Why would you call it an assassination? Soleimanni was on Iraqi soil where he was boldly directing Qud forces and strategically planning attacks on the US embassy and other military assets. He was a legitimate target and a casualty of war.
Allegedly...because US intelligence is never wrong...or purposely misleading Reports says he was there to meet with the Saudis aimed at de-escalation. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...scalating-tensions-Saudis-killed-PM-says.html
To be blunt, the IS intelligence was spot on this time. Soleimani had be labeled a terrorist by the international community. If he didn't want to be exterminated he should have stayed in Tehran.
You don’t know any of that. There are reports, FWIW, that he was delivering some kind of diplomatic message to Saudis. One thing i think we all have to keep in mind...under Trump, official statements that are things Trump cares about are at MiniTru level. That’s sad.
For every person who objected to my term "murder," fair enough. I see your point. The word "murder" was inappropriate and, perhaps, too much. That being said, I am opposed to assassination as well. I am opposed to the police gunning down "suspects" in almost all cases. I am opposed to drone strikes targeting non-military targets. I am opposed to hitting most "military" targets, except in defense. I am opposed to almost all forms of government-sponsored extrajudicial killing. Overall, I am just not a fan of killing people.
Says who? This time? The US? That's a reliable source... Mainly the US, really... I thought peace missions were a good thing. Why would the US kill the guy who wanted to de-escalate tensions in the middle east? Was killing that guy worth having 34 US soldiers having brain damage/trauma for the rest of their lives? If you think Soleimani changed anything, that's really naive...someone else took his place and might end up being worst than he ever was
Is that why as far back as 2007 the UN sanctioned him and along with the EU sanctioned him more? Speaking of naive...
Let's try this again... I have helpfully emphasized the parts that indicate a "some are more equal than others" mentality. "Revealed preference" is definitely a thing.
My response was to Iranian media and the two Iranian apologists saying Soleimani was killed in a cowardly way. But continue to mischaracterize my post.
Okay... you're defining "Hair band" as a product of MTV and no one that came before can qualify because of that, essentially. I'm defining it as any band whose members had long, teased hair, ponced about in tight leather, and played insipid party rock. There are no genre or topic or style differences between Panama or Hot For Teacher and Unskinny Bop (bop bop bop) or Photograaaaaph. That Ed was too good a guitard to attract the teen girl component doesn't change the fact that these bands played the same sort of material. Just like Aerosmith. Dream On doesn't save them. Notice that I did not disagree with you when you say that those later bands were a product of MTV. I am saying it doesn't matter because the content and presentation is the same. And as far as "supposed" bad boys... everybody can't be Jimmy Page and abduct girls for real. It gets in the way of making money. I never got why anoraks were geeklisted in the first place. They remind me much more of something modern-outdoorsy-adventurer than pocket protector-wearing maladjusted NASA dweeb.
The UN is really the US puppet. Funny that guys like Bush & Cheney aren't sanctioned ever...while the US can unilaterally decide tha the ICC is BS and Americans are exempt from prosecution for war crimes... Soleimani was no angel but neither are Americans in the middle east. Also context...who's on who's borders?
For me the 70s era was largely still a stage based era where "rockers" were basically expected to be edgey in appearance and breaking the rules. Perhaps oddly in hindsight, lots of the personas adopted were highly feminine / camp. tights, heels, the hair etc. The likes of Le Roth was a larger than life stage persona. To me that defines those guys in a different era. I agree, MTV did not invent that, indeed television is usual stealing from subcultures. (Wham / Culture Club appropriated heavily from gay culture for example). IMO MTV appropriated the hair band look, but made it much more masculine and safe - think Bon Jovi. But of course in the conservative 80s, with this stuff in your living room for your teenage daughter for the first time it was dangerous. It also shouldn't be overlooked how much this stuff was sexualised. Hot for Teacher is actually a great example of that and IMO a classic video of the era. So I am still sticking to my opinion that Van Halen don't belong with the other Hair Bands you listed. In the end they were a fairly standard old rock band from the pre-mtv era. Bon Jovi on the other hand was a manufactured TV phenomenon just like Madonna. Same with Poison.
Your Quote Fu needs some work. I never implied in this thread or any other that Bush/Cheney were upstanding world citizens nor am I remotely close to being supportive of US foreign policy. I’ve lived our foreign policy up close and personal. I do agree that the UN and for that matter the EU are lapdogs of the US, right or wrong that’s how they want it as much as the US. The EU and its citizens may not admit it but it is a hell of a lot better than being under the Soviets and now Russia’s boot.
