King Abdullah's Moderate Beheadings
When 'moderate' is a euphemism for 'friendly to U.S. interests'

From The New York Times' obit for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who just died at age 90:
Still, Abdullah became, in some ways, a force of moderation. He contested Al Qaeda's militant interpretations of the faith as justifying, even compelling, terrorist acts. He ordered that textbooks be purged of their most extreme language and sent 900 imams to re-education sessions. He had hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded.
It's supposed to be "moderate" because he was doing it to "militants," I guess.
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He had hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded.
What goes around, comes around in moderation.
He should have beheaded the imams, too.
The imams are the only thing that legitimizes his family's rule.
Not really legitimize, since farcical asteroidal ceremonies are not a good basis for a system of government. But yes, in the sense that the power of the monarchy depends on support from the priest class.
Beheadings! Now we see the violence inherent to the system!
In his defense, all that sand can get in your undies and make you irritable.
The temperatures are so high over there, it makes the blood run hot.
No, please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker about who beheaded who.
LOL
...King Abdullah, a very brave and dangerous monarch...
? huge tracts of sand.
I know, but I want the king that I serve to have... a certain... special... [music] ...something...
NONE OF THAT!!!!
What, spankings?
Oh no, those, certainly. BUT THERE'LL BE NO SINGING WHILE I AM HERE!
+1 Empty Quarter
Good one, Rich. I lol'd.
Me too.
Dittoes.
FTFO: He was described as ascetic, or as ascetic as someone in the habit of renting out entire hotels could be.
I imagine he was also described as a ... you know.
A monarchical Antonio Maria Esquivel?
"As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.... I valued King Abdullah's perspective and appreciated our genuine and warm friendship."
-- President Obama
*sob!*
*sob!* 😉
Funny how, if you're the most powerful in a certain situation, you're in favor of "stability."
That's from The Onion, right?
I wonder if Dubya is shook up. He was the King's bestie if I recall the right hand-holding photo.
Don't lock eyes with 'em, don't do it. Puts 'em on edge. They might go into berzerker mode; come at you like a whirling dervish, all fists and elbows. You might be screaming "No, no, no" and all they hear is "Who wants cake?" Let me tell you something: They all do. They all want cake.
I wonder if Dubya is shook up. He was the King's bestie if I recall the right hand-holding photo.
As usual, Bush's biggest fan weighs in with the proper perspective.
+1 bow to the King
Needs more scraping.
In line with Islamic law, Abdullah kept no more than four wives at once, and was married at least 13 times ....
Abdullah fathered at least seven sons .... Of his 15 known daughters ....
Emphases added. At least he didn't have casual sex.
I believe that would comply with Biblical law too. I am no Bible scholar though.
You don't have to be a scholar; just believe.
CHRISTFAGS!!11!!!!
I am no Bible scholar though.
/corrected sheeky
He contested Al Qaeda's militant interpretations of the faith as justifying, even compelling, terrorist acts.
It's not terrorism when the government does it.
Boooooooooooooooosh
It would be culturally insensitive to judge the beheadings in Muslim nations by our Western standards. /nyt
I believe it was FDR who said of notorious Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia:
"He's a sonuvabitch but he's our sonuvabitch."
I can't help but notice that the word 'moderate' is being used in the Times exactly as it is used here--as a shield for the Muslim who smiles at us while he nods at his jihadi brethren.
Moderate is a comparative term - in that there are people *worse* than this guy.
***cough***Nicole***cough***
If his successor keeps up with this 'moderating', in 100 years from now, it will only get you 500 lashes for insulting a royal.
WTF! I got my daily fails all queued up, where's the lynx?
MOderation in the posting of timely AM Links is no virtue!
Starting to look like the intern got beheaded ?
He's on a roll, folks...
The A.M. links were trapped in a jar for 1,000 years, and must be let out.
See, I was referencing the Arabian Nights.
The dog ate the AM links. That's why dogs are haram.
"Stay out of haram's way."
I don't think today is a federal holiday, so I'm not sure what gives.
Au contraire, today is a twofer.
