And it keeps coming...

November 26, 2005 3:04 AM

"Little Gitmo". Council of Europe envoy Alvaro Gil-Robles reveals that US forces built a "Little Guantánamo" in, of all places, Kosovo. Gil-Robles also has interesting things to say about the strength of democracy, vastly underestimated in his opinion. (And before anyone starts a "liberal Euroweenies" tirade, let's note that the Gil-Robles family has rock-solid conservative credentials)
posted by Skeptic (22 comments total)

OUr government did something under handed, won't acknowledge it? Come on your pulling my leg. I am just wishing that somewhere in all this nonsense there is enough evidence to charge someone high up with some international crimes, well or at the least to lock them up for a few years with no representation or hearings!
posted by lee at 3:36 AM on November 26, 2005

Can we please drive a stake through the heart of the idea that people who are "conservative" somehow are more credible when talking about war? I know the current situation is so bad that pretty much everyone is saying what a shitflood it is, but this meme is counterproductive.
posted by Space Coyote at 3:48 AM on November 26, 2005

There is something wrong in America when I have to be dissuaded(?) to believe my country is violating international law instead of upholding it as it has done for most of the twentieth century. My country is not perfect, and probably has never been, but it should always put forth its best effort to be perfect. Unfortunately, in the last 5 years (give or take 2 either which way) it has become an abonimation on the plant, and that's saddened me very deeply. I can no longer have a reaction of, "that's unfortunate, I'm sure we didn't mean it." When from the get go, before any policy is enacted I already know it's a bad idea.

I wish the U.S. would go back to a doctrine of, "would it be acceptable for U.S. citizens to live under these conditions?". If the answer is no, then it is wrong for anybody else to live under those situations. Unfortunately, right now, America is imposing the will of a few at the cost of the many, who may or may not, feel a sense of patriotism.

If the war in Iraq had a draft, the parallels between 1967 America and 2005 America would be astounding. It's amazing to believe that a generation (the Baby Boomers) who grew opposing war and felt victimized by the system would turn around one generation later (30 years) and enact the same attrocity on their children. When history looks back on the "Baby Boomers" they will be doomed as the most selfish generation to ever live and will be held up as an example a hundred years from now on how not to be.

Sips beer, decides its better to sleep instead of venting about the worst generation to live. Better to live my own life, and be doomed with 20 years worth of Depends commercials.
posted by Mijo Bijo at 3:51 AM on November 26, 2005

I cant sleep, deciding to vent.

What have the Baby Boomers sacrificed, ever? Can't think of a damn sacrifice? Neither can I. When I think of any generation before them, I can come up with a sacrifice. I can give examples, but you'd be a fucking moron not to know them (false dichotomy?) Really, fuck them! Every generation before them gave up power eventually, they'll never do it. They gave up everything they believed in their 20's to make money in their 40's, 50's and 60's. They are a scourge on humanity. They don't give a fuck about their children (by children, I mean anybody in their 20's today). All their going to leave is a gnarly debt for us and out children to pay. Baby Boomers are the cause of the 21st century equivalent of Vietnam. A fucking pathetic lot they all are.
posted by Mijo Bijo at 4:13 AM on November 26, 2005

Space Coyote, I wasn't implying that conservatives are per se more credible when criticising the Bush Administration's actions, just pre-empting the almost inevitable response of those who react to any such criticism, especially when coming from Europe, as the work of crazy-eyed anti-American (and possibly anti-Semitic) lefties.
Apart from that, considering that European mainstream conservatives (not the far right) are usually staunchly Atlanticist and loath to criticise the US, even at its worst, it is significant when the likes of Gil-Robles or Boris Johnson (never mind a certain American-educated conservative French president) start attacking Bush.
posted by Skeptic at 4:40 AM on November 26, 2005

They don't give a fuck about their children (by children, I mean anybody in their 20's today.

Sigh.

The kids of today. All they ever do is whine, whine, whine.

Watch your ass, Mijo Bijo, or we'll pack you off to a Boot Camp.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:40 AM on November 26, 2005

You know, I am sure the Chinese think we have a lot of damn gaul coming over to China and complaining about their human rights abuses.
posted by caddis at 6:04 AM on November 26, 2005

The Council of Europe, increasingly solely a pro-democracy institution and long overlooked by pretty much anyone, has developed and is further developing balls, of mass destruction.

BTW... The Council of Europe is not to be confused with the European Council (which is made up of the Heads of State and/or Government of the European Union) or with the Council of the European Union (which is made up of those people's ministers). Both those organisations, being part of the European Union, have far fewer member states. The Council of Europe has every state with land in Europe as a member, except for Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Vatican (all on democratic grounds, or because Borat is irritating).
posted by ab'd al'Hazred at 6:29 AM on November 26, 2005

a lot of damn gaul
posted by ab'd al'Hazred at 6:30 AM on November 26, 2005

I am sure the Chinese think we have a lot of damn gaul coming over to China and complaining about their human rights abuses.

