World Politics

[blutto]

Re: Re:

....just to put a foundation to that cherry picked quote....

Men get killed because of what they are; they’re on the other side. That’s what it’s all about. And of course it happened on both sides. This was a war; it wasn’t just Serbs killing Muslims. Muslims were killing Serbs. I mean this was a civil war with two sides fighting.

....and yeah read that article and you had to twist things pretty darn hard to get what you wanted out of them...and frankly your interpretation was self-serving crap....hope your lab work is not that shoddy....

Cheers

As always, your replies are vindictive and lacking any intellectual merit. But it is like the sun coming up in the east. Something I have gotten used to on a daily basis. I am shocked that you have been awarded a PhD. I don't think I have seen a more close-minded and negative person with a doctorate in my career in academia. Even the negative people occasionally try to argue things on merit.

Lost amid this hoopla is the deeply flawed research done by Johnstone about the massacre.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6494

The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) - a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) - a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard - far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika - was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard - in full colour - at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone's book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.

Were the victims soldiers or civilians. Or is any man or boy of military age a soldier by definition?

To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been 'executions'; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved - against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an 'enclave'. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial - she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre - it is an apologia for the Serb forces.

....here is something about the source you quoted....

Man of the Year

FPM's 2013 "Man of the Year" was Ted Cruz[2]

FPM's 2011 "Man of the Year" was the Wounded Warrior Project.[3]

FPM's 2010 "Person of the Year" was the Tea Party Movement.[4]

FPM's 2009 "Man of the Year" was radio and then-Fox News host Glenn Beck.[5]

On January 1, 2007, FrontPage Magazine named Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean its 2006 "People Of The Year 2006".[6] The two United States Border Patrol agents shot drug smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila in the buttocks near the US–Mexico border and were convicted of "eleven of the twelve counts alleged in the indictment, including assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with serious bodily injury, discharge of a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence and wilfully violating Aldrete-Davila's Constitutional, Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal seizure, as well as obstructing justice by intentionally defacing the crime scene, lying about the incident, and failing to report the truth."[7] They had been sentenced to 11 years and 1 day and 12 years imprisonment, respectively, and were subsequently incarcerated.[8] FrontPage Magazine considered them guilty only of "bureaucratic infractions"; "these men have lost their money, their reputations, and (perhaps soon) their freedom trying to protect our nation. For that, they deserve our thanks."[6]

FPM's 2004 "Man of the Year" was John O'Neill, the head of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.[9]

....and you complain about my use of Counterpunch....

Cheers

 

[aphronesis]

@dj, I have to question how close you've been to academia. B may push an agenda, but the pushback from the Clinton voters is on tether's edge.

 

[python]

Re:

@dj, I have to question how close you've been to academia.

why did it take you so long ? i read him...sometimes agreed...sometimes wondered. as soon as the emotional underpinnings (which are generally a fair game) were passed as intellectual and balanced (read: righteous) i cut the chase to call a fake.

 

[djpbaltimore]

Is what he does not frowned upon in your fields? Attacking a person and not the argument is not acceptable in science. I have seen no-one who is so brazenly vindictive and bullying. It doesn't mean that people are saints in science, but disagreements rarely get personal. I don't mind discussing ideas heatedly, but respect must be given. I can respect you even when we disagree. People like blutto have turned me off from the progressive side of politics.

 

[djpbaltimore]

Re: Re:

@dj, I have to question how close you've been to academia.

why did it take you so long ? i read him...sometimes agreed...sometimes wondered. as soon as the emotional underpinnings (which are generally a fair game) were passed as intellectual and balanced (read: righteous) i cut the chase to call a fake.

Well, your lack of scientific credibility in the clinic is not an open secret and was put on display this week. You were totally unmasked, resorting to more puerile name calling, which appears to be your main MO.

 

[aphronesis]

I won't speak for B. Left secrarianism is an issue. But your own defenses of Clinton and counterwhinges have often veered beyond rational. Or empirical. And there's an acute defensiveness that's come with this.

 

[djpbaltimore]

So basically you are saying that the bullying by b is deserved?

I don't accept that and I think that you don't believe that either.

 

[python]

i will leave my credibility to the comments of anyone besides those i consider fakes, like dj..your problem is that yet another person questioned your academic crap in the list is growing... a vindictive simpleton exposed naked lashing out against people like blutto is everything you call others. eat it and own it. untill then, get used to people - and now an academic like aphro - seeing threw a fake.

