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He only killed grown-ups History is a flexible commodity. More like therapy really:
John Kerry started his acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic convention by giving a military salute and saying, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” He was introduced, very movingly, by a veteran who lost both legs and one arm fighting in Vietnam. On stage were other Vietnam veterans who served with Kerry on one of the so-called swift boats going up the Mekong river. That swift boat provided the metaphor for Kerry’s whole speech. Evoking “our band of brothers” he said: “We may be a little older, we may be a little greyer, but we still know how to fight for our country.”
There is plenty of this kind of eulogising in the Guardian.
Stange is it not? The very same people who would have been spitting at John Kerry and calling him a “fascist baby-killer” in the 1960’s are the same ones who are now getting all misty-eyed and choked up over his Vietnam war record.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Note that Kerry’s Band of Brothers were all his subordinates. His peers , i.e. his fellow Swift Boats commanders despise him. They make up a good bit of the membership of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
The guy’s Vietnam record was never examined when he was a Senator, now he is going to get a going over.
In the end the determination should be —
Fake American War hero
Real North Vietnamese War Hero
Oh, it has nothing to do with what he did in Viet-nam. It is part of a ploy to win the election by seeming strong on defense. He is trying to play both ends at the same time: pass on the image of the Anti-War Hero to those who are still lost in the Sixties; and use the Swift Boat War-Hero image to play to the other side.
I’m sure he hopes he can keep the two sides apart and each believing their image is the true one and the other is just there to win the election.
It is also to Kerry’s advantage if he can make the campaign run on fluff instead of actually laying out a real program.
I still think Leiberman was the Democratic Party’s only chance at a really viable candidate. The media is trying hard to make this look like a horse-race because that sells papers. Personally I would not be surprised if Kerry gets not just beaten but buried in November. It is a real possibility.
There may be much to despise about the Bush Presidency. But the ability to fight the current World War is not one of those short comings.
Personally I would not be surprised if Kerry gets not just beaten but buried in November.
I would like to go on record that I predict an absolute blowout by Bush–he will crush Kerry on par with Reagan’s crushing of Mondale. I could be totally wrong, but that’s the feeling I’m getting.
What if Poop Deck Johnnie is playing rope-a-dope with his military records, hiding them until October and then releasing them?. If they clearly show he earned his Purple Hearts and his other decorations, he will put a hole in the Swifties boat. If he won’t release them, he is dead.
His latest comment, that he’d fight a more sensitive WOT, and Teresa saying the way to end it is to hold hands and talk about it, should bury him without the Swiftboat guys.
Alfred E Neuman and Dale, I’m with you. I think Kerry will, to his genuine astonishment, be buried.
I also have a theory. Kerry was in Vietnam for a grand total of four months. If someone added up all the hours he has spent on public platforms and rallies, and on the telly, wittering on about his service in Vietnam, I’ll bet it would add up to more time than he actually spent there.
He and Theresa are going to end up a couple of Heinz Baked Has-Beans.
I continue to find the fact that supposed libertarians prefer George Bush to John Kerry bizarre. Bush is an ardent statist who has nearly completely sabotaged the international effort to destroy Al Qaeda by spending a quarter trillion dollars on Iraq instead of Afghanistan & Pakistan, who has vastly expanded government spending in the United States, who is an ardent protectionist, who is in favor of radically diminishing the rights of people his nutty Christian religion tells him are “bad”, etc. Even the few things that he has done domestically that make vague sense, such as his tax cuts, have generally been done in an assinine way that increases the complexity of the tax code, and said tax cuts will expire soon anyway as he didn’t have the testicles to make them permanent.
Kerry is no worse than Bush in any obvious respect. Perhaps Bush lies more about being in favor of economic freedom, but he certainly doesn’t do anything about those lies so why should we care?
As for war records, George Bush pretends to have served his country, but of course he used family connections so he would never have to risk his neck in actual combat at all. Dick Cheney dodged the draft, too. At least Kerry never has to think about the guy who went in his stead so that he could spend his days driving drunk and snorting cocaine, like our President. (And no, that’s not a slander — he was was convicted in court.)
