“Am I sometimes exasperated by the barmier entries, including by those who appear to believe that all terrorism is always false flag? Yes, I am sometimes. But no more than I am exasperated by those who swallow the entire war on terror agenda and the associated wars and attacks on liberty at home.”
I am having an interesting dialogue with angrysoba in comments on his blogpost about one of my blogposts. Some people don’t seem to get the concept of open debate. Angrysoba appears to be angry because he believes it is wrong for anyone to be allowed to express views which he deplores.
http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2009/12/british-ambassador-and-his-loony.html
angrysoba,
Did you spell your handle right?
Shouldn’t it be angrysoab?
Methinks you dost protesteth too much.
Incidentally, according to the book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” by FW Engdahl, your tribe hardly gets a mention.
The evidence that the Anglo-Saxons have been the biggest cunts on the planet, with the main competetion coming from the Chineses and the Russians is pretty overwhelming.
Your tribe are such that they have nearly exterminated themselves and are merely the fall guys to be blamed by the idiots.
Do I get my 10 shekels now?
Tony
Arsalan, in my shivery old age I wear my T-shirt underneath my warm sweater, on the belt-and-braces principle.
I’m sure YOU don’t want to dominate me, but there are plenty of Muslims who think that I, as a gay man, should be killed. The extreme homophobia of many of your co-religionists is a nasty fact which has to be faced up to realistically, and not brushed under the carpet as in your rose-tinted fairy tale world.
But it doesn’t make me ‘Islamophobic’: See my posts “Religion gone rotten” and “Phobias – true and false” in Anticant’s Arena.
All best wishes to you and your family for 2010
Anticant
“The peer reviewed scientific paper clinched it for me.”
Mark Golding, you silly, sad person. You don’t understand the concept of peer review. It’s a cornerstone of science, and it’s not enough for someone to say, “This paper has been peer reviewed.” Peer review has to actually happen before it can be claimed to have had happened.
Mark Golding: “The peer reviewed scientific paper clinched it for me”
And which “peer-reviewed scientific paper” would this be?
I agree with Ruth’s comment “It’s more important to focus on what’s happening now than whether the holocaust took place or not.” Now to my mind holocaust denial is not only wrong and historically inaccurate, it is also cruel to the survivors and the relatives of the dead. But it happened 60 years ago and we don’t seem to have learnt much as a result of its memory. Just click on my name to see another case of human rights abuses by our government being widely denied.
Look at my well witnessed case (defamation, threats, harassment by MI5/6 on behalf of high establishment interests that are very close to the Royal Family) being covered up by 2 governments. Organizations like Amnesty International and The Guardian remaining silent because they put toadying to the establishment ahead of human rights where only one family is involved. They are today’s deniers. Do these censored and controlled organizations and their supporters have no shame?
As Les Dove describes in “The Torture Report” these same organizations cry crocodile tears at any human rights abuse abroad, while being careful to avoid any such issues at home.
A kind individual hit the nail on the head when he wrote recently on Media Lens ?” “Roderick Russell getting precious little help from anywhere, as the Black Dogs of Animal Farm persecute him illegally.”
angrysoba
I am old enough to remember the shockwaves caused by the newsreels of Nazi concentration camps when they were first entered by allied troops at the end of WW2, and I know people whose fathers and brothers serving in the British forces were traumatised for life by the horrors they saw in Belsen.
So I know that Holocaust denial is wicked rubbish.
But that is no excuse for using the Holocaust as a justification for the many immoral and reprehensible things done to the Palestinians by the State of Israel. Nor for the atrocities committed by the original terrorists – the Stern Gang – during the British mandate.
Two wrongs don’t make a right – unless one is a Zionist.
Tony: “Did you spell your handle right?
Shouldn’t it be angrysoab?”
No. What would that mean?
“Incidentally, according to the book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” by FW Engdahl, your tribe hardly gets a mention.
The evidence that the Anglo-Saxons have been the biggest cunts on the planet, with the main competetion coming from the Chineses and the Russians is pretty overwhelming.
Your tribe are such that they have nearly exterminated themselves and are merely the fall guys to be blamed by the idiots.
Do I get my 10 shekels now?”
Tony, what the Hell are you babbling about you weirdo?
What is “my tribe”?
What is your tribe?
Why are you talking about being paid in shekels?
” It’s our governments who have recently exterminated more than a million Iraqis and maimed millions more. It’s our governments who are continually bombing civilians in lands rich in resources and strategically important to them.