They do. Here's their 2004 Human Rights Record of the United States.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:38 AM on November 26, 2005

Here's their 2004 Human Rights Record of the United States.

There was a time when I'd argue "Yeah, we screw up sometimes. That's wrong. At least we're trying."

But, anymore, we aren't.
posted by eriko at 8:13 AM on November 26, 2005

It's amazing to believe that a generation (the Baby Boomers) who grew opposing war and felt victimized by the system would turn around one generation later (30 years) and enact the same attrocity on their children.

What is amazing is how asinine your rant is in every aspect.

The popular image of baby boomers is of white, suburban kids who grew up watching "The Mickey Mouse Club" and protested the Vietnam War, not the children who came of age during the Reagan era.

But a new study by two Duke University sociologists, released as the last of the boomers is turning 40, shows the Baby Boom as a diverse group of people whose experiences differ not only from those of previous generations, but also from each other...


"We all fall into talking about the baby boom as if it were a homogeneous group, but it’s a very heterogeneous group," Hughes said. "And it’s not just a semantic issue. If we are worried about the future as the boomers age, we need to be prepared for a very, very heterogeneous group of people."

The study challenges some of the assumptions that have grown up around the baby boom:

-- Many boomers live in poverty: At midlife, boomers have the highest wage inequality of any recent generation. Late boomers have the highest levels of poverty since the generation born before World War I. One in 10 late boomers lives in poverty at middle age.

-- Baby boomers did not all come of age during the turbulent 1960s: The demographic anomaly is that the baby boom stretched from 1946 to 1964. While the oldest of the early boomers graduated from college during the Summer of Love, the youngest of the late boomers left college during the Reagan years.

-- Baby boomers were not all political radicals: Even for those boomers who were young adults during the late 1960s, opposition to the Vietnam War was far from universal, for example. One-third of the early boomers served in Vietnam, and younger voters were more likely to support conservative candidates. In 1968, many of George Wallace’s supporters were young, Southern and rural.

-- Baby boomers were not the first to reject the traditional family: Late marriage, permanent single status, small families, childlessness and divorce have a long history in the United States. The Ozzie-and-Harriet family of the 1950s was not the norm, but an extraordinary -- and temporary -- shift in historical patterns. It’s the generation born before and during World War II, not the boomers, who had the sharpest increase in divorce...

As the oldest baby boomers approach 60, their future has been the subject of much anxious speculation, especially since inequities in wealth and income can be expected to persist -- and even increase -- as boomers age.

"In many ways, old age is a continuation of income inequality that begins at younger ages," O’Rand said. "Given that the baby boomer generation is now more unequal than others at the same ages, we can expert them to be more unequal in old age than previous generations."

As Last of Baby Boomers Turns 40, New Study Debunks Myths About Celebrated Generation

It doesn't matter the boomers are not a homogenous group--if we say they are, they are. It's so simple. It's always the fault of those people over there, be they the bank owning jews running Hollywood, the black welfare queens loafing on the tax payer's dime or those selfish, greedy baby boomers sucking up all the resouces. It's all their fault. Let's stick it to them. Scapegoat, scapegoat, scapegoat--that's always the eternal solution for the simple minded.
posted by y2karl at 9:32 AM on November 26, 2005

And furthermore,

If you want to oversimplistically stick it to a specific generation, kick it upstairs--babyboomers and younger generations are far more in agreement in social attitudes than the generation pre-babyboom:

Scrooge's Nightmare : "Most Americans - even many Bush supporters - would recoil and rebel if the evangelical right ever got its way and began to limit the personal freedoms most of us now take for granted.
All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance."

Also here as 60's Morality is Winning

But that's if you want to oversimplify and scapegoat people by their age cohort, there continues the generation war of the generation before. Certainly, some babyboomers--and those who marketed to them--certainly rhetorically stuck it to their folks in their time: who can forget the Generation Gap? Or when Columbia Records motto was The Man Can't Bust Our Music ? One would hope the younger generation could come up with something original. It's all Mom and Dad's fault ! is so been there and done.
posted by y2karl at 10:25 AM on November 26, 2005

y2karl - Mijo Bijo is obviously referring specifically to the generation that protested the Vietnam war. Those individuals do have certain cultural touchstones in common - civil rights movement, JFK assassination, summer of love, Watergate backlash, etc. Mijo is pointing out the betrayal of the values of those times. Your source loops in "Baby Busters", calls them "late Boomers", and then points out that, you know, they're different 'cuz they don't have those touchstones.
posted by swell at 10:26 AM on November 26, 2005

To back up y2karl's point about every generation blaming the previous one, remember that the so-called "Greatest Generation" that sacrificed so much gave us Vietnam in the first place. I remember the predictions when I graduated from college (1979) that my generation would be the first one to make less than its parents, because they had screwed up the economy so much.

