proves climate change isn't happening, so I don't need to worry about that data. It's been 90 f***ing degrees in Maryland the last 3 days, in the first week of April no less. Just once I'd like to see Drudge make a headline about that.

Well about evangelicals, remember there was also once a time when the black vote still tilted in favor of Hillary, then once it became clear that Obama had a shot at the nomination, they jumped ship. That's just FWIW, because although Huckabee is a likable guy, his personality isn't anything like Obama's, and also evangelicals as a voting bloc aren't anything like blacks.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Apr 6, 2010 -> 09:22 PM) My name is Jordan4life, and I like watching Evan Longoria play baseball. The end. Longoria hit the holy f*** out of that ball. It was awesome because both Adam Jones and Longoria homered in that game. Jones had himself a hell of a game, too. Oh, and why do people bother trying to run on Markakis? QUOTE (MattZakrowski @ Apr 6, 2010 -> 10:16 PM) What a game. I'm so glad I watched it instead of Yankees-Red Sox. Actually, I'll probably watch the end of that one too. I made it a point to sit down and watch that game since I missed the Opening Day for the Sox since I was at work. The O's are my second favorite team, as me and J4L have talked about a couple of times.

QUOTE (DukeNukeEm @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 04:59 PM) The 80's support of the Afghans had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan at all, just who they were fighting. We were scared to fight the Russians and the Russians were scared to fight us, so we tit-for-tatted in guerrilla wars. The names, dates and places change but from 1945 to 1991 the reasons pretty much stayed the same. But it was still a guerrilla campaign. One that we tossed aside like a used condom when we got what we wanted out of it too, but still. By the way, to your earlier post about why the military didn't completely overhaul the ground forces, actually they were. That started in the late 90s when Clinton was still in office and started to really get in full swing in Bush's first term. The process takes a long time, and is expensive, the military is actually still going through it. There really aren't a whole lot of scenarios that I can think of in modern warfare that would require you to send in 3 heavy divisions with 500 tanks to fight another 2 heavy divisions - yeah you're gonna want to keep your Abrams and Bradleys just in case some s*** goes down (just like your F-22s) but generally speaking the Army and Marines want to stay light, mobile, and lethal.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Apr 6, 2010 -> 08:30 PM) Peace, man. *SUCKS AIR IN* Seriously, you don't get that? You don't get weapon programs, especially air force weapon programs? Considering, you've got China, Russia, and others developing more technology as we speak? It's ok, though, I see ya'lls point. Nothing will ever happen, and the world is a safe, beautiful place. Dismantle it all and stop the spending. It's unnecessary. We need all that money for social programs so that the redistribution of wealth can continue from the private sector... i.e. the government decides where to put money. Defense spending included, of course. Nowhere in my post did I, or anyone else for that matter, say anything about that... hell, I am in the same dirty, unholy industry as you, and of course I want an overwhelmingly powerful DoD. But there is a point of diminishing returns or just plain overkill. Defense industries are powerful, and they provide a lot of jobs scattered across the country - intentionally - so they have a lot of senators and representatives willing to go to bat for them. But where does their profit come from? Government spending, that s*** isn't free. It makes no sense at all to have 5 times (arbitrary number I threw out btw) as many next-gen aircraft as our nearest competitors do, and we can barely fund our current, ACTUAL operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unless someone thinks Russia or China is an imminent military threat in which case I'd say there is a very strong case for that being bulls***.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 02:29 PM) He's saying that is it done in the other thread all of the time, and nothing is said about it... I kind of agree with him. What are you talking about? I read every post in this thread and the Dem thread, and they attack public figures all the time, but I don't recall ever seeing anybody in there posting indirect blanket comments about Soxtalk posters in this thread being stupid or whatever. When individual posters get on each other on a personal level then me or another mod steps in but that's something different. If I'm wrong, please point this out, but actually the only place I ever saw anything close to that that happen was in this thread, and there were probably 3 comments roughly to that effect in the last month or so. I didn't say anything about it because I didn't think it was a particularly big deal.

QUOTE (chunk23 @ Apr 7, 2010 -> 02:42 PM) There has been a concerted effort to make sure videos and images like this one do not make it to the public. As far as the general public is concerned with the occupation, out of sight is out of mind. So now that reality has surfaced, it's obviously going to be surprising to a lot of people. it is the fact that this does happen everyday that makes is so disgusting. Simply saying "war is hell, stuff like this happens" serves to normalize terrible acts like this one, making it more and more likely it will happen again. The gunner certainly didn't seem to care that he had just injured children and killed unarmed men. That's because he's been trained to think that bad things happen to innocent people and that it's inevitable, so it's okay if he's the one to do it. Obviously terrible things happen in war, that's what war is, but there appears to be no effort whatsoever to minimize these losses. In other words, the US is saying "war sucks, but we love it and don't care what happens to innocent people". What rules did the military follow in the video? The ones that say it's okay to shoot unarmed individuals trying to rescue people? What chaos was going on prior to the killings? The men were walking casually in the street and there wasn't an ounce of fear or stress in the voices on the recording. It was more like hunting than combat. This isn't even going into the coverup aspect of it. Why would it matter in the first place? Come on now, saying there is no effort whatsoever to minimize collateral damage is completely ridiculous, that's something you'd hear from a commentary program on Al-Jazeera. Every soldier is trained on the law of war and how it applies to different areas, taught what is a lawful combatant and what isn't, what a war crime is, what's not. In a place like Iraq (post-Petraeus) or Afghanistan (new emphasis on counterinsurgency) there are actually MORE restrictions on who you can and can't engage to the point where it even places the patrol in danger. Like, you see a group of armed men, and they're obviously watching you, and you're almost certain they're hostile, but unless they engage you first (and you know they will when they get a tactical advantage) you can't shoot, that sort of thing. These guys also will deliberately blend in with the civilians as much as possible, or take a position really close to civilians to intentionally cause innocent casualties, so they can film it and call American soldiers murderers. Me saying how war is hell isn't normalizing anything. If the U.S. military was unprofessional and just kind of randomly allowed Private Snuffy from the backwoods of South Carolina to kill whatever he felt like killing that day, you really would be able to tell the difference from now, but there is no such thing as a "clean" combat situation where it just appears fair to someone looking from the outside. That is the norm for war. The alternative is to not have any more war which isn't always realistic. There is no stress or fear in their voice for the same reason you might not hear stress in a surgeon, police officer, EMT's voice. People have coping mechanisms. Whenever I would get shot at, obviously I was afraid, but you wouldn't be able to see it on me physically until later, if at all... that's why people have PTSD and f***ed up dreams and problems sleeping when they come home. The coverup aspect is a whole other story entirely but I guess I can leave it at the fact that the military tries to put a positive spin on the war, and avoid bad press. The reasons why should be pretty obvious. You're asking why it mattered to me, a U.S. soldier at the time, that an Iraqi's IED blew up Iraqi civilians or other U.S. soldiers that I probably knew? I don't know how to answer that. If I really have to explain, I honestly doubt that my explanation would help any.