And yet it seems it’s OK to do this but it wasn’t OK for the Germans to exterminate the Jews.”
Look, Ruth, there are plenty of wrongs about the Iraq war and plenty of things that should probably be keeping Bush and Blair awake at night (and may well do) but saying if it was okay for Bush and Blair to wage a war which unleashed a massive and hideous sectarian battle in Iraq then it was okay for the Nazis to kill six million Jews and millions of others is a ridiculously fatuous thing to say.
If I thought that I were living in Hitlers’s Germany, I would be resisting every day. I would be ethically compelled to blow up train tracks and destroy government buildings, and perhaps do even worse. At a minimum, I would exploit today’s free speech rights to protest every single day.
Since I don’t think I live in Hitler’s Germany, of course I’m off the hook.
But someone like Ruth, who believes that the U.K. and the U.S. of today is the same as the Germany of Hitler, is in a really bad position.
Well I’m sure she perhaps attended at least two protests this year. If the weather was nice.
@angrysoba : “…saying if it was okay for Bush and Blair to wage a war which unleashed a massive and hideous sectarian battle in Iraq then it was okay for the Nazis to kill six million Jews and millions of others is a ridiculously fatuous thing to say.”
No, angry-son-of-a-bitch (now do you get it?), ‘fatuous’ is turning Ruth’s argument around and then trying to make out that’s what she said.
@St Larry from Louis: “If I thought that I were living in Hitlers’s Germany, I would be resisting every day. I would be ethically compelled to blow up train tracks and destroy government buildings, and perhaps do even worse. At a minimum, I would exploit today’s free speech rights to protest every single day.”
Do you think you would notice?
“To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted.’… Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow… Suddenly it all comes down, all at once… You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”
German professor describing the arrival of Nazism in Europe to American journalist Milton Mayer.
Angry Son Of a Bitch,
It is important to maintain a sense of humour when the bastards are coming for you.
I met an Israeli Vet on a Greek Island in September…He was 26 years old.
He had a great deal of difficulty in communicating.
I felt really sorry for his wife…
The Trauma must be aweful
Tony
Hawley Jr.
Maybe you should read a few of those I have mentioned earlier. Browning, Goldhagen…perhaps Hilberg or others.
Breaking in the shops of Jews or stripping them naked and shooting them in the back of the head may seem like “increments” to you but if that is the case then maybe you should be more on the lookout. After all, if those aren’t increments, maybe ranting about “usury” or “Zionism” or “global banking” is where it starts.
What do you think?
Do you think YOU would notice?
Larry says : “If I thought that I were living in Hitlers’s Germany, I would be resisting every day… ethically compelled to blow up train tracks and destroy government buildings, and perhaps do even worse. ”
Actually, you’d more than likely be an enthusiastic supporter. But to the point – if Ruth did any of these things you mention, even protesting, she’d be arrested and charged with terrorism. Just like a the vegan cook Maya Evans, who now has a charge of international terrorism for reading out the names of dead soldiers at the Cenotaph near Downing Street.
http://glennbarder.livejournal.com/3143.html
What are you trying to say, exactly – that Ruth is a coward for _not_ doing these things, or that she _should_ cause acts of terrorism (at least as the state sees it) ? Surely you wouldn’t be encouraging anyone to cause terrorist acts?
*
hawley_jr: I do believe you’ve read “They Thought They Were Free”… I was just thinking of getting my own copy to quote. That book, written in the late 1950s as I recall, serves as an incredibly important account of how ordinary people just became used to accepting what should be totally unacceptable. And incrementally is exactly how it happened – only the ill-informed would toss out the notion that Jews were stripped naked and shot as if that just spontaneously happened at the outset of the process of Nazism.
Here’s a academic review of the defining features of Fascism, as seen in Germany, Spain, Italy and so on:
http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm
There are alarming and growing similarities with our governments, particularly the US, and most especially under Bush. If anyone is serious about keeping fascism at bay, these are the points (in the link above) to be concerned about, not some nonsensical worry that someone is mentioning “usury” or “global banking”.
hawley_jr,
Great post.
Nearly as good as this on Alternet…
Posted by: red porch on Dec 31, 2009 7:09 AM
Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
“Laughing Stock Of The World…
A boy with a firecracker in his undies brings America to its knees…”
It gets my vote for the most efficient use of 18 words two of which were “a”
Tony
Most “ordinary nice decent” Germans were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler until it all started to go wrong for them.
After all, he restored their self-confidence and pride in being the ‘Master Race’.
