(no subject)

[rm]

Apparently LJ has decided not to communicae with LJ users because that would reward bad behavior.

I think that's the "no, really, fuck off and stop using our site" message we were waiting for.

http://news.livejournal.com/106909.html?thread=70316701#t70316701

Aside from outraged, I'm really quite unutterably sad.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

tsarina is working on one.

[miep.livejournal.com]

I'm about half-way through it, and Nosik is very dismissive and verges on insulting.

[ithinkitisayit.livejournal.com]

< really stupid American moment >
Are you the Miep Gies that helped hide Anne Frank? :O Or related to her, perhaps?
< /really stupid American moment >

Or (more likely), are you just some person from Holland that happens to have the same name, or is named after Miep Gies?

[miep.livejournal.com]

:) isn't she amazing? I'm just some person from Minnesota who got to play Miep in a community theater play when I was in high school and loved the name and the person. So I kept the name, and am always pleased when someone notices the reference.

[ithinkitisayit.livejournal.com]

She is! Did you know that she doesn't even consider herself a hero?! How humble is that?

Though, I have to admit, depending on how you look at it, it's possible that there are no such things as heroes. There's only people who do what anyone decent would do, and since there's such a lack of decent people, we wind up categorizing these people as heroes.

There seems to be a stigma among college kids these days about dying for a cause you really believe in. My friends all laugh at martyrs, since they don't believe there is any honour in being a martyr. I'm not sure how much of that is the backlash from Vietnam/Iraq and how much of that is simply a change in the times.

I'm college aged (21), and I feel it's a great honour to be able to die for a cause you truly believe in. I think the problem these days is that the US no longer stands for the nation that fights for people's rights. Maybe we never were that, but we were certainly founded with that idea in mind (the "All men are created equal..." line comes to mind).

Part of the problem is that the country is willing to kill off soldiers to fight in a war we can't win (Iraq), but we're not willing to send our soldiers to fight so other people can live, even if we can't win that war, either (Darfur genocide). I feel the latter allows the soldiers to die in honour, since they died fighting for someone else's freedom and fighting for someone else's rights. The former tries to pretend that the soldiers are dying in order to help people, but said former also neglects to point out that more Iraqis have died in this war than Americans.

And yes, the soldiers are dying with honour in this war; honour that they were loyal to their country, even though their country knowingly sent them to their deaths. However, if I had to choose how to die? I'd rather die fighting for someone's freedom, even if the war isn't completely winnable, than to die for loyalty to my country.

Though, logically, I imagine there's a lot more reasons we can't go into Darfur, though, I'm not knowledgeable on what they all are. I imagine the idea of World War 3 and using Nukes has to come into it, though.