Let me guess: you were going to call him/her a serial child rapist.

You should have gone ahead with it, Jet. That would have been hilarious. Bi was just asking for it, anyway.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to Arular.)

bi, if you don’t think the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan have anything to do with a particular “War of X”, you might want to be careful how you wield that “idiot” word.

Why won’t you stop praising yourself for being a total idiot?

Oh, I get it now. If it’s called “Battle of X” or “War of X“, then it’s non-random.

Or do you mean something else? Can you actually give a general standard of what’s random and what’s non-random instead of just picking ad-hoc examples?

Otherwise, I hereby proclaim the LTTE’s struggle as the “War of the LTTE”. And since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly don’t follow the pattern of “Battle of X” or “War of X“, it follows that they’re random violence, so they’re 100% Wrong.

(Incidentally, the “somewhere between 500 thousand to 1,000 thousand US soldiers and 10’s of millions of Japanese would have died in a US invasion of mainland Japan” claim is disputed.)

(certainly this follows in the spirit of the Grand Inquisition, how Spanish of you)

Oh, OK. Suddenly “Spanish” has become a swear word because the Spanish citizens didn’t have the courage to vote a bunch of liars back into office.

She’s actually a filmmaker and a visual artist by training, makes her own clothes, etc.

I’d never thought that politics (unless your music is a vehicle for your politics, like Crass, Born Against, or Skrewdriver) was a great reason for reason to dismissing an artist outright.

The hype surrounding this record is probably unwarranted, but then again, isn’t most hype?

Robin,
I hate to keep wasting your time by not being clear enough. My response to Kvetch was purposefully misinterpreting him and casting his words in the worst possible light. That seems to be his favorite method of argument, and I try to be accommodating.

Bi,
I wasn’t calling you a liberal, I was making claim that my ideas were liberal. And a gang related school yard shooting is random violence. A suicide bomb going off in a crowded market is random. The Battle of the Bulge is not random. And you’re the one who alluded to me being a Christian (and going to hell), apparently based solely upon my most evil and heinous crime of mocking Uncle Kvetch (certainly this follows in the spirit of the Grand Inquisition, how Spanish of you). Oh, and I’d praise the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Approxametely 100,000 civilians in occupied Japanese lands were dieing every month from starvation and murder by the Japanese. Somewhere between 500 thousand to 1,000 thousand US soldiers and 10’s of millions of Japanese would have died in a US invasion of mainland Japan. At the end of the war, Japan had lost around 350,000 civilians. Japan had one of the lowest civilian casulty figures in the war, especially based on how large a part of the war Japan was. So those two bombs saved hundreds of people for every one they killed. In real life, Dostoevsky’s morality question turns out to have a real answer.

I don’t need your help for that, thank you very much.

And what makes you think I’m a Christian?

Nice straw man.

The fact that I piss in the cheerios of people who voice support for suicide bombing whenever I get the opportunity?

Yet another straw man. You sure love making straw men don’t you? Send me a few million of them, then I can find out what it means to clutch at straws.

I would have thought it very liberal ideal …

Oh, because I detest half-baked arguments like those you make, suddenly that makes me a liberal.

… to stand up against random violence, reguardless of the cause.

What on earth is “random” violence as opposed to “non-random” violence?

There are huge differences. While the SL state has been thuggish and while the discrimination of the 1960s/70s and pogroms of the 1980s are unconscionable, it has made large strides, offering autonomy, ethno-federalism, strong, official apologies, among other things. Moreover, the LTTE wiped out other Tamil groups (the EPRLF, e.g.), has mowed down Tamil student demos at Jaffna university, has ethnically cleansed the Muslims in the east, suffers from a cult of personality akin to the Sondero Luminoso, and has strong fascistic tendencies. The opportunities for a secular-binational SL is not being opposed by the SL state at this point, and LTTE has opposed elections in LTTE controlled areas.

Btw, this video of Sunshowers does play up some LTTE imagery http://www.blastro.com/player/miasunshowers.html

Jet, I don’t follow kvetch, and I’ll be happy to condemn all misrepresentation manufactured strawman arguments. The main unfairness is to compare an appreciation of an artist with some stupid views with appreciation for a fascist dictators administrative results. Her musical talent is not essentially tied to her views on the LTTE, while Mussolini’s making the trains run on time is tied to making Italy more and more unfree.

If you look at my first comment, you will see that I was asking for someone to fill me in on exactly what was controversial about M.I.A., because up until this morning, all I knew about her was that I really liked her songs. The Slate article made a passing reference to her support for the Tamil Tigers—something I knew nothing about—but gave no details. Rather than wading through several thousand comments on the thread that Gypsyfrocksbedlam linked to, I thought I would take the lazy route of asking if somebody here might be so kind as to bring me up to speed.

Your response was to call me a fascist.

When taken to task for this, your response was that this is exactly the kind of thing I do all the time, so I deserved it.

I guess that’s all I want to say. I had 3 or 4 more paragraphs written for this comment, but to what end…to “clear my name”? I think the people who read CT regularly can judge your notion of “fairness” for themselves.

and the controversy will make M.I.A millions of dollars.

bi,
I always like a good joke. Contact me sometime, maybe we can put together something that’s actually clever. And what makes you think I’m a Christian? The fact that I piss in the cheerios of people who voice support for suicide bombing whenever I get the opportunity? I would have thought it very liberal ideal to stand up against random violence, reguardless of the cause.

Ted,
I misread your post regretfully. I first read it to mean that all that would happen after MIA was on the cover of Time. But you were meaning it would put her on the cover of Time. I do agree with you 100%. It would be kind of Orweilien if MIA is propped up to be much more than she is, just to beat the left up. But then again, all people on the left have to do is agree she’s a nut, instead of whining about the label. When Ward Churchill made the pages, all we heard from talk left radio (Garofalo couldn’t have stood up for him more), academia, etc is how the Right is making him a target for political purposes in a semi-defense of him. Not that he’s a nut and they are right he’s a nut, and they should stop blaming him on us because they have nuts too (as CT did).