What’s the difference between that self-delusion and American ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘manifest destiny’?
Glenn,
I don’t have time to look into that particular case, but I’m sure you have it entirely wrong. I know that the U.K. is not the most free country in terms of free speech, but surely it can’t be that you’re automatically arrested if you engage in protest.
If it is that bad in the U.K., that I encourage you to move to the U.S., where your crazy rants will remain unmolested. We have free speech here. I gather that the same is true for Japan, where angrysoba now resides.
“If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”
The future teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold
So if I can shoot rabbits
Then I can shoot fascists
Bullets for your brain today
But we’ll forget it all again
Monuments put from pen to paper
Turns me into a gutless wonder
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
Will be next
Will be next
Will be next
Gravity keeps my head down
Or is it maybe shame
At being so young and being so vain
Holes in your head today
But I’m a pacifist
I’ve walked La Ramblas
But not with real intent
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
Will be next
Will be next
Will be next
Will be next
And on the street tonight an old man plays
With newspaper cuttings of his glory days
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next
Will be next
Will be next
Will be next
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mwiUYkJ8I
Tony
Glenn,
Rense.com? Rense.com?
Once again the crazy American right wing gets cited here!
@angrysoba: “Breaking in the shops of Jews or stripping them naked and shooting them in the back of the head may seem like “increments” to you…”
You are ascribing the words of a German professor to me. Though I can’t find any instance of the word ‘increments’ in the quote from him, nor any mention of the acts you’ve so graphically described.
My point to you was about the trick you used in responding to Ruth’s argument.
Larry said: “I don’t have time to look into that particular case, but I’m sure you have it entirely wrong”
Now that’s a level of arrogance and laziness I have not come across in some time. Typing “Maya Evans arrested” into a search engine, this was the first result:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4507446.stm
Since following links seem to cause you difficulty (I did provide references with the original), this is how the BBC starts the story:
—start quote
A peace campaigner has been convicted under a new law banning unauthorised protests from taking place within half a mile of Westminster.
Maya Anne Evans, 25, a vegan cook from Hastings, was found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
She was arrested in October after reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq at central London’s Cenotaph.
—end quote
But I appreciate you’re a very busy man, far too busy to bother spending 30 seconds checking facts before calling someone “entirely wrong”.
As it happens, the US is not the greatest place for free speech either. Unless you call being penned into a “free speech zone” full exercise of the 1st amendment, for example. But it is a lot better than the UK when it comes to freedom of information, free speech rights, rights to publication and so on, I freely admit.
Larry from St. Louis,
In the UK, whilst most teenage kids get arrested for walking down the street so that the police can collect their DNA and give them a police record, the main reason they do this is so that they don’t try to travel to America…
In America, they arrest you and throw away the key.
Check the Statistics
You have more people in Jail, than the rest of the World combined…
Its the biggest growth industry in the USA
Slave Labour
The FEMA camps have been built for when outright Civil War brakes out…
Yes I have family in America, and I am delighted that most of the few remaining have already got jobs back in Europe and are working their notice – and will put up with being stripped naked and searched as they leave
Tony
this is interesting.
A lofty and patronising tone from some posters anent ‘conspiracy theories’. I recommend a read through Sachermann’s essay ‘Cognitive Processes and the Suppression of Sound Scientific Ideas’ – I believe it is applicable. A small extract:
“According to Aronson [ref], when people are confronted with opposing beliefs or ones incompatible with their own, they are likely to ignore or negate that belief. They do this in order to convince themselves that they have not behaved foolishly by committing to false beliefs. To assure themselves that they have been wise in supporting their position, they often convince themselves that those who oppose that position are foolish and truly objects for contempt and derision [ref].”
and
“Another study by Linda Simon, Jeff Greenberg, and Jack Brehm [ref] showed that trivialization is also effectively employed as a mode of dissonance reduction. The subjects in Simon et al.’s [ref] study were led to follow counter-attitudinal behaviors. They later chose to trivialize the dissonant information about themselves more often than they chose to change their opinions [ref].”
http://amasci.com/supress1.html
From Larry, another gem: “Rense.com? Rense.com? / Once again the crazy American right wing gets cited here!”
May I suggest you look up the “poisoning the well” logical fallacy. ok, ok, you can’t look things up (no time and all that), so here’s a reference:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html
Oh yes, you’re not good at following references. Here’s a quote from the reference (if reading isn’t also too much for you these days):
—start quote—
This sort of “reasoning” involves trying to discredit what a person might later claim by presenting unfavorable information (be it true or false) about the person. This “argument” has the following form:
Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented.
