Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Hezbollah. On the one hand they seem to be closely tied to the corrupt clerics in Iran and are no stranger to anti-semitic remarks; but on the other, they are all that stand between Israel and their predilection for massacres in Southern Lebanon like those at Sabra and Shatila. I read comments by Chomsky who met Hassan Nasrallah right before Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon last year, that he was actually a fairly nice and well-meaning man but it wasn’t followed up by much more other than to talk about the war. It was interesting then to read the other day when a fellow Zmag forum poster asked Chomsky this question:

Professor Chomsky,

if you were nasrallah would you give up hezballah’s weapons? do you think they ought to? barsamian asked you in what we say goes what you think of him and you responded that he is a very pragmatic man. could you possibly elaborate? does he seem like an honest, compassionate man?

i have a sort of bias towards nasrallah because he’s the only arab whose speeches are translated into english and put on youtube, great way to learn arabic, so i’ve literally gone through and analyzed each word of 4 of his speeches.

To which Chomsky’s response was as follows:

Reply from NC,

My impression is about the same as others who have met him: for example, Edward Peck, White House official responsible for terrorism in the Reagan administration, who described Nasrallah, after an interview, as having given “a logical, reasonable presentation…just an educated intelligent man talking about serious issues that he perceived.” On Hizbollah’s weapons, his position, as I understand it, is pretty simple. The first question is whether Lebanon has a right to have a deterrent against US-backed Israeli aggression. If the answer is “No,” then Hezbollah has no right to weapons. But it’s a strange answer after five such invasions, each murderous and destructive, one of which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of the country, all of them without credible pretext. Suppose, then, that the answer is “Yes.” Then what would the deterrent be? One answer would be a credible US guarantee, but that’s not in the cards (to our shame). Could it be the Lebanese army? No one believes that. We’re left with one deterrent: Hezbollah. When I was in Lebanon in 2006, before the latest Israeli invasion, I spent a fair amount of time with some of the strongest opponents of Hezbollah, and continually raised this question. No one had an answer.

I’d like to see a credible international guarantee against further US-backed Israeli aggression. Short of that, it’s hard to see what the argument would be for Hezbollah to give up its weapons, though no doubt it is highly undesirable for a state to harbor an internal non-state military force.

The outstanding Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri, writing in the major English language Lebanese newspaper, captured the basic point rather well: “Hamas and Hizbullah are among the most effective and legitimate political movements in the Arab world: They have forced unilateral Israeli retreats that no Arab army could induce; won elections democratically without resorting to the gerrymandering or ballot box stuffing that most American-supported Arab regimes live by; provided efficient service delivery and local governance to their constituents; and sustained resistance to Israeli occupation that appeals to the desire of ordinary Arabs to restore dignity to their battered lives and to their shattered, hollow political systems.”

That’s exactly why they are hated and feared by the US and Israel.

NC

Kind of puts the organization in an interesting light.

Quite a few of these made me lol

 

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it hadrusted shut.

He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.

She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

“Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”

The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.

Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.

They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”

Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.

The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.

The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.

Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.

The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.

I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.

She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.

You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.

The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.

The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

I found them here: http://www.losteyeball.com/index.php/2007/06/19/56-worstbest-analogies-of-high-school-students/

While finding headlines for Novemberfourth.org the other day, I noticed something strange about the submissions on Digg pertaining to McCain and Palin. An enormous amount of them had been marked as being potentially inaccurate. This struck me as odd, since many of the submissions were simply true or false. It wasn’t like there was much room for interpretation. Just have a look at these examples:

Well, did he or didn't he?

A satirical voicemail can be inaccurate?

Was it or wasn't it?

So every claim made by Palin was exactly true?

So maybe Digg needs an accuracy vouching system? Where users can override these kinds of claims at times when “possibly inaccurate” is “possibly inaccurate”. However, this does come right on the heels of complaints by many users that Digg has a liberal bias and that many rumours about Sarah Palin were shown to be false. So what to do?

I think some more bury options might help. Something like “Misleading Title”, “Remember it’s Innocent Until Proven Guilty”, “Omitting too Many Relevant Facts” etc… All of these provide more precise information then the vaguer “Possibly Inaccurate”