Deleting a diary is a major offence in blogging here @BooMan … it’s just not done!
My comment in the diary:
On Noam Chomsky
Sometimes, even a professor doesn’t have a clue … just amazing.
○ Chomsky on Syria, Assad, and Qaddafi | MIT Boston – July 2012 |
○ Noam Chomsky: An interview on the Syrian revolution | July 2013 |
○ Identity, Power, and the Left: The Future of Progressive Politics in America | Harvard Kennedy School – 2015 |
My post to a comment by mino:
Major Offensive By Terror Groups on Aleppo
.
After a cessation of hostilities and a lull in Russian and Syrian air strikes for a humanitarian corridor to rebel held district of Aleppo … the moderate rebels and jihdists have joined forces on a major offensive on government held positions aroun Aleppo. Thanks to an influx of modern and heavy Grad artillery, a barrage of missiles and suicide car bombs … humanitarian aid my ass! Using civilians as a human shield, similar to all major urban guerilla tactics as we witness with IS in Nineveh province and the siege of Mosul in Iraq.
Major Aleppo offensive launched as Syrian rebels attack government forces
A senior official in the Levant Front rebel group, which fights under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner, told Reuters: “There is a general call-up for anyone who can bear arms.
“The preparatory shelling started this morning.”
The attack appeared to have been mostly launched by rebel fighters from outside the city against government forces that hold its western districts.
A spokesman for Ahrar al-Sham, a large Islamist rebel group, also said in a social networking message an offensive on Aleppo had begun.
Factions involved in the attack include Free Syrian Army groups and Jaish al-Fatah, an alliance of Islamist factions, the Levant Front official said.
[Press agencies and the NY Times
The comment I intended to post…”The “Moderates” were not allowing anyone to leave anyway.”
I deleted the diary for a couple of reasons: (1) It was being widely misunderstood owing to layered ironic remarks by me and by the author to whom I linked. In other words, my attempt to be clever fell flat. (2) You decided to hijack the thread by posting remarks and links dealing with Syria. The thread was never about Syria. It was about some remarks that Noam Chomsky made about Hillary Clinton and the reaction that some people were having to those remarks.
I guess if Booman wants to ban me, he’ll ban me.
Yr linked article in diary referred to this TruthOut publication …
Syria, a view from the “other side” …
○ The Truth About Syria: A Manufactured War Against An Independent Country | Mint Press |
I’m not actually looking for an argument, but really, I linked to an ironically worded item at lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com that had nothing to do with Syria. I guess if you want to keep following links one after the other (and pretty obviously you like doing that), then be my guest.
“I linked to an ironically worded item at lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com that had nothing to do with Syria.”
Perfect illustration why our minds will never meet!
The link and the major portion of LG&M article is a quote from TruthOut:
○ Noam Chomsky on Syria: A “Grim” Set of Alternatives | Oct. 27, 2016 |
Syrian Kurdish refugees load their belongings as they prepare to be transferred to shelters
in Yumurtalik, Turkey, September 29, 2014. (Photo: Bryan Denton / The New York Times)
Not about Syria? How so!
Did you see this today? Kennedy’s History of the Pipeline Wars
Thx! Great stuff.
See also the “Seven Sisters” documentary produced by Al Jazeera.
It’s a good article, though I think is somewhat simplifies what was always complicated.
Chomsky’s comments on Syria were interesting – one thing he said was Obama had done about all he could, and hadn’t made a mistake re: Syria.
I don’t buy the “ironic” excuse at all.
The link you posted to actually goes into Syria in some detail. OUI wasn’t hijacking the thread.
You know what is sad.
In the quote Chomsky stated a SUBSTANTIVE reason for voting for Clinton related to nuclear policy that I had not heard before. It is actually a good argument to make on her behalf to those on the left.
But the link you used wasn’t interested in the substance – he just wanted to hippy punch.