Not only is it National Pie Day:
http://nationaldaycalendar.com.....anuary-23/
...it's National Handwriting Day, too!
http://nationaldaycalendar.com.....anuary-23/
I thought National Pie Day was March 14.
EVERY DAY IS PIE DAY!!!!!
I forgot!
David Clarke, Wisconsin sheriff: 'Al Sharpton ought to go back into the gutter he came from'
WARNING: Effin' auto audio.
Well, at least that sheriff is not RACIST!
He's the face of the Republican Party for the next two years, even if he isn't a Republican.
I think I might have a new hero.
"Well, at least that sheriff is not RACIST!"
He's an Uncle Tom doing The Man's dirty work.
/sarc
That's funny; he doesn't look not-Scottish.
ATTICA! ATT...um, MOURNING LYNX, MOURNING LYNX, MOURNING LYNX!!!!!
*bangs tin cup on cell door*
[Joins Switzy in noisemaking]
*** throws burning mattress into corridor ***
I'm with you two right up to the dirty protest
*** urinates on burning mattress ***
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
+1 Diesel and Dust
Hey, its not like we are throwing the ol' "correctional cocktail" at anyone.
OK, upon further review, Rich might...
Hey! Pretty sure you meant *SugarFree*!
Well, that is a given, isn't it?
Eeeeew!
Tonio's noisemaking
Loder's movie reviews just posted. Still no links.
*flings burning roll of toilet paper out window*
If I had a subscription I'd cancel it.
Since I'm a subscriber now, can I complain about the recent H&R AM Links timing?
Yes. Yes, you can.
Well, I just gotta...You know who else had perfect balls?
My Balls are Perfect SFW
Some balls are held for charity
And some for fancy dress
But when they're held for pleasure
They're the balls that I like best.
My balls are always bouncing
To the left and to the right
It's my belief that my big balls
Should be held every night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6yDhVyP9oU
(May not be SFW, in case you didn't guess)
And I'm just itching to tell you about them
Oh we had such wonderful fun
Seafood cocktail, crabs, crayfish
Huh, huh, balls.
Huh-huh, huh.
OK, I watched "The Americans" S2E6 last night and they had a clip of Reagan talking about how the Afghani Mujahadeen were fighting for freedom. Ugh.
And just to be clear, I'm not slamming RR particularly but this is the sort of awful lie that all national leaders tell to justify morally questionable decisions which are the least bad option available.
Highly recommend "The Americans".
Agreed. Not a show for chubby chasers though.
Nor for fans of the bear, which is particularly disappointing given that the USSR was depicted as a bear in political cartoons as long as I can remember.
Russia was bearish long before the USSR.
If you want to see something libertarian, the Watch TCM app should have The Mating Game up for another six days or so.
Paul Douglas plays the patriarch of a farming family who makes his living entirely through barter. His neighbor doesn't like him, and so decides to sic the government (in the form of the IRS) on him to get Douglas' land -- and this is portrayed as an unambiguously bad thing for the neighbor to do.
Tony Randall plays the IRS agent sent to investigate, and winds up falling in love with the eldest daughter (Debbie Reynolds). The happy ending is that the government has been screwing over the family for 90 years and actually owes them a seven-figure sum. I doubt there was any intentino to have a libertarian movie, but damn if that's not how it plays out.
Is the Reason staff in mourning for some foriegn potentate?
Hah!
Obvious that the Saud King was bankrolling 'em. /tinfoil hat
SAUDAPUS!!!!!
This type of thing would have never happened on Postrel's watch.
DRINK! (multiply-boiled coffee)
If they don't post the lynx soon I'm going to have to do my fucking job for a change! This is not acceptable!
Take a few deep breaths, sarcasmic. Please don't do anything rash.
Yeah, we don't want the economy to overheat.
And on a Friday!
Sarcasmic, I answered you a while ago about Carr; don't know if you saw it but...
Not a 'fan' per se. His shtick on immigration and ebola is not my cup of tea (although he's careful to sometimes focus on illegal immigration).
But his stuff on EBT fraud and the mob is fun to listen to.