I don’t understand what is going on here. If you are real libertarians, you’ll hate both of the major US parties sufficiently that you won’t be cheering for either to win. Neither is at all in favor of the open society. Both do horrible things to increase the size and scope of government. I can’t see how one can cheer for either, and yet a large fraction of you seem to be ardent Bush supporters. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Perry Metzger – Your points are fair enough, but as we have pointed out on this blog before, the emotions of the Brits are not engaged by American domestic issues. Our interest is on the war on terrorism, and we are in the front line – or close enough – and this is what matters to us in an American president.
Mr Bush is robust on protecting enlightened Western civilisation. Mr Kerry is so-so. Mr Bush had the strength of will to conquer his addictions. Mr Kerry, who is addicted to himself, has not. Bush keeps his own counsel and plays his cards close to his chest. Kerry’s a blow-hard.
Mr Bush has an engaging way with him. John Kerry looks and talks like Ed Muskie, another personality boy who never was. The way I perceive it, and I can only form perceptions from the same information we all have, Mr Bush is genuine and Mr Kerry has Blairesque delusions of grandeur. I think Mr Bush is a man of action and Mr Kerry is a man with an overweening sense of his own place in the scheme of things.
Having just seen the latest version of Richard Conden’s, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, it is very striking just how similar Kerry’s story is to the anti-hero of that story – and it was written some forty years ago!.
Maybe Kerry is the Kennedy’s ‘Manchurian Candidate’, after Ted threw away any chance of being elected, they looked around for a puppet to put in his place – the best they could find was Kerry. The story could well have been a blueprint for the this latest Democrat scam…
That Kerry served only four months, and took his cine camera along with him, seems very suspect, he must have thought he was going on holiday… The man is obviously a ‘flake’ by nature.
“As for war records, George Bush pretends to have served his country, but of course he used family connections so he would never have to risk his neck in actual combat at all. Dick Cheney dodged the draft, too. At least Kerry never has to think about the guy who went in his stead so that he could spend his days driving drunk and snorting cocaine, like our President. (And no, that’s not a slander — he was was convicted in court.)”
Wouldn’t a true libertarian favor somebody who DIDN’T murder people for the government over somebody who did?
Why would a libertarian find a problem with any of these things? A true libertarian would believe that EVERYBODY should dodge the draft because it is an immoral statist ploy for the government to negate the rights of free citizens and further the warfare/welfare state.
A true libertarian would believe that anybody should have the right to use cocaine if they so choose, and a true anarcho type libertarian would even say he has a right to drive drunk, as long a she doesn’t hurt anybody.
For the record, Dick Cheney went to college, got married and had a child while he was draft age, all things that exempted people from the draft at that time. Are you implying that he wouldn’t have done those things if there was no danger of being drafted? “Dodged the draft” implies that he fled to Canada or tried to pull a fast one on his draft board (like Bill Clinton). Of course he did none of those things.
Again, what is somebody who is trying to admonish people for not being libertarian enough going around complaining about draft dodging? Sounds like liberal in libertarian clothing to me.
Perry Metzger,
If you care to actually read what I wrote (rather than deploy your auto-reflexive response mechanisms) you will see that I have made no comment about Mr. Kerry at all.
“Dick Cheney dodged the draft, too.”
a) Cheney was a father, and was thus not in the draft pool.
b) You make it sound like Bush peeled potatoes. He flew fighter jets. While that isn’t excactly taking fire in the bush, it’s probably more dangerous than quite a few positions in the army, navy and airforce.
The ‘introducer’, Max Cleland, did NOT lose both arms and a leg ‘fighting in Viet Nam’. As he was about to have beer with friends, he bent over to pick up a grenade lying on the ground in a NON-COMBAT zone, and it blew up. (he was about to have beer with friends.) See Ann Coulter’s article on this. (Townhall 12 Feb. 2004)
Samuel R. Walker
Verity’s description of Kerry as a man with delusions of grandeur, would seem to fit the man quite nicely.
To all those who try to parry the criticism of Kerry by referring to Bush, it is Kerry who continually attempts to use his prefabricated, four month war record as proof that he is a fit leader. He invites inspection and subsequent criticism.