And you actually didn’t start by thinking here is something that might help persuade people.
You just wanted to vent against the left.
Yeah. I saw that mention of pocket nukes. What a terrible idea.
I turned it into a discussion on Syria because simply posting “look what Chomsky said about not voting for Clinton” without exploring what it was he actually said seemed like a waste and (accurately) a troll.
Apparently, discussing an issue relating to what Chomsky said was off topic from the goal of the thread: hippie punching.
I think it would be interesting if someone (not yours truly) started a discussion thread about the concept of hippie punching: what is it? what’s the point?
It would be interesting in such a discussion thread to compare/contrast with terms like “Hillbot” and how it gets used. I’ve been called a Hillbot here more than once, which I think is pretty ironic, as my vote for Hillary in November will be my FIRST ONE.
Perhaps folks quick to condemn hippie punching should reflect a bit about whether they’re also critical of calling people Hillbots.
We are 9 days from a general election that by some measures is a 1 point race.
And yet some Clinton people just cannot contain themselves. They have to express hate.
I see it in Twitter by people who should know better.
This is from the ABC Poll THIS MORNING:
“There’s a much closer race, meanwhile, among young voters, again because of signs that fewer Democrats and Democratic-leaners in their ranks are joining the likely voter pool. Bernie Sanders was especially popular among young adults, and they’ve been far less strongly enthusiastic Clinton supporters than their elder counterparts.”
If you can’t see that now is the time to try and convince Sanders people to vote for Clinton then I don’t know what you think you are accomplishing.
Clinton has the nomination. The left probably is going to be marginalized.
The goal is to win. Nursing some imagined hurt is irrelevant to that goal.
Oh – and got a link for the Hillbot line?
I’m a Sanders person who did vote for Clinton in early voting. Same with my spouse. Same with one of my offspring (a first time to vote). I won’t speak for my family, but I can certainly speak for myself. Part of my willingness to do so really does come from how terrible Trump and the GOP that spawned him truly are. A Clinton victory and at least a Senate majority serve as something of a firewall against right-wing nationalism, which strikes me as necessary if we want any hope of building momentum for progressive reforms in the years and decade to come. We will find the sledding far rougher under a wannabe Mussolini (which is what a Trump regime would potentially amount to). Hillary is at least saying all the right things about education costs and health care reform, even if that is largely driven by the pressure put by Sanders. I’d like her in the White House and then expect that collectively we put her feet to the proverbial fire to follow through to the extent she can through a divided Congress. In the meantime, if I see any Sanders-esque candidates make their presence felt in my little corner of the US, I’ll gladly give them whatever support I can. My activist days are well behind me, but I can always find ways to contribute somehow.
That all said, politics, like life is messy. It requires trust. I am quite skeptical that the liberal and leftist side of the blogosphere has developed that trust. Otherwise we would not have all this talk of hippie punching (which I find hilarious because hippies were already a thing of the past when I was a teen and young adult), or hillbots (sometimes spelled hilbots), or accusations of groupthink (I can document the ones aimed in my direction). As long as there is an inability to lay down our proverbial swords and working together – even with our differences duly noted – we will continue to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As long as those of us who really are old enough to know better continue to set a poor example, we will turn off younger activists. Can we really afford that at this juncture in history? I turned my sword into a plowshare a while back. I intend to keep it that way. Any young person reading this blog should understand that the way politics works is not always pretty. That we deal with coalitions. They will sometimes have conflicting priorities. We live with flawed candidates (they are human, after all). Heck, we deal with flawed organizations and fellow activists. Just the way it is. But when we do come together we can and do get something to show for our efforts. But we have to be able to trust each other, and respect where each of us is coming from. Without that, it’s game over.
Mi dos centavos.
I’m too tired to follow you when you say I’m supposed to be convincing Sanders voters to now vote for Clinton. Hm. The one young Sanders voter I know who swears not to vote for Clinton is also prone to lots of conspiracy mongering. ANd I’m not nursing any imagined hurts.