They're cool if they can actually be used - I mean - we could order another 300 F-22s, but what the hell for?

btw, the prisoner I was talking about earlier, we didn't abuse him. I felt the temptation and I'm sure others did too, but I wouldn't do it. I knew he was personally responsible for the deaths of 6 Iraqis that next morning when his IED blew up (he wouldn't tell us where it was) - it could've been Americans, but at that point did it matter? I never thought about arbitrarily killing someone, not counting combat situations, but the thought actually got extended play that night.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 6, 2010 -> 05:58 PM) How do you react to this Greenwald bit? All of that falls under "what war is actually like," as Greenwald even said in that article, and still needs to be seen in its proper context. With a few obvious exceptions, none of this is as cut and dry as it's made out to be by a lot of people, not necessarily by Greenwald because he is actually saying the same thing I'm saying (that war is an ugly business), but by the commenters and other amateur bloggers. The ones who run with the "OMG MURDER" angle are just as misled/uninformed/delusional as the ones who run with the "OMG DISRESPECT TO TROOPS" angle. The purpose of the military is to kill people quickly and efficiently, that's not always directly acknowledged, but that's what it does, and it really doesn't serve any other purpose particularly well. It's tricky enough telling friend from foe in a regular war, but in places like Iraq and Afghanistan it's really, really hard to tell legit targets from unarmed civilians. It sounds easy, but it's not. There's rules you have to follow, and procedures in place to make those rules easier to follow, and there is punitive action when people get caught breaking the rules, but that only mitigates, it doesn't prevent everything. I just want to know why people act all surprised when they find out something bad happened in a combat zone. This type of s*** happens every day. Off the top of my head, I can recall certain particular events that still stick out 6 years later: -Me getting very close to having my s*** blown off, missing the VBIED only because I forgot to fill up my gas tank before a long trip and had to stop to fill up, and the convoy 2 minutes behind us got blown up and took casualties -Me almost flipping a Humvee over and nearly killing my gunner near the same location as above, trying to avoid what I thought was an IED -Getting ambushed in a crappy town, being almost shot, shooting at what I assumed was an armed man (why else would he be there, everyone else went inside), but wasn't really sure, but didn't exactly have time to think... -Seeing one of my teammates throw a grenade at this armed insurgent who was retreating into a house - said house catches fire somehow a couple minutes later, and I heard the guy screaming -Hearing about the neighborhood Zarqawi got killed in, realizing I had been there, and noticed at the time none of the villagers were ever cooperative -Trying to warn an interpreter about all the threats against her I'd found, having her confidently ignore them because she "felt safe" and then getting lit up execution-style on her way home with several dozen 7.62 rounds a week later while I was on R&R -Having that same interpreter's best friend, a 55-year old grandmother I'd made friends with, get shot in the stomach days later, visiting her in the hospital while I waited for a ride back to my base camp -Having arrested an insurgent who got caught setting an IED, seeing him assault my interpreter, then seeing my interpreter pull a handgun out of nowhere and having to restrain him from doing something that almost certainly would've gotten him sent to prison -Listening to one of the Iraqi women who cleaned on my base camp hysterically tell me that her son got killed the day before by stray fire from an American convoy that had gotten attacked by an IED and ambushed -Driving by kids while I was in the gun turret of a Humvee doing 70 mph and they threw big f***ing rocks at me and wondering what the hell to do? I ended up bluffing them, drawing my pistol to scare them, getting killed by enemy fire/explosion is one thing, getting killed by a kid's rock is just insulting -Seeing the aftermath of Fallujah after Operation Phantom Fury where the city was 95% destroyed, and the hundreds of dead Iraqi bodies that we prepared for burial This is just stuff I saw or was involved with personally and is by no means an exhaustive list, I could probably come up with 10 more, but you get the idea.

QUOTE (LVSoxFan @ Apr 6, 2010 -> 03:32 PM) How the hell do you boo a guy on the first day of the season? Strike out 3 times and pop out on a bunt attempt

I generally avoid doing this but I'm going to pull out the "combat veteran" card for a minute here, just to say that there are a lot of people that don't understand what war is actually like. If you think it's 100% orderly, disciplined, and always clear what the right answer is, you're completely wrong. It's total chaos that you do your best to dress up as something organized, and a great deal of the time you probably have less than half of the information you wish you had even when you have what would be considered "good" intelligence.