Four months,- I ask anyone with a shred of commonsense – is it possible for a man to be sufficiently wounded, (to merit the award), and to recover three times in such a short period? if it is possible that the medal was awarded for superficial injury, (as appears to be the case), then the whole concept of the award is trivialised, and Kerry is metaphorically, ‘giving the finger’ to all those genuine recipients. who really did suffer injury.
I still suspect that his whole political career was ‘engineered’ from ‘day one’, with the Kennedy political machine as prime suspects. After all, it was the original Kennedy that espoused the idea of grooming presidential candidates from an early age, in the first place.
I do love a good conspiracy!……
I think the real point is that 4 months or 4 years in Vietnam doesn’t make one more or less able to be Commander in Chief of the United States. 15 years ago I worked at Dominoes pizza. That doesn’t mean that I have the experience, the knowledge or the skills to be the CEO of Dominoes pizza.
The transformation of John Kerry from a war-protesting hippy, the most liberal member of the Senate who used that office to continually hamper our nation’s foreign policy, from voting against miltary expenditures to putting up roadblocks to fighting communism (Daniel Ortega had no better friend in the US Senate) to somebody who portrays himself as tougher than Republicans on our nations enemies, is stunning. I don’t think even Bill Clinton would have the audacity to try to pull a ruse like that, and he was the master.
Dspears,
The point that I was trying to make is that someone who is so duplicitous and conniving, and is willing to participate in such a charade, has serious character flaws that make him unfit to be President.
You are correct, there is no requirement to be a war hero to run for President, but surely if a candidate lists that as one of his achievements, then at least we should get the real article, not some pretentious, mentally defective wannabe.
A true hero, would be far more modest regarding his exploits., particularly if he had commited some of the derring-do that Kerry claims.
The man is a fraud, and should be judged on his exploits, experience and character, not just on his own overblown publicity…
Ernest Young and DSpears – Kerry is not only a fraud; he is a manufactured fraud.
Bleating on throughout this campaign about his four months in Vietnam is risible. Four months ago, it was May. That’s how short four months is. In that short space of time, despite not knowing the terrain or the enemy, having only just arrived, he performed three acts of supreme bravery? Surely this extraordinary sequence would have received intensive coverage at the time? Surely this reeks? Are they that easy to get? People who served a genuine tour of duty in Vietnam for three or four years would have come home with trunkfuls of Purple Hearts. But that didn’t happen. Just in Kerry’s case.
Did anyone else gag when he slyly started being referred to as JFK? By the unbiased press? Oh, pulleeeeeze …
And the fact that Kerry was on the antiwar bandwagon, sharing a platform with that great patriot Jane Fonda has been buried with all the landfill that money can buy. They probably even had Michael Moore sit on it to tamp it down a bit.
With George Bush, what you see (and hear – grammatical errors and all) is what you get. Ernest Young is right: Kerry is a fraud.
Anyone else read Mark Steyn’s column about him and his imperious wife’s (photo op) lunch engagement at a Wendy’s fast food outlet? When asked for their order, Teresa pointed at a photo on the wall and asked, “What’s that?” The waitress responded, “That’s a bowl of chili.” Teresa went with the chili. Ol’ JFK ordered a Frostee, whatever that is, but maybe an icecream cone or a slurpee drink. His guess is as good as mine.
Then they were chauffered to a yacht where, to their vast relief, they could eat their real lunch in an environment where photos of the food weren’t glued to the walls.
I have nothing against rich people, the establishment, and yachts, and I wouldn’t mind numbering yacht owners among my acquaintance. It’s the slumming that sticks in the craw. And the lordly pretension. Ernest Young is right.
“And the fact that Kerry was on the antiwar bandwagon, sharing a platform with that great patriot Jane Fonda has been buried with all the landfill that money can buy.”
Not only that, but Kerry as much as anybody, was responsible for the enduring image of Vietnam veterens as mal-adjusted, drug addicted basket cases who couldn’t live a normal life after their government forced them to go half way around the world and commit war crimes against innocent people who just wanted to set up a peaceful worker’s paradise. The reality is that a poll done not too long ago showed that something like 80% of Vietnam veterens would volunteer again (most were volunteers, despite the popular image of poor draftees who couldn’t buy their way out).