Hillbot: More than once by Marie3 directly or indirectly. I would have to search the archive.
I regret ever beginning this argumentative mess by making a lame attempt at humor when I reproduced that Lawyers Gun & Money post.
Never regret …. a lively discussion ensues. 😉
Oh, it’s been a lovely illustration of karma (meaning cause and effect in the ethical realm).
I was unaware that everything written here is an effort to persuade.
Apropos the business of hippie punching, actually I don’t think the writer at Lawyers Guns & Money was doing that, unless your definition of hippie punching is “making ironic or sarcastic remarks about people who like to beat up on Hillary Clinton”.
The reason that the Lawyers Guns & Money item worked IMHO is precisely because it conjured up Noam Chomsky. Look, the man is brilliant, but he has become the object of a cult of personality. So the LGM writer was saying to those who fetishize Chomsky, hey look, your hero is expressing opinions about Hillary Clinton that diverge from what you expect him to say.
The fact that one could backtrack through links to something with the word “Syria” in the title didn’t make that LGM post about Syria any more than a story containing an offhand remark about Hillary Clinton petting a cat is a story about cats.
Seeing as the conversation from the last thread also segued into Egypt, this in the Financial Times is a good look at Obama and Clinton’s differences on the revolution and other aspects of FP:
American rift over an Egyptian despot
Lots more in the link, including Syria, Tunisia, etc
In this case, the President was correct. I was not Obama but Morsi who blew the opportunity for a functional democratic state in Egypt by rigging the Constitutional Assembly to favor the Moslem Brotherhood and ensure a Moslem Brotherhood government.
Clinton in this was conventional.
He may have been correct but this is a deeper issue. Even someone as despised as Mubarak had deep institutional support in Egypt. That move embittered many of those currently in power who did not want Islamists in power. Think of how angry you might be if Christian dominionists came to power in the US.
I think we generally need to get out of the business of pushing democracy by forcing changes in government and meddling in foreign affairs.
Clinton is conventional in that her class of politicians are comfortable dealing with allied dictators and autocrats and generally fearful of what can happen in a vacuum.
Obama was.
The more I learn about the ME decisions over the last 3 years the more I see a pretty significant difference between Clinton and Obama.
Is this the thread for saying that on this Chomsky is pretty close to right. Unless the Democratic President and Democratic Presidential Candidate are suicidal.
The task always was to dismantle Daesh/ISIL/ISIS without creating yet another enclave for a transmogrified version of them.
After Obama’s “red line in the sand” statement, Russia’s bailing him out of politically having to go to war with Syria opened a potential detente with Russia that the Ukrainian coup immediately closed. I see Kerry’s hand in successfully disposing of Syria’s chemical weapons and Nuland’s hand in closing the possibility of detente on behalf of neoconservatives everywhere.
Clinton must know that the Russian base in Sebastopol a is a major national interest for Russia, as is the base in Kaliningrad. Just as much as Norfolk and Tampa. No matter how nutty her advisers are, they must know that too.
But the Republicans in Congress want something, anything, to tar Obama as not strong against terrorism. Their current play-pretty is the “moderate” rebels in Syria. Well, Obama and the military somehow figured how to integrate them into the offensive against Daesh and make all of the parts of this very improbable alliance work so long as the focus is on eliminating Daesh. Even Russia has an interest in Daesh not relocating to Russian muslim regions.
This has been quite an amazing result in American diplomacy of late (or even the past 50 years). Knee-jerkers are angry at Chomsky for saying so.
The second and much harder task is what to do with the vacuum that Daesh will leave. So far, there is a tentative opening between the Kurdish Regional Government and the Iraqi central government in that the KRG announced that its troops will not enter Mosul. And will not thereby kick off yet another Sunni rebellion. But the disposition of authority of the former Daesh-held Islamic State population and territory is not settled.
