US Genera Secret Plot Protect Assad Bring Russia into War

[tapitsbo]

I am sitting aboard the starship Sinister Transnational Entity currently.

Happy NYE

[JackRiddler]

That's not a pretense I lay much trust in. Your joke aside, ha ha, what does it matter where you are in the world, where you grew up, how you identify (or are identified) as a "national," what languages you speak, etc.? Obviously these all contribute to one's perspective, even if one can transcend, and should always try to transcend, and even if it's not necessarily obvious which factors are more important than others. How much money you have might say a lot more than which passport you carry, it is true, or vice-versa, and there are a million other ways one might be influenced, often based in unknowable personal experience. One can be very unfairly judged for such things, it is true. On the other hand, they tend to tell a lot about what kinds of things one knows firsthand, and has experienced, as opposed to other kinds of things one tends to know from reading or hearing about them. Is any of this controversial? I make no secret of having grown up in New York, where I currently sit, or certain other aspects of identity (or "identity") I didn't mostly get to choose, but that in part define me and how (or from where) I see things, such as that I'm Greek as well as American, etc. So why not be forthright in this discussion?

[tapitsbo]

That wasn't my pretense; I agree that our identity has everything to do with this.

I know lots of people uphold the point of view that you do in this thread, and lots of them work for think tanks or in journalism.

The bizarre double standard where Hungary is fascist and poor Israel needs to be defended from anything that has the slightest whiff of mischaracterization seems like Stockholm syndrome to me.

But I guess I'm overlooking the part where every US presidential candidate "stands with Hungary".

Seriously though, where's your Jeremy Corbyn down there?

I live in a country where the last government tried to make criticism of Israel ILLEGAL.

While that was unsuccessful and is a little more extreme than usual, I think it says a lot about how eager the West as a whole is to genuflect to Zionism, which is indeed not omnipotent but manages to get away with absurd double standards like the immigration one (relevant to your Hungary example.) Tragically this genuflection often goes way beyond support into attacks on other groups of people...

So what if reality has everything to do with the power and nothing to do with fairness? That to me is just more encouragement to break the hypnosis that puts Israel beyond criticism. The country has so much influence over the West (we orbit it rather than it being a "satellite") that breaking our subservience to it should be one of the highest priorities especially of someone like you who is worried about "fascism".

Of course the controlled opposition "settler colonial" blah blah criticism is allowed, usually as an expression of sympathy for Palestinians. Real examination of Israeli influence on the West and other areas is not so welcome, though.

I can sympathize with millions of displaced and exiled people needing their own homeland after WWII. But time's up for it having such an insane degree of control over other countries' policy and such exceptional status. Of course you no doubt want to turn this into an argument about how there should be no countries in the first place, therefore claims about the differences between them are "statist" or whatever...

And I do get what you're saying about America being on retreat - when will America's Last Tantrum happen though?

Of course I feel like I've been trolled into writing this.

But most institutional messaging feels like trolling these days, anyway.

[JackRiddler]

I live in a country where the last government tried to make criticism of Israel ILLEGAL.

That's wrong. Where is that?

[slimmouse]

IMHO, Jack, bless him, really hasnt got to the heart of the problem yet.


Get some Graham Hancock down your neck. The world is a lot easier to understand if you do.

Its all Icke without the lizards. And it all makes sense

The greatest trick the devil ever played is to convince you that he is God.

Personally speaking, I find this a genuine model of assumption.

[seemslikeadream]

I thought the reference that Gordon made in this vid about Icke was great....without the dragons

I'm not going to mention the time cause ya got to watch the whole thing!
An Archaeology of Dragons


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuzU98S5LSA


The Golden Legend

[tapitsbo]

haha yes I like gordon's general mix of everything from animism to skepticism although I wouldn't come to his ramblings all gullible, I take it with a heavy clump of salt

and slimmouse I don't buy reptilian comptroller theories even figuratively I reckon them a distraction

and JackRiddler I was talking about the Harper government in Canada. And before anyone rips into Canadian uh policies I'm not defender of them.

Back to the thread topic: I know Russia has intimated support for less warlord-y forms of Sunni gov'ts in the ME conflict regions - does anyone think these have much chance of getting off the ground?

[JackRiddler]

What's bizarre, tapitsbo, is that you seem to think failure to provide an Israel-centric explanation for any and all US geostrategy (or most anything else) amounts to "protecting Israel from mischaracterization." Also, apparently, no government in the world can be criticized here without your prompt protest that Israel is worse by comparison, no matter how irrelevant this point right or wrong may be. I can't help you with this particular obsession.

And Graham Hancock? As a key to understanding the world? The problem with trying to discuss anything on this board is that a lot of people pop up who lack intellectual self-respect.