And the callers are an interesting bunch to say the least.
One clown is a lefty from Montreal named 'Steve'.
You've probably heard me on the Chump Line more than once.
Really? Too funny!
Probably.
Wow. 9:30 AM and Mourning Lynx nowhere to be found. I am disappoint.
I am alternating between popping in here and making a PowerPoint presentation...oh, and drinking coffee. I am a productive dynamo.
Don't you have some currencies to destroy?
I leave that to my Swiss masters.
I blame FoE.
Exactly...he is the missing link
I blame ENB.
I envision FoE's anxiety at previously unseen levels as he furiously mashes the F5 button through the keyboard.
The H&R Staffers are huddled around the coffee machine - nursing hangovers - and laughing at our expense. I can hear their shrill little giggles, punctuated by the baying laughter of their masters, the Koch brothers.
Matt Welch is protesting the cancellation of The Independents by not posting any Links.
Perhaps Reason re-located to Kansas City and the website will now be run on Central Time.
Kansas, eh? Could be dangerous. Reason might be relocated again and the website has to run on Central Munchkin Time
Heh, heh!
Also, the other MONA:
http://mona.unk.edu/mona/
All that was inspired by one Bruce Springsteen album?
Well, it was a decent album.
UAE beat Japan??!!
I know, what a shocker, even though it was only on penalties. I think we can take them out in the semis. Did you see Timmy's goals in our game? We are so rooted once he retires
rooted?
really?
rooting- 1. child searching for boobs.
2. plant establishing location for growth
3. gaining access to a server's superuser password.
me no speak austranglish
Rooted = Oz slang for sex.
Good - we need him in the Red Bulls.
Flyover timezone? The horror...
Lucy wouldn't have done that, she'd have bravely defied everyone and given us her best links knowing she'd suffer for it later. All while wearing a cute little outfit.
DON'T TALK ABOUT LUCY!
go on...
It's Gawker, so...
Flight logs put clinton on the lolita express
"The logs also show that Clinton shared more than a dozen flights with a woman who federal prosecutors believe procured underage girls to sexually service Epstein and his friends and acted as a "potential co-conspirator" in his crimes."
Shorter media:
"Did you hear about this totally crazy girl doing some social media work for Rand Paul? Ridiculous huh?"
"What's that you say? Bill Clinton was a buddy with a pedophile and flew around with him, porn stars, and various adult women who acted as pimps for underage women? I don't think there's a story here."
Stone Zone had this a few weeks ago.
Can you imagine if this were a big time Republican? If GWB tried to rape a masseuse for example in a hotel room? 24/7 non stop in the media basically forever. Clinton is part of a pedophile club and 'nope, nothing to see here folks, move along'.
My conservative brother and I had a little political spat. He actually said I had to let him be right sometimes. I said, "Fine, then be right sometimes."
drug warrior?
You know him. The ole "freedom is fine until this line, which happens to be exactly where behavior I dislike starts."
Like owning body armor?
Ban boxing gloves. They make people punch harder.
Thankfully he's without vice.
Now if only he were without vise.
Well. I can't wait around much anymore. I'll leave this here. Science vindicates the Pats:
http://boston.barstoolsports.c.....footballs/
Science AND I invoke Occam's Razor in that they probably really didn't do anything wrong this time.
If it weren't for their fans, I'd probably like Boston teams.
They had the second least fumbles in the NFL this year. If playing with a deflated football helps their players get a better grip on the ball and helps to contribute to their lack of fumbles, then I think they did definitely have an advantage and they should be punished (something like losing draft picks).
Other than that, it is just great knowing that Belichick and Brady have to deal with all the nonsense until the super bowl.
10+ years of trial work and dickering with Afghans and Iraqis... Brady was suffering from "truth distress".
Link's blocked at work, but the initial reporting stated that temperature differences between the field and the inside only accounted for, at most, about ~0.5 PSI.
they probably really didn't do anything wrong this time.
Unfortunately for the Pats, their history has removed any benefit of the doubt they would otherwise get. It's like Raiders in their heyday or the Flyers since their inception.
