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wvParticipantAs always–I listen to Rush Limbaugh on my drive to work(just to hear what he’s selling on a particular day). Yesterday he was OUTRAGED that the Democrats would dare say that people would die because of this bill. He literally used the word “OBSCENE” several times.
It’s not just dems saying their health/tax-cut plan will result in deaths. Medical organizations, universities – pretty much anyone who studies it comes to that conclusion.
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Ah, but will they be Republican deaths or Democrat deaths?
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wvParticipantYeah, thats pretty typical.
Its really not unusual. That kind of thing.
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wvParticipantSince I’ve known you, you have never said anything like “I like capitalism” or “I dont like capitalism” — What can you say about what you think about ‘Capitalism’.
Say…’something‘.
At this point, capitalism exists.
It however can’t be allowed to run things because that’s purely undemocratic. Right now it runs things. Will capitalism change? Most likely. Can it be altered, limited, modified, transformed into something else and better? Yes that’s possible. What keeps it in place as it is, is beliefs.
I can never really make sense of what you mean when you talk about not liking ‘philosophical’ answers to ‘big questions.’ I wish you could put that another way. What is a ‘philosophical answer to a big question’? Give me an example.
It;s just a contrast between looking at things historically, which accounts for messiness and contradictions and paradoxes and for concrete practical reality, and idealism (in the philosophical sense) or essentialism (either term really), which deduces things just based on ideas.
So for example, essentialism: since religion is lies, if we get religion out of social and public life, it will improve people. That’s a social engineering idea. Thinking about political life solely in terms of big rational ideas of justice or good is social engineering; in turn, social engineering is always based on someone’s arm chair ideas of what people are and how they can turned into what they should be instead. So another term for all this is “dogma.”
So for example in the French Revolution the Jacobins replaced Christianity with worship of the Supreme Being, a rational and deistic idea of proper spiritual belief. Result: old religion didn’t go away, it just lurked in opposition, because people don’t abandon beliefs that define them if you simply impose systematic social structures on them from the outside. So, there was chaos, the terror, the regime was always unstable, and it ended up leading to a military dictatorship (Napoleon). Napoleon, ironically, was just fine with Catholicism because it kept the masses in line. So the Jacobins were not wrong about religion making people non-revolutionary, but they tried to fix it through dogmatically imposed social engineering.
Lesson: if you dictate systematic changes from the top down that are based solely on principles of reason, you just end up creating another monstrosity.
Practical solution: there is no general, overall practical solution, those are always rooted in time and place. So in case of the French Revoluion, you don’t attack religion, you declare religious freedom generally, ally with what is practically speaking useful in existing religious belief (charity? hey good idea!), leave it alone, but exclude it from matters of state, law, economic policy, and any form of public administration.
The problem? Reason said destroy traditional religion and replace it with something that is more directly in keeping with the aims of the Jacobion revolutionary state, because that way everyone becomes better citizens, “better citizens” also being something defined by reason.
But history is messy and never does what reason says it should or ought to.
What does aligning with history mean? You do what is practically possible and necessary to achieve things organically in the name of sound political principles.
And, practically speaking, that means you have to choose which people you can never appeal to, and find ways to end-run them without The Terror or genocide. So practically speaking, there are racists, and you defeat them politically and keep them out of power. But you don’t start executing them in mass, like they did with the guillotine in The Terror.
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Well, so, you dont ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Capitalism?
Those value judgments about liking or disliking capitalism ‘dont compute’ in your brain?Basically, I agree with what you wrote in that post. Basically. I basically think we are ‘stuck’ with this: “…You do what is practically possible and necessary to achieve things organically in the name of sound political principles.”
However, my reading of the ‘situation’ leads me to think its more likely than not, that we dont have ‘time’ to avert disaster doing what i just said we are ‘stuck’ with.
I also, think we may go wrong with ‘philosophical answers to big questions’ as you point out — but i still think its fine and dandy to have…oh….a meta-vision or grand unifying vision BASED on core values like ‘democracy,’ ‘love,’ ‘compassion’,
‘fairness,’ ‘critical thinking,’ ‘tolerance,’ ‘equality,’ etc.Those values can kinda create a rough, nebulous, vison. Which is different than a ‘dogmatic philosophical answer.’ The vision is more like a guiding star. A direction. A leaning toward the light kinda thing.
….i would also say, Corporate-Capitalism ‘exists’ and its a very very bad thing, as it exists now. Its what we got though. Its where we start. And probly finish.
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wvParticipantWell what would your broad definition be?
I wish we had not lost the old board because there was a time when I worked hard on defining that.
One principle is this though.
Someone on the left will see economic policy as subject to public interests, not just as some natural or inevitable outgrowth of the market. The market itself is not free exchange but regulated exchange (the free market is what you see in The Road Warrior). The question then, once you acknowledge that, is to regulate markets in such a way that they support a democratic society and public good.
To some that’s “abolish all capitalism.”
To some that’s “Norway does it right.” (Social democracy.)
There are other approaches to that whole question.
So for example, absolutely, in practical terms, you can’t have the financial center controlling the society (Citizens United) and there is no defensible good reason to make something like health insurance a private, for profit enterprise. (We can all think of other things.)