He lied, pure and simple. The people who testified with him were fakes with stolen serial numbers. Nobody can find ANYBODY who was actually in Vietnam to corroborate these stories. In fact, Mai Lay was the exception not the rule.
Genuine people can oppose war and that’s fine. But the Vietnam protester movement had a lot more sinister motives that involved the radical left-wing politics of professors, intellectuals, and celebrities who are still radically outside the mainstream. In a word, they were communists.
In the late 70’s Joan Biez tried re-organize the old anti-war faction in order to oppose the communist government of Cambodia and it’s mass murder of 1/7 of it’s population. The silence was deafening, and was only broken by people like Jane Fonda who denounced Biez for giving “the right an issue to prove their viewpoint.” Of course “the right” had predicted exactly what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after America left: mass murder.
The fact that the anti-war left was not willing to oppose war and mass murder that was committed by (fellow?) communists speaks volumes.
The more I learn about John Kerry and the people who share his world view, the more he scares me.
The Hanoi Candidate. A true Useful Idiot.
D Spears – But they’re the best lies money can buy. You should appreciate the quality.
“who is in favor of radically diminishing the rights of people his nutty Christian religion tells him are “bad”, etc”
And the Libertarians wonder why nobody votes for them.
Perhaps their election slogan could be “The majority of Americans are nutcases following a nutty religion and WE will put them right”.
That should go down well in the South and the Midwest.
When liberal libertarians drop their insane desire to destroy the nations that have granted them freedom, and understand that traditionalist social conservatism, Western nationalism and political libertariansim are inseperable, then they might start getting somewhere. Until then they will be rightly ignored.
The claim to have been in Cambodia Christmas 1968 has more holes than a Swiss cheese ans smells as ripe.Kerry even said in the Senate that being shot at whilst there is “seared into his memory”.I’m going to buy a copy of “Unfit to Command” which blows the gaff on all his pretensions.
Yes Shawn,
I too have often noticed the ease which ‘so-called’ Libertarians, dub anyone with a different religious outlook to them, as ‘nutty’, or worse. It would seem that it’s their way, or ‘no-way’, with no room (or respect), for any other opinion.
It appears that atheism is the ‘in thing’ amongst them, and that, of course Darwinism etc. is the only sensible way to think about the more ‘mystical’ side of the human psyche. They really do have a very big headed, know-it-all approach, to matters of a religious nature. All very arrogant and un-libertarian. Could it be that they have replaced a ‘mystical’ religion with a ‘materialistc’ religion, but fail to recognise the latter as being a religion?
Well, good luck to them, they are fortunate they have all of the answers to life’s little mysteries, I happen to think they know as little as the rest of us, and just want an excuse to feel superior…:-)
Their vehemence against their ‘ex-religion’, of whatever brand, gives a hint that perhaps they are not so atheistic as they think, and that some vestige of belief lingers in the recesses of their memory, a bit like reformed smokers, always the harshest critics of those that continue to indulge…
Hah – liberal libertarians.
Collect enough liberal libertarians – the party of pot, porno, and puerility – and pretty soon you get a backlash demanding state regulation of heroin sales, live sex shows, drunk driving, adult sex with teenagers, etc.
The paradox of libertarianism, is that you can only have general liberty when there is no need for the state – i.e people act reasonably virtuously. When enough people cease to act reasonably virtuously, the folks who would rather not have their efforts to live a more or less decent life request state intervention. Liberal libertarianism – the argument that there should be no restraints on behavior, whether by the state or by voluntary participation in social institutions like churches or inherently conservative groups like the rotarians, neighborhood associations, etc – is at best only a temporary governing philosophy.
Rehabilitating the image of the American soldier in the world will have a positive effect on this war.
Maybe not immediately but in time.
It is going to be a very big shock to the world that Americans do not order their soldiers to be war criminals.
This is going to destroy a lot of world views and cause deep depression on the left. I was fortunate to make that transition 25 years ago.
I used to be a Libertarian until 9/11 proved to me that they were bat shit crazy. I’m embarassed to go to meetings these days because the crazyness I once engaged in is so evident.