I agree with this, I don't know about edgy, but they did dress for their shows. Page's dragon suit comes to mind. But AFAIK, Floyd wasn't doing any of that stuff. I think of that as being more 80s for some reason. This: ...was a back cover page of any number of guitar-related magazines in the late 80s/early 90s. There was no sarcasm intended, even tho a few decades later, we're all doubled over in laughter at the visual. I see a continuum here, or something. Roth got it from Robert Plant and Mick Jagger, and then the 80s bands got it from Plant as well. Wham did? I always just thought of them as being 80s Brits who did the suit thing but couldn't be taken seriously aside from George Michael's voice (bro could sang). I didn't perceive anything gay from GM until he said so. Ridgeley was just a sidekick. Culture Club was pretty obvious in retrospect, but until Boy George said straight up that the dressing wasn't just a schtick, it's not like anyone would have known for sure, not way back then. That's part of exactly what I'm talking about! Hot For Teacher becomes One Bitten, Twice Shy, MTV or not. Those bands would have existed anyway, and they would have followed VH's lead. Now, as far as masculinity goes... you've seen footage of Zeppelin. Robert Plant on stage looked gayer than Lindsey Graham, but do you want to argue that Bon Jovi got more trim than Plant did? They were all doing what they felt the ladies wanted, nothing more. And IMO their music and shows and atmosphere was no different than the MTV-era bands. You're not talking about The Guess Who or GFR or some other band that wore jeans and boots and demin vests and stuff. You're taking about Van Halen- flaming gongs and DLR leaping around shirtless and four or five kick drums and all that. They are the original hair band, and Poison, etc. are the grandbabies you need to let 'em claim. Madonna was going to get hers, video or not. My guess is that her sound (if in fact we can call it hers) probably did well in dance clubs.
After the Pentagon first claimed that 11 US servicemen were flown to Kuwait and Germany "out of an abundance of caution" for concussion related symptoms, the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Qadas, had a report that already suggested the Pentagon version of the 'facts' was inaccurate and misleading. The report in Al Qadas first appeared on 18 January. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Iranian_attack_on_U.S._forces_in_Iraq Regardless of the veracity of this report, instead of just relying on what the Pentagon has to say, I would think US journalists could be bothered to check with sources in the facilities (e.g., in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Germany, as well as in the US) which have or had treated the US servicemen to learn more about the nature of their injuries. I don't think that would take a huge effort to so and it might throw light on some of the issues relating to US casualties from Iran's missile strikes. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/2...s-flown-to-kuwait-hospital-after-iran-strike/
Yeah - Jagger was actually someone I was thinking of when I wrote my post. All those guys were very theatrical - but it makes sense for stage where you need something "big" for the audience even to be able to see it. I also agree the 80s caricature is deeply ironic, as these "bad boys" are so feminine/camp - but of course one key market that was being appealed to was younger teenage girls. This had become a new spending demo in the 80s <jitty emerges from wheelhouse> I agree it was done in a safe way. I was like 12 at the time and simply accepted what George was doing. There was never a whisper in media that he was gay in those days. I've studied back quite a few of these videos and the imagery is all there. Kind of like an 'in' joke. Lots of that stuff was down to the directors, which is where the backstory gets fascinating. e.g the Club Tropicana video is wildly camp. I am talking about something else, which is that the MTV era was the first time that bands were sold first on image rather than music (or at least equally). Before that, bands could be hyped sure, but radio play was the key format which is an audio format. Suddenly the band could be sold as a complete image - like a film. What happened was not terribly sophisticated in hindsight, but people were making up the genre as they went along - often with tiny shooting budgets. e.g. Billy Idol was a supposed bad boy punk and the classic rebel yell video concept was "hire some blondes with big tits" and pretend to film a concert. Right from the start it was hyper sexualised but aimed at a very young audience. I think i was like 12 when billy idol toured NZ. I vividly recall us boys at a friends birthday party - he was a huge fan - air guitaring Dancing with myself "sweat! sweat! Our babysitter who was older went to the concert - it was a pure teenage concept. So like "hair" bands, this was entirely a stolen look, retro-fitted to young kids who had no concept of punk. Idol was a clever guy who played that role. I see the Bon Jovi/Poison era as the same. Record company products, delivered to MTV "ready to go" and spun up on the hype machine. Like them or not, Van Halen were a real band, and actual bad boys. The pretty boy look of these guys was entirely to sell them to teenage kids. I mean even as a boy, I remember being highly bummed out that i couldn't look like a Californian surfer dude with impossibly blue eyes and a bandana in my hair. Winger was probably the most ludicrous of these efforts, but things swiftly moved on to a harder "LA" look with GnR This I agree with. None of that got reinvented and was the same as it ever was. I'd guess the audience got younger maybe? I'd always imagined Van Halen had an older white trash audience, whereas Bon Jovi was teenage. But then I was a white trash teenager listening to Van Halen so maybe that isn't true. Madonna was basically a pioneer of video. It's kind of hard to discuss this because now video is such a natural part of how we remember the music. But without video Madonna as we know her is not possible. One of the things I was surprised to learn is that I always assumed as a kid in 1983 that bands had always had music videos I didn't realise when I watched Madonna's first videos that she was doing stuff no one had ever done before.
