dagblog - Comments for "Mosul Airport falls - end of ISIS near"

Key bridge taken in Mosul -

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 06:40:55 +0000

In reply to Mosul Airport falls - end of ISIS near

Key bridge taken in Mosul - will allow much easier crossing into old quarter once pontoon/overaly fixed.

Peter, nonsense. I don't

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 09:08:00 +0000

In reply to These shouting matches at the

Peter, nonsense. I don't overhype Putin nor compare him in any way to Stalin, simply acknowledge historical Soviet and Tsarist facts and post-Soviet reality, trends and possibilities.

In case it hasn't been obvious, I much prefer containment as a strategy and delaying tactic for half of these problems, but sometimes sitting it out invites a Rwanda or ISIS that can't be or shouldn't be allowed to just wreak havoc and genocide.

Okay, withdraw the pejorative

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 09:02:42 +0000

In reply to I don’t feel any obligation

Okay, withdraw the pejorative, and just say the article was hugely questionable and doubtfully argued on all fronts. That there might be a couple valid points in a lengthy imbalanced portrayal is not a basis for discuasion. Nevertheless, I gave a couple points to highlight the absurdity, and that was met with "ok, but there's more". Yes, I can easily object to 10 or more points, perhaps partially or fully agree with 2, 3, who knows.

I stop. If you care about my response, tell me when you have a link you're 95% in agreement with, and don't expect I'll be exhaustive when I point out huge monstrous flaws. I've give up any hope that what you think will be convincing will be convincing to me - hopefully will at least have food for thought.

When the 56 escapee made the

Flavius — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 01:44:12 +0000

In reply to thanks for the hope springs

When the 56 escapee made the mistake of visiting Hungary in the 80s he was imprisoned in a

mental hospital. Got out somehow. Occasionally read his letters in the Times for which his son

is now a famous contributor.

On a personal level of course Evil and its opposite are universal. I was assured by an until then German friend that the holocaust was defensible " You don't know what they were like." And had kind assistance when my wife stumbled in the Moscow subway.

I won't venture into attempting to distinguish good and non-good countries. I guess Denmark hasn't done much harm since something was rotten there. But there's been no point since Plymouth Rock when we have not been heavily racist or have not been willing to let the poor die of conditions for which the rich are quickly treated. Nor when Russia has had a benevolent Government. Nor when Great Britain was great for its colonies , including us. France? Spain ? You jest.

revised to correct one letter

Re: Perhaps calling the

artappraiser — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 23:47:43 +0000

In reply to Perhaps calling the article a

Re: Perhaps calling the article a stinking pile of shit was over the top

Yes, but I do think calling it "agitprop" would be quite accurate. And very late 60's style at that, maybe SDS or Weathermen.

Yes the mental hospital thing

artappraiser — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 23:37:35 +0000

In reply to When the 56 escapee made the

Yes the mental hospital thing was a favorite of the USSR and satellites. For artistic "dissidents" especially, paint or write the wrong things and you got the free "medical care" that the state said you needed. I've met several of that experience from a major Leningrad artistic circle. They weathered well what might break someone from our culture, now successful and happy exiles for decades (missing the fall of the wall probably for the best.) From what I've read, the psychological and psychiatric professions there are still tainted by that whole thing, a much worse bunch of quacks than ours even.

One awful weakness that appears to remain from Soviet despair in Russia and former SSR's: substance abuse, specifically epidemic level of alcoholism.

On Holocaust denial, so widespread of a small minority, that is not particular to a culture, only to anti-Semitic Christian and Muslim tribalism. One should always keep in mind with such folk the old adage "First they came fro the Jews, then they came for....." because one can always be on the other side of that tribe in an instant, they need to create an enemy to blame for bad luck or whatever.

Perhaps calling the article a

ocean-kat — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 20:53:35 +0000

In reply to I don’t feel any obligation

Perhaps calling the article a stinking pile of shit was over the top but it wasn't a very good article. We have directly confronted the main point of the article, " This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars." I admitted that the US could be blamed for the deaths in the second Iraq war and pointed out the most obvious error in the article, the Korean War. I suppose I could have included a link to wikipedia but the error was so glaring I didn't think I needed to. "Directly responsible is a pretty strong indictment. I think in most cases there is at least shared responsibility and in some, like the Korean war, we were forced into it by the invasion from North Korea with the support of Russia and China. I don't think you've addressed that point "in a reasonable way" and PP pointed that out.