[seemslikeadream]

Graham Hancock is amazing ....and I do not lack intellectual self-respect in away shape or form...what I do know is that smugness is just plain silly...we all can't live in your little world Jack....it is just not big enough

it would be intellectually respectful if you would list your objections to Hancock...what about him that you think is so "unintellectual"

[seemslikeadream]

case in point......when ideas are mocked because of small closed smug minds ...when I started college Continental drift was not even being taught ....1968

When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience

More than 100 years ago, a German scientist was ridiculed for advancing the shocking idea that the continents were adrift
.........

But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift. A paleontologist called it “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication.” Wegener’s lack of geological credentials troubled another critic, who declared that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them.” He then produced his own cutout continents to demonstrate how awkwardly they fit together. It was geology’s equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s glove.

The most poignant attack came from a father-son duo. Like Wegener, University of Chicago geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin had launched his career with an iconoclastic attack on establishment thinking. He went on to define a distinctly democratic and American way of doing science, according to historian Naomi Oreskes. Making the evidence fit grandiose theories was the fatal flaw in Old World science, Chamberlin said; the true scientist’s role was to lay out the facts and let all theories compete on equal terms. Like a parent with his children, he was “morally forbidden to fasten his affection unduly upon any one of them.”

By the 1920s, Chamberlin was the dean of American science and his colleagues fawned that his originality put him on a par with Newton and Galileo. But he had also become besotted with his own theory of earth’s origins, which treated the oceans and continents as fixed features. This “great love affair” with his own work was characterized, historian Robert Dott writes, “by elaborate, rhetorical pirouetting with old and new evidence.” Chamberlin’s democratic ideals—or perhaps some more personal motivation—required grinding Wegener’s grandiose theorizing underfoot.

Rollin T. Chamberlin, who was also a University of Chicago geologist, did his father’s dirty work: The drift theory “takes considerable liberties with our globe,” he wrote. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” Young Chamberlin also quoted an unnamed geologist’s remark that inadvertently revealed the heart of the problem: “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.”

..........

The turnabout on his theory came relatively quickly, in the mid-1960s, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading and vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the earth.

But we perpetuate this illusion that our history is known, that we’ve puzzled out what it means. And our past is mysterious, more mysterious even than the stories that we invent to explain the few traces that remain – etchings on a gravestone, potsherds in a cave, piles of rocks in the woods. To tell my daughter that this stone chamber was built by a farmer is a bit disingenuous.
http://northernwoodlands.org/articles/a ... e-chambers

[tapitsbo]

That's not at all what I was saying, Jack, for the record...

This thread started with the Hersh article. The "protection from mischaracterization" was all about the IS stuff - which seemed like the main point of your posts (although there was a lot of other interesting stuff in there.)

I didn't make a single claim about Israel being central co-ordinators or anything of the sort - I was addressing what you said. You've brought up a lot of true facts but I feel like the discussion is being steered in a "nothing to see here" direction.

It still strikes me that the US and Israel are anomalous in their influence, aggression, unusually close relationship, and that at the very least, elements in both governments seem to act in co-operation with IS.

Suppose this could be framed as either criminal corruption or prudent geostrategy depending on one's persuasion.

It seems to me to strongly be the case that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are slowly getting thrown under the bus by the US and its allies. Of course this is maybe a good, or great thing.

If it means complete destruction of innocent lives, warlord or jihadi-controlled areas, displacement of populations, then maybe not so great.

I really have a tough time buying a lot of the stories about IS, which strikes me (and many other better informed individuals) as a big threat to Saudi Arabia

[tapitsbo]

I got "your post is being altered by another user" while I tried posting that...

FWIW, FYI

Of course all these events being discussed here, along with Wombat's post in the coup thread, correspond nicely to AlicetheKurious' allegation that the plan is to turn the entire MENA into a mass of highly fragmented territories won by warlords, as well as something resembling the Yinon Plan potentially taking place.

[JackRiddler]

Okay. Again, if you go back to the post by me that started this exchange, I don't think "nothing to see here" is in any way a fair characterization. Quite the opposite. Nor does it deny an Israeli-US axis, there is just a lot more to see. There is criminal activity on many sides, along with very imprudent, demented geostrategy (in fact, in my mind "demented geostrategy" is redundant). Even where we speak of "interests" these are usually irrational at their core. Stupidity and incompetence do not exclude malice and greed, in fact they all usually go together.

slad, I don't know shit about the history of the world, which makes me above average (since people can know even less than nothing). That doesn't mean every story of a distant magical past (bestowing us with networks that still run things today) that someone fabulates to fill in the gaps and sell books and merch has to be taken seriously in the name of open-mindedness. Though I'm happy with the Giza=Orion's Belt idea, no reason to doubt that (or to pretend it can be proven). Sorry.

[seemslikeadream]

Jack it would be nice if you didn't execrate/exaggerate so ........just when did you come around to continental drift?

[tapitsbo]

Of course there's criminal corruption everywhere but I personally find IS and Al-Qaeda more objectionable than the governments that they have been used to attack.

The "coalition" campaign against IS, especially until this fall, was most strange.