They actually believe that the only thing keeping them from Green Party like success is that not enough people have heard of them. That if only they ran the right kind of ad.
The problem isn’t the ads folks. It is the product.
Medical marijuana gets 55% to 75% approval and votes when a moderate bill is up for public vote. The Libs in a good year get .5%
Pathetic.
I do so hope that the real 1968-1974 choices in Vietnam get re-examined.
1) Stay, fight evil communism, die, push drafted soldiers into becoming killers of both Viet Cong, and innocents;
2) Leave, let communism take over, accept the genocide of Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
Kerry argued for choice (2), and the US followed it (Nixon); but few anti-Vietnam war protesters accept that they SUPPORTED genocide — because they didn’t want it. Nobody wants the bad parts of their choice, but only the good parts is NOT a real choice.
How many days did Kerry spend in the hospital? Zero?
“but few anti-Vietnam war protesters accept that they SUPPORTED genocide — because they didn’t want it. Nobody wants the bad parts of their choice, but only the good parts is NOT a real choice.”
This shouldn’t have come as a shock tyo anybody, the first thing communists do when they come to power (never after an election of course) is they start murdering people on a massive scale. It’s in the communist revolution handbook. Pol Pot was proud of the fact that he was creating the most pure communist state in existence. He thought of himself as a perfector of the art. Of course that meant 2 million people had to die, a price that Mr. Pot was willing to pay.
The silence in America was deafening when this was going on, and it took the American left so by surprise that they were at a loss to explain it. So they blamed Nixon.
If the U.S. economy has its likely effect on George Dubya, Anointed One-and-Only Scourge of Islamofascists, Calibrator of Our Moral Compass, and Man of Action, y’all may have to look out for your own hind ends while we get our civil liberties and our society sorted out.
Here is a link to the The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story.(Link)
Kerry is a liar and a faker and a phony, no doubt about it.
David Carr is correct. The leftist media and people in general think the other people are dumb. Not only do the unwashed masses need nannying and “guiding” in every respect by the “intelligencia”, but when election time comes you can easily fool them by a cheap and dumb fraud like Kerry posturing like a war hero.
We need in the US a libertarian movement that takes into account the religious and cultural views of most Americans, that understands the need for a clear moral philosophy (which does not have to be exclusively Christian or even religious, it could be Objectivist), which understands that patriotism, national freedom, border control, and opposition to mass immigration are essential to the preservation of liberty, and that does not, as the Libertarian Party does, advance nutbar ideas like “child rights”, which middle America is always going to reject.
In short, we need a libertarian movement that is culturally and morally sane.
And we need a workable strategy. A single Libertarian Party is a poor one at best, a joke at worst. Instead, we should emulate the Christian Right and colonise the Republican Party from within at the grassroots level. We should work to promote libertarian political ideas within the Christian Right, church groups in general and also to other groups like conservative Jews.
This does not mean that we should reject those who have socially liberal views, but we need to come to some common ground that allows us to work together, and at the least that common ground should be the recognition of the need for some kind of moral philosophy of traditional virtues (respect for property, thrift, self-control, patriotism, respect for family and elders etc), and commitment to national freedom and border control.
I hear ya, Shawn.
Shawn gives a pretty good list of reasons why I do not consider myself a full-blown libertarian, as if there were on definition of that term in the first place.
I’m a minarchist.
Part of why true libertarians (Rothbardians) are not and will not occupy a significant protion of the political landscape is that they don’t play well with others. One of their simultaneously annoying and admirable qualities is a dogmatic adherence to rigid principle, even when it leads them to kooky conclusions. As strange as it was to see the Republicans in charge of the government that they had spent 30 years deriding as a nonsensical waste, it would be 1000 times wierder to have a libertarian congress or president.
I’m not religious in any but the most trivial sense, but I don’t see anything in being a libertarian that says you have to be an atheist or detest religion. QUite the contrary. Religion has been one of the main things that has traditionally been savaged by statist governments throughout time, from the Romans to the Soviets. Not that religion hasn’t had it’s excesses, but the vast majority of those have happened because religion has gained control of government, which is the real problem from a libertarian viewpoint in the first place.