National boundaries aside, the important thing for political stability is who actually administers the government that the population faces on a day-to-day basis. Assad’s government becomes an issue for those areas that have sought to build Islamist political structures or have been viciously suppressed by the Assad regime, father and son. Supporters of Assad comprise minorities who fear a tyranny of the majority. Those are difficult political fractures to bridge without a forced solution. Russia sees that keeping Assad preserves stability of a proxy and deal with those fractures with authority. Obama and Clinton, having stated that Assad has lost legitimacy (which he had when it was stated) have difficulty walking that back in order to restore stability in the Middle East. And the plain fact about pipelines is that you cannot construct pipelines in the midst of a civil war. And war destroys a heck of a lot of economic infrastructure.
Does Chomsky even deal with this complexity?
Given the fact that the Russian national interest in backing Assad is the continued presence of the Russia base at Tartus, Chomsky is correct that it is likely that evicting Assad (and Russia) from Syria risks nuclear war if the US wants to go that far. Think of a large US overseas base in a strategic location of global importance; how determined would we be? Was not part of the Cuban Missile Crisis a defense of our base in Guantanamo as well as ensuring that Cuba did not become a Soviet foreward position? The nation furthest away generally blinks. In Syria, the Black Sea, and the Baltic, that’s US no matter how much we beat our chests.
I think both Obama and Clinton understand this; apparently so does Chomsky. It is obvious that Trump does not.
And I think that was Chomsky’s point about this election.
What I would take issue with here is that Tampa and Norfolk are within the internationally recognized boundaries of the United States. Sebastopol is in what was recognized as Ukrainian territory for decades.
I know why you’re taking this position and agree with some of it but Russia responded to the coup in Ukraine by invading that country and effectively annexing the portion it wanted to reclaim.
Some of these arguments about rights to important military bases are interesting because I’m not sure you would support this justification with regards to US claims to Guantanamo in Cuba or the US position on retaining its base in Okinawa were the Japanese to kick us out.
Those decades were when Crimea was part of Ukraine ws during the decades after the year 1954 and that arrangement was made by Soviet Union Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khruschev.
Russia did not invade Crimea. It was already there in the Sebastapol military base.
I’m not supporting claims, I’m pointing to the fact that protecting the presence of this strategic asset is something that Russia would fight for with all its effort; it is an existential strategic location as much as Norfolk or Charleston are. It so happens that its claims would stand up in international court.
But here is where the ambiguity comes in. Khrushchev’s maneuvering to attach Crimea to Ukraine.
1954 Transfer of Crimea
Of course, Nikita Khrushchev had affinity to Ukraine. He got his start in Soviet politics administering the Donbass, and having Communist Party posts in Kharkov and Kiev before going to Moscow.
Come to think of it Sebastapol existentially is like Pearl Harbor in 1941. And attack on Sebastapol would launch a war on the attacker. It is considered that important. Hawaii was a (colonial) territory of the US in 1941.
The Kagan-Nuland advisers to Obama and Clinton have been spinning a convenient line.
Let’s rephrase then to make it more palatable. Ethnic Russian separatists in Crimea, supported by Russia, formed one side in a civil war in Ukraine.
The historical wrangling is how Russia justifies its claim to Crimea. It doesn’t change the fact that Ukraine was recognized internationally, for decades, as having sovereignty over Crimea due to the facts you mention with regards to Khruschev.
For the record, I acknowledge Sebastopol’s crucial importance to Russia and am perfectly fine with the world letting Russia have Crimea back. It’s just not worth the hassle.
One can argue the unilateral imposition of a no fly zone over Syria – which Clinton has been for consistently – is as dangerous a proposal as had been presented in this election.
I am far from a Chomsky believer, but I think here he sees what most see, a complicated situation without obvious solutions.
This appeared today on NC….
Islamic State v. al-Qaida by Owen Bennett-Jones