Therefore any claims person A makes will be false.
This sort of “reasoning” is obviously fallacious. The person making such an attack is hoping that the unfavorable information will bias listeners against the person in question and hence that they will reject any claims he might make. However, merely presenting unfavorable information about a person (even if it is true) hardly counts as evidence against the claims he/she might make. This is especially clear when Poisoning the Well is looked at as a form of ad Homimem in which the attack is made prior to the person even making the claim or claims.
—end quote—
If you’re still struggling to understand, allow me to explain. The 14 defining features of fascism were produced by this Dr. Lawrence Britt. Just because they’re quoted in a right-wing site is not a reason to get all hysterical and think that observation alone is enough to dismiss the entire point.
Of course you’re not interested in the issue, which is why you never reply to it. But invoking such a feeble logical fallacy as a counter is weak, even by your low standards.
North American Scum – LCD Soundsystem
Oh oh oh
oh i don’t know, i don’t know, oh, where to begin
we are north americans
and for those of you who still think we’re from england
we’re not, no.
we build our planes and our trains till we think we might die,
far from North America,
where the buildings are old and you might have lots of mimes.
aha, oh, oh.
i hate the feelin’ when you’re looking at me that way
cause we’re north americans
but if we act all shy, it’ll make it ok
makes it go away.
oh I don’t know, I don’t know, oh, where to begin
when we’re north american
but in the end we make the same mistakes all over again
come on north americans
we are north american scum
we’re from north america
and all the kids all the kids that want to make the scene
here in north america
when our young kids get to read it in your magazines
we don’t have those
so where’s the love where’s the love where’s the love where’s the love where’s the love tonight?
but there’s no love man there’s no love and the kids are uptight
so throw a party till the cops come in and bust it up
let’s go north americans
oh you were planning it i didn’t mean to interrupt
sorry
i did it once and my parents got pretty upset
freaked out in north america
but then i said the more i do it the better it gets
[ Lyrics found on http://www.metrolyrics.com ]
let’s rock north america
we are north american scum
we’re from north america
we are north american scum
we are north american
new york’s
the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent
wahoo north america
and it’s the furthest you can live from the government un huh huh
some proud american christians might disagree
here in north america
but new york’s the only place we’re keepin them off the street
boo boo now we can’t have parties like in spain where they go all night
shut down in north america
or like berlin where they go another night, alright, un huh un huh
you see i love this place that i have grown to know
alright, north america.
and yeah, I know you wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole
’cause we’re north americans.
we are north american scum
we are north americans
we are north american scum
we love north america
take me back to the states man
north american scum
where we can be ????
north american
where the dj ????
here in north american scum
don’t blame the canadians
let go north america
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ2np7R-Uwg
Tony
Tony: May I suggest this classic for your next review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZzM4s0Hgs
It really is rather catchy!
mike cobley:
‘Sorry, my bad. I was specifically thinking about events like 9/11, 7/7, the attack on the USS Liberty, various solo bombers, suicide or not, events where it is difficult for the public to be sure just exactly what was going on. Iraq and Af-Pak are imperialist projects enacted out in the open, with politicians and media cheerleaders ignoring public doubt and anger while pushing the flimsiest of rationalisations for their murderous campaigns. Does that clarify it?’
Mike Cobley, if you are declaring yourself a barmy conspiracy theorist, then it clarifies it, as these things are not done out ‘in the open’. They are done under official narratives that talk of WMD, hunting terrorists and promoting democracy. Unless you wish to furnish me with an example of where this is done ‘in the open’? Seems you may just be a loon… ;-0
And angrysoab and Larry the Lamb are shills and it would indeed be the best thing for decent humanity to delete their comments and ban them. It’s so obvious it’s funny… ;-0
I see all the ‘Holocaust’ talk has started again. I do have a few questions for Lamby and soab if they will indulge me. If the ‘Holocaust’ is so set in stone, then why is it a crime to ‘deny’ it? I find it bizarre they went to the trouble of legislating on this issue. Is the basic assumption behind the legislation that everyone is incredibly stupid? Surely, if that were the case, it would make it nonsensical to legislate in the first place. Or is the basic assumption that everyone is a racist? Again, if that were the case, I don’t see legislation getting you very far. Finally, I always see ‘Holocaust denial’ inextricably linked with racism. I am flummoxed as to why a viewpoint on history automatically makes one a racist. Any explanation? To be clear, I am offering no opinion on the history here.