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Open Thread

by: Laura

Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 12:24:20 PM EDT



Laura :: Open Thread
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Open Thread | 19 comments
Ok maybe not (0.00 / 0)
I tried disabling new users and it screwed everything up, inexplicably. Suddenly the recent diary and rec columns disappeared, and now the last few diaries are not even listed, though they still exist.

Soapblox is fucking whack.

why dont they just disable links in sig lines? (0.00 / 0)
wouldn't that help? i guess the bots could just type the links each time, tho, if they have nothing else to do.

The defectors have started an underground railroad to smuggle other rebels out of hostile territory
[ Parent ]
I think one of the reasons soapblox is being targeted (0.00 / 0)
is that the users here link to lots of stuff, we're very media savvy. Contrast that with, say, a crocheting blog. No linky goodness. Wordpress also hosts a number of media savvy pol sites, and they are also being attacked. Damn hyperlinking hippies!

Disabling links in sig lines wouldn't really count for much in the fight. What really pisses me off is the wonky soapblox format. I can't do anything to make this better. I can't even ban ip ranges - one, because legit people here use proxies that may be affected and two, because the attacks are coming from countless directions. The only soapblox fix that's been described to me as forthcoming is a fix on their ip ban. See, currently, if an ip is banned here, new users can still sign up, they just can't post! Stupid, right? So even if they fix that it's not much help...unless they have some other ideas up their sleeves.

I have 60 new users so far today. So even if I wait and do mass deletions they still get their stupid little diaries and comments in. Several got through today.

[ Parent ]
Can you set a bar on posting for X days after new membership? (0.00 / 0)


"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it", Helen Keller, communist.
[ Parent ]
Yeah...I can (0.00 / 0)
but it's easier and less intrusive to legit user rights to just mass delete the accounts.
[ Parent ]
"No smoke without fire" American exceptionalism defence (4.50 / 2)
Two interesting pieces this morning.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Johann Hari, who is not a total idiot and generally ahead of the "progressive" curve interviewing Gore Vidal who is currently behind his own schedule for dying.  The interview has a lot of crap about Vidal's drunk mother but I was struck by Hari's shortcomings in his attempt to defend US imperialism and exceptionalism in this what I'm calling the "there's no smoke without fire" tradition.  AKA "some of the propaganda is true, isn't it?" view of things.

I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified - when some were not. He looks coldly at me. "Okay - name one." Pearl Harbor, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

His face tightens into a scowl. "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!" he snaps.

He taunted the Japanese so they would have to hit us, at Pearl Harbor, and they did. ... We have conveniently forgotten because we don't teach American history to anybody, but he sent an ultimatum to the Japanese telling them to get out of China, which they'd been trying to conquer for years. He was laying down the law to them, [saying they had to] surrender their rather proud nation's empire. And they said fuck you. And the next thing we knew the fleet was moving towards Pearl Harbor.

That's not how most historians read it - but I move on to an even more contested example.

So Hari is ignorant of the history of Pearl Harbor and thinks historians are too.  I must say Vidal is (as usual) 100% correct here.  No surprise at all of course.  Why else is he being interviewed at 87?  The guy's a fucking god.  Hari isn't.  So why does he take him on?  What a piss-ant.

"Okay - name one."

Just what I would say, but Hari doesn't want to be educated.  There's far more Vidal could have said of course time permitting.  But facts mean nothing to Hari and he uses none.  He just shrugs and says "everyone knows" and "there's no smoke without fire"

If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others.

"Just as?"
Bullshit of course.  Weaker countries don't attack stronger ones on the whole.  If they ever did it surely wouldn't be a case of "just as".  Hari simply assumes shit and he will not be told.  The facts are dismissed.  Surely Vidal's real reason for thinking as he does has nothing to do with his knowledge of history but that he's an old man who wants to see the bad in everything American.

Pathetic.

I move on to an even more contested example. He says the Soviet Empire was "purely reactive" to American power, and only committed atrocities and invasions because the US "goaded them." Can that be true? Couldn't they be independently cruel, just as the US sometimes was? "They had a whole continent to play with, they didn't need any more space," he says, and changes the subject, rather oddly, to talk about the Dutch.