These shouting matches at the

Peter — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 20:39:05 +0000

In reply to I don’t feel any obligation

These shouting matches at the extreme seem to provide diversions for both the R2P interventionist and anti-imperialists sides. The fanatical wing PP seems to represent appear to be selling the idea that Putin's evil and treacherous ways are an excuse for and provide a justification for the US to match that evil with our own version. This is especially attractive to them for it allows them to try to sooth the butt-hurt of loss they suffered by trying to undermine Trump. This disease has spread far beyond McCarthyism to a sizeable segment of the population attempting to possibly destroy what remains of our republic.

Greenwald's posts on this subject are clever and use the extreme rhetoric of the interventionists to ignore the known more mundane poblems with Putin's Russia. He then smoothly slides into accepting the use of similar and related reactionary methods used to attack Putin and would celebrate their use if they could remove Trump. This is some kind of relativism that is dangerous but Glen has shown many times he is a closet Clintonite.

Your examination of the conflict in Yemen seems to leave out the party that started and continues the war. They are modeled on Hezbollah and fly the Iranian battle flag, Ansar Allah is a minority of a minority that had valid grievances but though they could conquer the whole country and rule over the majority. What you write about the US/Saudi involvement may be true but the Saudis can't allow a hostile regime to rule in Yemen. The fact that civilians are targeted in these urban conflicts is true whether it's the Iraqis in Iraq the Assad/Russian forces in Syria or the US in both, that's how these conflicts are fought.

P.S. Regarding your statement

A Guy Called LULU — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 20:31:07 +0000

In reply to I don’t feel any obligation

P.S. Regarding your statement that included: "... it's really a major passion of yours to prove this and to get the U.S. to be more isolationist." My position is not that we should be more "isolationist" but rather that we should be way, way, less "interventionist". That is significantly different.

I don’t feel any obligation

A Guy Called LULU — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 19:04:02 +0000

In reply to On Greenwald: After giving

I don’t feel any obligation or inclination to defend Greenwald’s, or any other person’s, “body of work” against any and all charges when I post something they say that I believe makes sense. Nobody, including exalted historical figures have created any published work of value who haven't also put out some some ideas that don't stand up under crutiny. Taking your own words at face value, you say you read him for years before deciding that he is not worth reading at all. Sounds at least a bit disingenuous to me.

What you call my “Bible”, PP calls a stinking piece of shit. I take the one method of ridicule about the same as the other, merely a way to object and deride [and say shut up] without substantiating in a reasonable way .. anything. Where I introduced that link to present a tally of the numbers I did, without going into great detail, acknowledge that determining “responsibility” for wartime deaths is open to debate and so one person’s count would be different than another’s. Even introducing that subject though, in a dialog where it has become appropriate because PP has brought up body counts to make a counter-argument, much less taking an affirmative position that the U.S. IS responsible itself or a hell of a lot of death has, here, only been met with dismissive ridicule.

Here is an example of how I would assign responsibility even though another country is the main actor. Yemen has a vicious civil war going on. Saudi Arabia is killing many there, destroying the country’s infrastructure, and is responsible directly for the extreme food shortages there which are, beyond dispute, already killing many and look likely to kill many, many, more. Quite possibly tens of thousands more, and soon, according to human rights organizations. Children and then women die first as is usual in such situations. Iraq is an example where approximately 500,000 children died and that number cuts off at the age of five. Maybe it was worth it to someone besides Albright and it wasn't totally our fault, I understand a little about the world, but it was a horrible outcome and should not be forgotten. Saudi Arabia is conducting their war on Yemen with U.S. supplied aircraft dropping U.S. supplied bombs from those aircraft that are taking targets from U.S. supplied intelligence and reaching their targets with the necessary aid of U.S. refueling aircraft. If those deaths are put on a list of ones that our country is responsible for then someone like PP for instance will call that list a steaming pile of shit if dismissing the list as total BS, which it is certainly not totally, fits his hollow argument of the moment.

As a side point to the responsibility question, I could agree in principle with the concept of R2P if I didn’t see its application as demonstrative of a diabolically insane, right-in-front-of-our-eyes demonstration, of murderous hypocrisy in the way it has been used as an excuse for war as an international political tool. Refer to the above.

I will point out once again that the root article to this entire back and forth is about McCarthy-ism coming back into play in our country. I showed where publications as connected to power and as respected by you as the NYT have run articles making that same point. While saying that life is too short for bla bla bla you have spent a lot of time constructing bla bla bla ridiculing my thinking in general as that of a childish dreamer and the work of the author of the root story as not worth paying any attention to, but not once in any way addressing the subject of the article. PP has done no better.