This whole thing is stupid. It didn't change the outcome of the game. It is however karmic payback. It was Tom Brady and the Patriots who lobbied the league to let each team bring their own footballs that suited their quarterback instead of the league providing them.
As soon as the league changed that rule, teams immediately went as close to the line as possible making their game balls suit their quarterback's taste. It was inevitable that eventually someone would go over the line and life being what it is, it was surely going to be the Patriots, the most controversial team in the league, and before the Super Bowl.
This whole thing is one giant self inflicted would on the part of the NFL. They should have stayed with the league and the Referees bringing the balls. That way there can never be an issue of one team tampering with the balls like this. Fuck the quarterbacks if they want a perfectly worn and inflated ball to their tastes. They are professionals and should be able to manage.
The only problem with that theory is that the other team's balls were not underinflated. If it really were just the cold weather, it would have affected both sets of balls the same.
The morning links have been canceled out of respect and mourning for the death of King Abdullah.
The Saudis practice a barbaric form of Islam. That shouldn't be a big deal. It is just one country and that is their problem. The problem is that that they own Mecca and thus have huge influence over all of the Muslim world. Worse still, the Saudi Royal family are a bunch of decadent assholes who live in incredible opulence basically at the expense of their own people. All of that oil money which should go to fuel an economy and to benefit the population goes straight into the Royal families pocket to fuel what can best be described as the most decadent lifestyle since the Roman emperors. The Saudi Royal family have been able to get away with this and stay in power by paying off the radical Imams and keeping them and their restless young men busy by subsidizing their spreading their barbaric form of Islam.
This has had horrible results for the rest of the world. To give just one example, the Afghans fought the Soviets for 10 years and never once engaged in suicide bombing. They only started engaging in such after Saudi funded Imams took over their mosques and started preaching that doing such was an act of martyrdom. The Chechens were never particularly radical Muslims until the Saudis and their money made them so. The Saudi Royal family says in power by paying off their Imams and sending their dangerous unemployed youth off to fight and hopefully die in places like Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria.
American government officials get taken in by the Saudi Royals because they meet them and see how reasonable they are. Yeah, the Royals themselves are reasonable. The problem is they live in terror of a lot of people who are not reasonable and stay in power by paying off and enabling those people to go out and cause harm in the rest of the world.
King Salman is 80 so when he goes to his reward, does Saudi Arabia collapse into a succession crisis or is the succession mapped out?
Another question: time to go long on oil futures?
Old Ibn Saud's got one more son left to inflict on his people. After that, I have no idea.
It might. The population hates the Royal Family. It is pretty hard to stay in power forever when your population hates you. They have always been one popular uprising away from hanging from lamp posts or running for their lives to exile.
They have to open things up to make things better for their population. This can't go on forever. But if they open things up, they risk losing control. They are in a tough spot.
Nah.
/every dictator ever
Two more posts in the last 10 minutes but still no links...
I told you. It is out of respect for King Abdullah.
Screw it, here's your morning links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbGzqbeWetc
I spammed mine on the "Man Flies Family" article.
To tie this post together with yesterday's post about the Libertygirl kerfluffle, remember that, when neocon fucks like Jennifer Rubin call even a slight inching away from a full-on, all-the-time-everywhere interventionist foreign policy "extremist," they are also framing status quo, realpolitik alliances with barbaric assholes like the Saudis as reasonable and level-headed.
(whew, that's a long sentence)
I suspect that's Jesse's point.
11 of 19
:saudiflag:
Michael, your sarcasmometer definitely needs a recalibrating.
You're insane.
What's insane? The whole rxn seems to be about (1) the fact that people were put to death, (2) that they were by beheading, and (3) that the sheik was friendly to the USA, and most of the people here are critics of the USA because they're in the USA.
Beheading is not punitive like other forms of dismemberment, it's just a way of killing somebody. And when you consider the types running around Saudi Arabia, how do you know they weren't the types you'd want to put to death too? And why do you assume the worst about friends of the USA, just because the USA is what you usually criticize? I assure you that if you were somewhere else, you'd be mostly criticizing that country.