I think that the current age of a generation is a much better predictor of behavior than what decade they happened to be born in - most people get more conservative as they get older (some would call it early-onset senility).
posted by rfs at 10:50 AM on November 26, 2005

...The CIA continues to use an American military base in Germany to transport terrorism suspects without informing the German government, business daily Handelsblatt reported Thursday.

Quoting a high-ranking CIA official in Washington, the newspaper reported that such flights carrying prisoners were still stopping off at the US base at Ramstein.

"The CIA planes have made stop-overs in several European countries, including Germany," the CIA official told Handelsblatt. "Nothing has changed that." ...
posted by amberglow at 11:25 AM on November 26, 2005

Mijo Bijo is pointing out the betrayal of the values of those times.

No he isn't.

I was going to leave it at my sarcastic comment, but y2karl's rigorous rebuttal has put me to shame.

He's actually arguing that the people who struggled for those particular changes:

a. Did nothing worthwhile and sacrificed nothing.

(Tell it to those who died in Vietnam -- it may not have been worthwhile, but it was definitely a sacrifice. Tell it to those who had their heads cracked on demos protesting the same. Tell it to those who were imprisoned for their parts in various other struggles -- regardless of how dumb some of them may seem today.)

and then:

b. Immediately sold out their values by taking jobs working for the man, building today's war machine, etc. etc.

Which of course, is all complete and utter bollocks as y2kark has pointed out at some length.

As y2k says, boomers are far from homogeneous. The vast majority of them were apolitical and shared similar values to the generations that came before them. But the reason that some of you have got a little bit more common sense today is precisely because of that small minority of us who did struggle and sacrifice for the various things that y2k is talking about -- human rights, racial and sexual equality, gay liberation, etc. etc.

People who look at this stuff through the lens of history may get the impression that these values were actually widespread. The fact is that they really weren't. They were originally held by a small minority of activists and agitators. The fact that that minority gets most of the media coverage and thus shaped the way that the history books are written shouldn't fool people into thinking these values were somehow commonplace. In the 60's, black people and women were much more likely to be discriminated against, gay people were largely in the closet - even in major cities.

In the main, the people I knew who struggled to think and live differently back in the days, continue to do so today. Some of them do so from the outside. Others may have taken jobs, but they do what they can to operationalize those same values from positions of power. And those who are in that position do tend to struggle with the various compromises that holding any sort of power generally entails. That's the nature of power. We restrict access to it precisely because the decisions are hard.

But the truth is, it was a group of boomers -- albeit a very small subset -- who changed the way we think and feel about the world and it's possibilities, and did so for the better.

And if current evidence of original thought or political change is anything to go by, if things were left up to Mijo Bijo and his generation, it looks as though you'd all still be wearing I Like Ike badges as you head off to meetings of the John Birch society and the local Klavern.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:26 PM on November 26, 2005

Wow, kirkaracha, that was an interesting read. You should put that up on the front page. [If you don't I just might someday. I would bet there are some other interesting assessments of our human rights records as well. I know Amnesty International slams the US every year.]

I agree with you eriko. It does seem we don't even try anymore. Hell, we don't even try to look like we're trying.
posted by caddis at 12:51 PM on November 26, 2005

Kosovo isn't alone. The US has been using several countries in Eastern Europe to house suspected terrorists. The EU isn't happy. Of course, the fact that the US might be torturing suspected terrorists in Romania and Poland is irrelevant. If the EU finds out that that their is torture going down, sanctions for Romania and Poland while the US finds another place to do it's business.
posted by panoptican at 3:45 PM on November 26, 2005

a lot of damn gaul

I thought we were leaving euro weenies out of this?
posted by srboisvert at 4:03 PM on November 26, 2005

hmmm, that was Freudian, now wasn't it?
posted by caddis at 5:12 PM on November 26, 2005

Wow, kirkaracha, that was an interesting read. You should put that up on the front page.

I'm pretty sure China's assessment of the US human rights record has been discussed here before; dunno if it was a front-page post or not. I'd expect people would get defensive and blame the messenger, even though the statement is largely bases on mainstream media sources and is heavily documented. It might work as part of an outside-looking-in post.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:22 PM on November 26, 2005