I am a fiercely patriotic American because I think America has a special role in the world, not only through history but in the future. America is different. The American people have a unique character and the foundations of the American government are superior to any in the world, even if they haven’t always been (or rarely been) adhered to by it’s elected officials.
The world would be a worse place today without American military power to resist the Nazis and the Soviets. I think the world will be a better place in the future if we continue to resist the Islamists (which I consider to be the latest in a long line of deadly ideologies in the world). Any ideology that professes to hate totalitarian rule and yet won’t lift a finger to fight against it is intellectually bankrupt. Any ideology that puts James Madison, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler all in the same category (statist) will never win me over.
That’s why I take a particular liking to the brand of libertarianism that is practiced at Samizdata. I have found a home.
David Carr says that the same people who would have been spitting at John Kerry and calling him a fascist baby killer are now getting misty over his war record. He’s right, and it’s a sure bet that the very same people would be sneering at Bush if he were trying to make any political gain of the same sort of “war record”. The Guardian would be full of sanctimonious reminders that service in Vietnam was really nothing to be proud of, and only someone with a very dodgy moral compass indeed would be crowing about it.
The left move seamlessly from ignoring the mass murder of the Cambodians to ignoring what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan, which especially angers me about female lefties.
Kerry is an opportunistic phony to such an extreme that it is painful to watch. As Ben Stein said, thousands of guys have won purple hearts, but nobody knows who they are. Kerry didn’t originally gain fame by winning three purple hearts; he did so by marching in anti-war demonstrations and calling other soldiers war criminals. So why isn’t he running on that point of view now?
I’m not sure, because I’m still fairly young, but somehow I doubt the Guardian, et al endorsed Bob Dole or George H.W. Bush because they were war heroes. Or that they would make the chicken-hawk argument when it comes to military action they favor.
Of course, the same Republicans who emphasized Dole and Bush I’s military records are now claiming that military service isn’t that important. Or that W. Bush’s draft dodging is somehow less shameful than Bill Clinton’s. And somehow I doubt had John McCain won the 2000 Republican nomination, the GOP wouldn’t be touting his military career up the wazoo.
Guess what ladies and gentlemen, it’s called politics. And as any self-described libertarian ought to know, politics is the art of bullshit. Why is anyone so surprised about it.
Daniel writes:
… politics is the art of bullshit. Why is anyone so surprised about it.
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Ah, the young.
These people are surprised because they’re so Pure they can’t see they’re eating grime. If you’ve read any history–and I’d bet you have–you might remember stories about just this sort of thing.
Consider reading Freud on the psychology of the group. Leaders are seductive, and people are pathetically happy to be seduced. It doesn’t matter what political philosophy individuals profess; the trap seems to be in our very nature. Power corrupts. Not the least among the reasons why, is that corruption is virulently contagious.
“Shawn gives a pretty good list of reasons why I do not consider myself a full-blown libertarian,”
I have to admit that I’m increasingly tilting away from libertarianism altogether, even minarchism. I still believe that gov should be limited per the US Constitution, and I will always believe that in general the gov should stay out of peoples personal lives as much as possible. But the moral and cultural decay in the West is alarming, and I’m open to the view that some gov intervention in certain areas may be necessary.
And while the good people of Samizdata, are an exception, even if I dont always agree with them, many of the self-identified libs I meet strike me as serious nutbars. Sadly this seems more true with US libs than with Europeans. The time since 911 has shown me US libertarianism at its worst. Now we have “Libertarians for Dean” and “Libertarians for Kerry” and “Libertarians for Nader”. Excuse me while I puke.
Iv’e never been a particularly educated person when it comes to politics and philosophy. My libertarian views came largely from reading Robert Heinlein. The only book on politics I have read is Barry Goldwater’s. But my disatisfaction with the lib movement has motivated me to do something about this, so I’m taking a holiday this weekend over on NZ’s beautiful west coast and taking Russell Kirk’s ‘The Conservative Mind’ with me.
“… politics is the art of bullshit.”
Sure, but some politicians are more phony, more creeps that others.