 

[djpbaltimore]

Guess what, I don't care what you think because I don't respect anything you say. I never claimed to have a Phd in PoliSci or history. I have been honest about my background. You have shown cowardice by throwing out ad homs instead of debating the substance of posts.

 

[python]

if you think exposing a coward who hides behind little jabs like calling people he does not agree with, calling them stooges of a foreign power - the people you never met or had the right to insult even if your disagreement was strong - then, yes, i will call what i see. where did you see that i care about what you guessed. as to ad hominems you clearly totally lack self reflection. or probably an intellectual honesty, may be a capacity to see own lame tactic at attacking a messenger. for almost 3 days i just watched how tried to insult blutto...what you did attacking blutto's academic credentials today was among the lowest i have seen.

thus you got what you begot. again. own it.

 

[djpbaltimore]

Blutto made this personal long before that incident. And I refuse to back down from a bully. The difference is that I find his behavior strange for someone with a phd. I don't question that he has one.The snake has accused me multiple times of being a 'fake'. That is a more serious accusation than the rhetorical jab I made in this thread. Anybody with an once of honesty can see that.

 

[aphronesis]

I have to ask again how many PhDs you've been around. I could say many things, but a world famous scholar (at Hopkins) threw an eraser at me for not going along. Recently, a donor told me that that same prof blacklisted intelligent students from his post doc courses at Harvard.

This happens daily.

 

[djpbaltimore]

The majority of the people i work with have phds. And that is not my experience. You can't teach like that anymore. And people can be bulldogs but it is based in the science, not your personal life.

 

[aphronesis]

No. You can't teach that way anymore (I never have.) But to pretend it's all warm and fuzzy is ...

On topic: politics is the subject and you've let slack a few times. Payroll? No Propaganda? Yes.

 

[blutto]

....geez that was a very strange way to end the day....a battle royale with me at the bottom of the pile...

...ok....truth be known I have over the last little while been testier than usual....that fire sorta got ignited somewhere after the coronation of Shillary....until then it was a normal day at the office, there was the clown car full of dolts, and the folks who most people in Soviet Canuckistan identify with, the Democrats....if you follow my posting history it is riddled with jabs at the Wrong Wing and all their fellow travellers...been making the same calls on Syria and the glorious revolution then as now....

....but then the world turned upside down...people were being called stupid for even considering going third party....instead of using critiques and discussion to persuade a certain cadre started using the rhetorical equivalent of bulldozers to get their points across and burying the victims if they didn't comply....fine...suddenly it was game on and from the way things have worked out here I can say I was not the only person to respond this way...though admittedly I have been a wee bit more combative than most...my bad...

...this has been a very polarizing election....that is being reflected here....maybe its the weirdness of this particular election cycle that has turned the Democrats into something like their own worst nightmare, or maybe I just assumed they were the kinda reasonable folks we admired here in SC....who knows?....bottom line this has become very ugly....some of fave sites have gone totally partisan in a way that would in the past make a doctrinaire Wrong Winger take pause.....everybody is taking a hard stand....tough times....tough choices......

....and last but certainly not least....a tranquillo non negative academic department, with really sweet heads, wonderful thesis advisors, no prima donnas, helpful secretaries, no back-stabbing, no profs stealing ideas from students, no idiotic students and no publish or perish pressures....ooops sorry I was dreaming...and btw this is not academia, and thank gawd for that....I don't have to write good, I don't have to be polite, and fcuk em if they can't take a joke...

Cheers

 

[BullsFan22]

Once a thread or topic forces (deliberate or not) into discussing their profession or educational background, it means it really swerved into a whole other dimension.

Oh, it must election season!

 

[Unchained]

Once a thread or topic forces (deliberate or not) into discussing their profession or educational background, it means it really swerved into a whole other dimension.

Oh, it must election season!

Or you could use world politics fuzzy math..the US claims it's borders are porous and refugees and immigrants are pouring through..the rest of the world starting with Turkey and Lebanon would probably access it a little different as their cultures border on collapse because of US politics. Our political season effects everyone...not in a self important way..more like a John Madden beer fart in an overcrowded elevator..

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

....just to put a foundation to that cherry picked quote....

Men get killed because of what they are; they’re on the other side. That’s what it’s all about. And of course it happened on both sides. This was a war; it wasn’t just Serbs killing Muslims. Muslims were killing Serbs. I mean this was a civil war with two sides fighting.

....and yeah read that article and you had to twist things pretty darn hard to get what you wanted out of them...and frankly your interpretation was self-serving crap....hope your lab work is not that shoddy....

