rainheart

Fat effing chance.

I'm combing through initial media reports of the letter in an experiment I'm conducting to see how the media have portrayed the letter.

The problem is that you cannot make an appeal to the American public through the major newsmedia, it is run by contrary interests, plain and simple; see the wikipedia entry about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp for a fairly transparent example.

I've only seen one CBS news article which had the letter at it's disposal, and it basically ignored many of the important points in the letter.

I disagree with Ahmadinejad as a person and as a politician completely, but even with the incorrect intentions, if he called for peace? I wouldn't say that he is wrong. In fact, when people say they want peace, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt- especially in this situation. Because the alternative is pretty damn grim and it costs a lot of lives, and that fact is only exacerbated by the willingness of the Bush administration to use nuclear weapons to win it's war should one occur in Iran. That basically means that it won't just cost Iranian lives, because the rest of the world as a whole will be pushed further into hating what America has come to represent- unilateralism. And that just means more insurgents and terrorists; exactly what the administration failed to take into account before attacking Iraq. Like they say, discretion is the better part of valour.

There you go. "The letter is bullshit because it's written by a fundamentalist muslim; therefore there is no merit in any of the ideas presented in the letter."

I guess we should just nuke the bastards, right? This is what I mean, people are horrible at judging what is in their very own best interests. reconmike, what you are is a latent nationalist- or perhaps even an overt nationalist. You submit that the nation-state in which you reside has precedence over your thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and overall sense of self; and you do this by failing to rationally respond to, for example, this letter.

I agree. What benefit do we derive from putting either the party who Ahmadinejad represents or the party who Bush represents- what benefit do we derive from giving them access to nuclear armaments?? Absolutely none.

The real issue is complete global abolishment of nuclear weapons, because as you say, Ustwo, our survival depends on it. In the extreme long run, the future is just way too unpredictable to allow entrenched political parties to hold such weapons. So, why the double standard then? Get rid of all nuclear weapons. Globally. Permanently.

But surely, even you must submit this is unrealistic. Thus, it is unfair for Iran not to pursue nuclear energy, even if it means it can develop nuclear weapons. Because, quite seriously, it is no less dangerous than the overwhelming partisanship and nationalist rhetoric which dominates the United States today.

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But I guess at the end of the day, none of the ideas that are presented matter. At the end of the day, the people who need to listen to these things are not going to listen. They're just going to fabricate some theory as to why others are wrong that compeletly ignores what the presented ideas were about in the first place. This is the logical outcome of ideologies like unilateralist nationalism.


edit:
Oh, and in response to people talking monetary values and currencies- I have to say one thing:

Let's hope alternative currencies can provide better solutions.