Again Vidal is right, Hari wrong.  Again no facts for Hari but rather a game of "what if?"  Couldn't the Soiviets have been as bad? ... if things had been completely different?

(The Dutch btw were the empire before the British -- something most people don't realise and I'm betting that's what hari didn't pick up there but we'll never know as the interview is filter through an imbecile apparently).

All this attitude and from, I remind you, a pwoggie ahead of the class, came up again in the comments of this piece at OpenLeft (two words, two lies):

http://www.openleft.com/diary/...

It's a piece about how American exceptionalism is foundering and the Chinese are taking over.

Comment:

The rise of China is the rise of a totalitarian state, and yet some on the left seem to take glee in having them supplant us.     The meeting (which was bogus by the way) that got so much play around the net last night was notable for the fact that most of the attendees were totalitarian states.  

This should be REALLY disturbing to people.   We can see a point in the not so distant future when the most powerful economic entities will also be totalitarian or at best authoritarian (and spare me the nonsense that the US is an authoritarian state).

Well maybe that guy is a right-winger but then there's this reply from someone who certainly isn't:

I agree that there is a danger of authoritarian regimes causing a good bit of trouble around the world in the near future, but I don't really see it being anywhere near as bad as what the Great Depression brought. That said, the US has lurched quite a bit to the authoritarian side - enough that Europe is winning out as an attractive place to live for many people who have the choice. There should be no doubt that a significant faction in the Republican Party strives to turn us into no less an authoritarian state than China is.

So what does "authoritarian" mean?  What it doesn't mean is asking which country is killing millions of foreigners.  Apparently its more about which countries are, "an attractive place to live" even when discussing world politics!

Complete disconnect from the most obvious facts.  Instead a swarmy sort of "I know the US is bad but really its good" because you know there's no smoke without fire, some of the propaganda has to be true.

Going back to Hari's interview he really loses it over Vidal's defence of Timothy McVeigh:

When did this happen to Gore Vidal? When did he go from righteous - and right - opposition to atrocities carried out by his own government, to justifying any atrocity against it, no matter how extreme? When I ask him, his scowl turns to a sneer, and he says I am ignorant and clearly haven't read anything.

Too right.
And I would add innumerate.

But no doubt Hari fancies himself the better man of the two and grasps at old age as an excuse for what even he can surely see is an absurd claim that he knows better than Gore Vidal.  These attitudes are all common enough among the better of the pwoggies, but they are rarely examined I think, although I am not sure why.

Hari himself slants his reporting to make it look as if Vidal is running from the fight ("and changes the subject, rather oddly, to talk about the Dutch", "I try again and again to tug him back and get him to say whether this means he thinks McVeigh was wrong to plant the bomb. He won't. Finally, he jeers: "You are trying my patience," and defies me - with a long stare - to change the subject").

He doesn't say so explicitly again I think because in words it would sound ridiculous.  Hari beats Gore Vidal in a political conversation?  yeah right.

But it doesn't get discussed much and I am not sure why.  partly perhaps because its where the pwoggies are their most authoritarian and therefore immune to reason.  They simply will not listen.  That tends to make people reluctant to explain things.

Simply put yes there can be smoke without fire.  No propaganda isn't true not even a little bit of it.  Facts do matter.  Your intuition doesn't.  And I would add numbers matter too.

But such a response is inadequate.  It's all in the details; details Hari had no time for.  

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it", Helen Keller, communist.

Excuse me, Gore Vidal is 83 (0.00 / 0)
not 87

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it", Helen Keller, communist.
[ Parent ]
Huffers. (4.00 / 1)
Other day they were going on and on about Zelaya and his ilk being antisemites because some random Honduran radio guy went on a rant...inspired by that unsubstatiated claim from The Miami Herald bitch Francis Rogles that Zelaya was raving about "Israeli Mercenaries". There was ONE poor guy in the comments trying to debunk - homunq, he posts on dk too. He was more than unsuccessful.
[ Parent ]
I was wondering where that came from (0.00 / 0)
A few days ago, Amy Goodman was interviewing Zelaya (holed up in the Brazilian Embassy) and she asked him about allegations that he was an anti-Semite.  So the allegation was originally in the Miami Herald?  Maybe Lanny Davis is working overtime for the Honduran "Chamber of Commerce" trying to garner not only support of the right-wing Cuban American community but also the Hardline Pro-Israel community.  Ros-Lehtinen's record as a legislator from Florida shows how successful appealing to both communities can be for one's career.
[ Parent ]
Here's a link to Zelaya's open address to the charges (0.00 / 0)
http://www.narconews.com/Issue...