Cheers

As always, your replies are vindictive and lacking any intellectual merit. But it is like the sun coming up in the east. Something I have gotten used to on a daily basis. I am shocked that you have been awarded a PhD. I don't think I have seen a more close-minded and negative person with a doctorate in my career in academia. Even the negative people occasionally try to argue things on merit.

Lost amid this hoopla is the deeply flawed research done by Johnstone about the massacre.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6494

The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) - a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) - a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard - far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika - was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard - in full colour - at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone's book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.

Were the victims soldiers or civilians. Or is any man or boy of military age a soldier by definition?

To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been 'executions'; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved - against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an 'enclave'. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial - she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre - it is an apologia for the Serb forces.

...here is a news flash for you...this is a politics thread on a bike forum....it is not a room in an ivory tower....different place, different rules...

....and btw there are no universal performance rules for PhD's off duty....heck I even knew a brilliant guy with a freshly minted Doctorate who could be just the sweetest guy in the world and he beat his wife....it takes all kinds and I have met many who are much more combative than myself....

Cheers

 

[djpbaltimore]

Yawn.. the bully plays the victim card.

As I was scrolling down, I actually thought that I would get a comment on the passage that I posted. Nah...... Guess not. Your outbursts seem most often IMO to be deflections away from the issues.

Still waiting on comments about Trudeau's trade deal bullying....

 

[blutto]

Re:

Yawn.. the bully plays the victim card.

As I was scrolling down, I actually thought that I would get a comment on the passage that I posted. Nah...... Guess not. Your outbursts seem most often IMO to be deflections away from the issues.

Still waiting on comments about Trudeau's trade deal bullying....

....can't say much beyond disappointed....and btw already posted my comment on that passage....

Cheers

 

[Semper Fidelis]

So when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she was all smiles when she presented him a small green box with a ribbon.

Lavrov opened it and, inside, there was a red button with the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.

"I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: 'We want to reset our relationship, and so we will do it together.' ...

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" she asked Lavrov, laughing.

“You got it wrong," said Lavrov, as both diplomats laughed.

“It should be “perezagruzka” [the Russian word for reset]," said Lavrov."This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.’”

operation reset. LMAO she got it wrong with Lavrov and she will do even worse when she is President.

Sad. She could not even get the correct word. Quadfocals should have asked some of the Russian Stooges for help.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Re: Re:

....can't say much beyond disappointed....and btw already posted my comment on that passage....

Cheers

No problem Blutov just let it go - DUDE BRAH!

You could have been called a Homophobic racist drunk.

 

[BullsFan22]

Re:

So when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she was all smiles when she presented him a small green box with a ribbon.

Lavrov opened it and, inside, there was a red button with the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.

"I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: 'We want to reset our relationship, and so we will do it together.' ...

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" she asked Lavrov, laughing.

“You got it wrong," said Lavrov, as both diplomats laughed.

“It should be “perezagruzka” [the Russian word for reset]," said Lavrov."This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.’”

operation reset. LMAO she got it wrong with Lavrov and she will do even worse when she is President.

Sad. She could not even get the correct word. Quadfocals should have asked some of the Russian Stooges for help.

When was this?

It must have been during Obama's first term, because things weren't too bad between the two countries. Remember when Obama took Medvedev out to some fine American fast food restaurants for some delish burgers? That was sometime in 2010. Or how about when, during the spring or summer 2012, Obama was 'caught' saying 'I'll be more flexible after the election..." Then Medvedev said, "I understand...my friend...." or something similar. That was about the last good thing I remember from the Obama administration having 'normal, decent' relationship with Putin and his administration. Normal and decent compared to what it is now.

 

[blutto]

Re:

Yawn.. the bully plays the victim card.

As I was scrolling down, I actually thought that I would get a comment on the passage that I posted. Nah...... Guess not. Your outbursts seem most often IMO to be deflections away from the issues.

Still waiting on comments about Trudeau's trade deal bullying....

....oh gawd you're channeling kwikki complete with the persecution complex....geez I don't miss him one bit....kinda ironic you picking up his mantle, though I gotta admit he had much more charm and was piles more believable...

Cheers

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

....can't say much beyond disappointed....and btw already posted my comment on that passage....

Cheers

No problem Blutov just let it go - DUDE BRAH!

You could have been called a Homophobic racist drunk.

....most excellent point, as usual....thanks for putting that into perspective....

Cheers