That's something I never gave any thought to today- that the stage IS big and something has to be going on, at least at that point. But in the case of Poison and the others, that film was based on a play written by Van Halen. Okay, now we're both on to something. You're absolutely right in that VH is not like Poison in that VH built its rep on its music, period, because there was no video at the time. But they had the same look and posturing and theatrics that the 80s bands had. They had it first, in fact. I am saying they're the same kind of band, because they have the same kind of music and the same kind of shows. It appears from this convo and things I've heard from friends that they do not have the same kind of fans. And I think that's shaping your argument a bit. I know tons of folks who love VH but wouldn't cross the street to hear any of what I consider their progeny. Kind of an analogy here: MTV made Robert Cray, but it doesn't mean Robert Johnson ain't a bluesman I'm no expert on this, but I'm thinking real punk doesn't pay the bills, and everyone who's alive to try to define it is doing something else for a living. Idol was savvy, yeah, and he was backed by one of the most underrated guitarmen in the genre (Steve Stevens). There may have been a created image, but the music was real enough. Van Halen's "badness" never crossed the line that would keep them from getting rich. And I guess that's a part of my point. You seem to be categorizing based on how much they live like they look, and I'm categorizing on how they sound (and look).
Yep - like costume opera basically. This is definitely true, especially since proper Metal was a huge iceberg at the time. So VH or GnR would be as commercial as you might go, while the rest was "fluff". What was interesting is then MTV moved to bring metal into the mainstream at the end of the 80s. The same thing happened with rap. Yep! I guess i see VH as an actual hard rock bad, whereas to me the term hair bands refers to the manufactured 80s era
By this, do you mean that there was a lot more to it than the surface that MTV managed to scratch? I never thought of VH or GnR as metal. When I think of metal, I think of guttural-sounding vocalists and drummers who sound kind of machine-like (on purpose, not suggesting they have no feel). I don't know enough about it to make a call. I will say that MTV never dealt with real rap that addressed real life, because they couldn't. But neither did radio. Early mainstream rap absolutely sucked. Everybody likes butter on breakfast toast! How tf was that supposed to reflect my struggle as a Black man living in America? Sure, Living For The City was much more accurate, but radio cut out the most important section ("Wow... New York! Just like I pictured it... "). Something real but sanitized like The Message, sure, but something real like Bomb First? Cinderella and Motley Crue and Poison and Whitesnake rocked as hard as VH. I just can't wrap my head around how concerned you seem to be with their origin. I'm gonna throw out a football analogy. MLS is a collection of some clubs that existed in some form or another before the league started up, and some that originated afterward. But none are more "real" or "true" than the others.
As I remember it, if you were listening to the proper metal like Megadeth/Metallica in '86/87 then you might also listen to VH or GnR as more commercial mainstream rock - but you were unlikely to be into fluff bands Also, and I might be remembering this wrong, bands like Def Leppard were really one summer of hype where you copied the tape off a mate or whatever, but they were never regular listening Later the centre of gravity moved when Metallica etc got mainstreamed
Proxy? Do you know anything about Iran- Contra deal? US sold armaments to Iranian regime during Iran-Iraq war specially airplane spare parts, anti tank missiles and anti aircrafts missiles. Isreal used to sell arms to Iran secretly during Iran-Iraq war and even bombed Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor. The policy was to keep them both fighting each other and prevent one from a total victory. They kept the balance by selling weapon and passing info to both sides. Iranian regime wanted to topple all regimes in the region and export its revolution to other neighbors. Saddam was a socialist turned to a racist nationalist. He was a threat to Isreal and other rich Arab countries. The plan worked perfect for 8 years and exhausted both Iran and Iraq. Only ordinary people of Iran and Iraq suffered.
This now explains what exactly happened in the aftermath and why it took them 3 days to publicly admit what had happened. IRGC tried to cover up their shooting-down of Ukrainian flight. For days they refused to tell even President Rouhani, whose government was publicly denying it. When they told Rouhani, he gave them an ultimatum: come clean or he resigns.By @farnazfassihihttps://t.co/YVzf5iMIcG— Negar Mortazavi نگار مرتضوی (@NegarMortazavi) January 26, 2020
According to Deutsche Welle, 5 Katyusha rockets have been shot at American embassy in Baghdad by Iranian backed militia. One of the rockets hit embassy's lunch hall and wounded 5 American employees. One of the five injured employees is in critical conditions. https://m.dw.com/en/us-embassy-in-iraq-hit-by-rockets/a-52159151 https://m.dw.com/fa-ir/آمریکا-وضعیت-امنیتی-در-بغداد-وخیم-است/a-52159244
My point remains that minding our own business would not have led to an Islamic Revolution causing all those deaths