But yeah, this MH reporter is also their Anti-Cuban expert it would seem. Since I've been paying attention, the Miami Herald has been 100% anti-sovereignty wrt countries south of our borders.

The hardliners are joining up all over the planet right now, we should expect more of this type of thing.

For backstory:

http://narcosphere.narconews.c...

[ Parent ]
Thanks for the links (4.00 / 1)
The money quote:

Narco News has obtained copies of the Zelaya organization's email responses to Robles, telling her that he mentioned "rumors" of "alleged mercenaries" but never said that such "alleged" parties were responsible for the high tech sonic and chemical weapons used on the Brazilian Embassy, which was the untrue claim made in Robles' September 24 story.

Like disgraced NY Timeswoman Judith Miller before her, Robles made light of a matter of chemical weaponry - in this case, against the Brazilian embassy, now confirmed by the government of Brazil and the United Nations - to try and portray Zelaya as somehow crazy because he was one of the victims of those now-documented chemical attacks.

It was the very next day after Robles blew the dog whistle that David Romero made his anti-semitic statements, barking to the tune blown by Frances Robles. Nobody at Radio Globo or anywhere else expected him to behave that way. But the sonic pitch of that kind of weapon unleashed that demon from him.

The other thing the aforementioned AP story, by Benjamin Fox, neglected to mention was that Zelaya had already condemned Romero's words on September 29, when he issued a statement that said:

"Many people in society are wrong, including some of my opponents and also some of my supporters, falling victim to anti-Semitism," said Zelaya in a public statement. "I reject all anti-Semitic postures and attacks and call on the Honduran people to do the same."

Fox never even asked Zelaya for comment.



[ Parent ]
To clarify: (4.00 / 1)
The MH article didn't call him an anti-semite persay, it just says he was complaining about 'Israeli Mercenaries'. Huge dogwhistle, for both real anti-semites and antisemite hunters. 'Game On!', almost.
[ Parent ]
Digby may have stumbled on a good idea (0.00 / 0)
Let's put ACORN in charge of selling guns: instant attention.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com...

In fact put ACORN in charge of anything to do with military spending too.

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it", Helen Keller, communist.

Oh, these modern fads... (0.00 / 0)
http://www.suntimes.com/news/m...

A Palestinian Muslim instructor filed a federal discrimination suit Monday against Columbia College Chicago, claiming she was fired after a student falsely reported she made an anti-Semitic comment in class.

Suriya H. Smiley is accused of saying to the student, "I should have known you were Jewish by the size of your nose," the suit claims.

A teacher's assistant and eight other students were present in class at the time and confirmed that Smiley never made the remark or any anti-Semitic statements, the suit said.


does anyone here have (0.00 / 0)
any experience with ventless propane heaters? i'm thinking of getting one.

The defectors have started an underground railroad to smuggle other rebels out of hostile territory
I've read that they put out the same kind of heat as a smallish woodstove (4.00 / 1)
So the efficiency would probably depend on the flow of your house. You also have to have the propane tank outside, so there's some pro installation required.

(I don't know anyone who actually has one)

[ Parent ]
i've been googling and googling (0.00 / 0)
but so far i haven't found anything that says don't get one. i have a tank and a line already but they are connected to an old vented propane heater. i would just need to replace it and seal up the vent i guess.  

The defectors have started an underground railroad to smuggle other rebels out of hostile territory
[ Parent ]
LOL, just googled a little (4.00 / 1)
They're all the rage on survivalist forums.

Also it looks like the offers mostly include installation, etc.

[ Parent ]
what fun! (4.00 / 1)
i never thought of myself as a survivalist before. i think i may add that to my resume.

The defectors have started an underground railroad to smuggle other rebels out of hostile territory
[ Parent ]
Open Thread | 19 comments
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