The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Videos/Podcasts on U.S./World sans Jingoism

    By A Guy Called LULU on Mon, 12/13/2021 - 5:56pm |

    Comments

    Discussion of Iran and the JCPOA


    by A Guy Called LULU on Mon, 12/13/2021 - 6:02pm

    Days are getting shorter, nights are getting colder, snow is getting deeper, I  just watched this.  A short documentary of the national security state by Gore Vidal.

    https://theanalysis.news/gore-vidals-history-of-the-national-security-st...


    by A Guy Called LULU on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 3:41am

    Gore Vidal was a douche. Getting rid of McCarthy was worse than having the Russian army and communist bureaucrats up your ass for 40 years? Worse than Mao's Great Leap Forward that killed 20 million or Stalin's Holodomor that starved 7 million? I mean you can't get halfway through that jerkoff's interview without tripping over irrational shit like this. And so Assange who's giving Putin blowjobs and encouraging naive idiots to hack the US (e.g. Joshua Schulte with Vault 7/8 hacking the CIA of all things) while helping Snowden steal and split gets his dumbass non-journalist ass extradited, but he's going to carry a Gore Vidal book on him to prove exactly what? That he lost all sense post-2014?

    Gore Vidal doesn't give you an excuse for pro-Communist espionage and exhorting criminal acts. Enjoy your prison time, Julian. Hope your kids remember you when you're out.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 4:58am

    I think of Gore Vidal as the epitome of a catty and witty elitist snob, and I found him enormously entertaining for that reason! His serious commentary and analysis should not be taken seriously for that reason, though he had a lot of Oscar Wilde-type wisdom as regards daily life. It's also how I feel about Oliver Stone (who doesn't have the snob thing, it should be noted -he's pop culture all the way) - enormously entertaining conspiracizing and the like, not to be taken seriously.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 1:10pm

    Thanks for the lucid description of your viewpoint.  Regarding Assange and the proper resolution of his case I disagree. So do a hell of a lot of other people who can couch their arguments in idealistic terms of what the proper role of journalism is and why the freedom to fill that role should be protected. Others add legalistic arguments and show how Assange's prosecution violates norms and standards that have long seemed foundational to our democracy.  Anyone who hasn't heard those arguments and so hasn't considered them could probably get a good primer watching below.  I am not pre-endorsing any and all things any of them might say but I totally expect some of them to give a very solid defense of the opinion I have come to. 

     

     


    by A Guy Called LULU on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 2:52pm

    You know i helped a little old lady across the street in 2008. Last year i killed 3 people, 4 if the one I nudged with my Prius survived. But i prefer you think of me as that grandma-friendly guy from 13 years ago. You can handle that, I'm sure.

    I'm on the masthead of a blog - I'm like a journalist, no? And if I start asking you all to hack into government files and send me controversial stuff to publish, that's just me doing my Dagblog duty, amirite? And if in the process you happen to send me the locations of all US troops in Eurasia and i just happen to pass that on to Russia, that's just journalism at its finest - truth just wants to be free. I did release some personal stuff on a few candidates, but to do news a few eggs gotta get broken. Pretty sure the one who killed herself over the affair was overreacting - politicians should be tougher.

    So video away. I think the US didn't charge Assange until Russia tried to extricate him from the Embassy and send him to Moscow. What a crazy bunch of kids.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/julian-assange-russia-ecua...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 4:02pm

    your link is a very interesting find! not the least of which I am surprised to see the name Robert Mueller play such a dominant role...then there's innocent little Ecuador...etc...lots of interesting stuff...

    and this endnote is interesting too!

     This article was amended on 20 December 2019 to omit the words “smuggle” and “plot” from the headline and text. They should have been avoided because they implied that diplomatic immunity is itself illicit. The Guardian’s independent standards Review Panel has issued a ruling on this article.

    edit to add: this journalism is not American, it comes from the land of Smiley and his people who, as le Carre knew, have a lot more experience at the craft of, er, "diplomacy" than Americans dowink


    by artappraiser on Thu, 12/16/2021 - 5:49pm

    Culture Wars Co-opting the Narrative?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/19/2022 - 3:17pm