Okay that;’s just ONE thing. Now that I have tried to be general (defining state borders) let me speak for me now. I always have one big qualification: as a leftist I believe in history which means, among other things, that philosophical answers to big questions are as often as not going to be too narrowly rigid. History consists of contradictory competing patterns, not simple problems or solutions. So for example, the corporate world is not one thing. Many powerful american corporations criticize Trump’s attack on the Paris climate agreement. That doesn’t make them good guys, just as a good king doesn’t make monarchy reasonable. But it;s also true that the corporate world is not one thing when it comes to climate change.
To put this another way,. to me there cannot be a dogmatically predetermined answer to the issue of economic policy. That would be because reason isn’t sufficient to sit down and come up with a realistic and workable “plan” to fix all that with one big embracing systematic change. We have far more examples of large scale, pre-determined rational ideas for “fixing society” going very, very wrong (including, say, The French Revolution) than we have of humans actually pulling that off. Reason cannot accomplish this. It just can’t.
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Since I’ve known you, you have never said anything like “I like capitalism” or “I dont like capitalism” — What can you say about what you think about ‘Capitalism’.
Say…’something‘.
I can never really make sense of what you mean when you talk about not liking ‘philosophical’ answers to ‘big questions.’ I wish you could put that another way. What is a ‘philosophical answer to a big question’? Give me an example.
Back in our ‘what is a leftist?’ discussions, i dont remember ever really
defining in a broad general sense. What i remember is a list of policy issues we agreed on. Like Universal Health Care. That sort of thing.I’ve moved further left since those days. Or further ‘somewhere’. I think BT has too.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by
wv.
wvParticipantI have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.
Well technically every molecule in existence derives from the big bang, or rather from the results of the big bang (but not from the singularity that caused it, cause that singularity existed before molecules did). It actually took a few hundred thousand years for atoms to even exist, and molecules of course came later.
See this is the thing. If you’re going to be so free with your opinions of the Rams on a dedicated Rams board, you should at least know a little something about them.
http://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/pcr/Astrochemistry/3%20-%20MATTER/nuclear%20synthesis.pdf
In the very beginning, both space and time were created in the Big Bang. It
happened 13.7 billion years ago. Afterwards, the universe was a very hot,
expanding soup of fundamental particles. The universe expanded rapidly
during inflation and expands at a more or less constant rate now. As it
grows, it cools.
At first, the universe was dominated by radiation. Soon, quarks combined
together to form baryons (protons and neutrons). When the universe was 3
minutes old, it had cooled enough for these protons and neutrons to combine
into nuclei. This is known as the time of nucleosynthesis. Hydrogen,
helium, lithium, and beryllium were produced. Today, about 90% of the
universe is still hydrogen. Remember that only the nuclei of these atoms
were created at this time. The universe was still far too hot to allow these
nuclei to attract electrons and form atoms. That didn’t happen for another
300,000 years, at the time of recombination.
At this time the universe had cooled sufficiently for atoms to exist. Echoes
from these first atoms can still be seen in the Cosmic Microwave
Background.===============
WEll if you are gonna post fake news about the Big Bang,
I’m just gonna have to go back to wrestling with an ethical dilemma — my 86 year old mother feeds birds on her patio. But now she has rats. Lots of em. They make her cringe and she cant enjoy her patio anymore. So she wants me to poison them. (we figured there are too many to catch and release somewhere).I dont like the idea of poisoning things. Plus, what if they die out in the open and the crows and ravens eat the poisoned rats?
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wvParticipantActually as a leftist I don’t accept her definition of what a leftist is. I think it’s too strict and narrow.
I think that in the big aggregate of generally allied views that exist on the left, hers is certainly one.
I don’t think it is THE one. I think it’s one among others.
When I try to define the left, I try to draw a sort of line designating where people with a lot of different (and even competing) views can exist. It seems to me that some people I read try to define the left in a way that gives a specific street address. I try to define it by saying here are the state borders, like Maine’s border with New Hampshire, and within that state there are lots of towns and cities and villages and streets and roads and different addresses, and in fact some people live in more than one.
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Well what would your broad definition be?
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wvParticipantThis means you’ve sipped water containing molecules that have passed through Bud Grant’s urinary tract.
You need to make peace with that.
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I have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.
Which means I am one with God.
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vNo wonder God’s been doing such a sucky job of late.
You’re a distraction.
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Look, not only have i ingested molecules that were around during the Big Bang — but i have ingested molecules that were around BEFORE the Big Bang/
So I’m not only one with God, I’m one with the the thing that was here before God.
Which makes me TWO with God.
Or somethin. I think. I dunno.
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vJune 29, 2017 at 11:35 am in reply to: Trump stumbles into another decade of war in the Middle East #70560
wvParticipantNot zn but the reason I think the perpetual war is by design is spelled out in this article. And it’s not about a conspiracy. It’s just that our economy seems to be deeply, and perhaps irrevocably entangled with the military industrial complex. Like you always say…follow the money.
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“….Hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing – and footing the bill for war.Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates. Recently, the “black budget” of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counterintelligence budgets. We now have 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies.
The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry….”
Yup. Deep State. (or corporotacracy, or whatever oversimplified label you wanna give “it” ) I think it is now ‘wagging the dog’ to a great extent. Not completely yet, but to a great extent.
And the dynamic of this ‘thing’ is linked to the concentration of the Media into fewer and fewer corporate hands. I think we are down to SIX mega-corpse now who basically own the media. I really think this concentration of media into six corpse doesn’t get enuff ink. I mean ya now have this Military-industrial-War dynamic wedded with or embedded with this corporate media thing….and…well, i have noticed a significant change in the media over the last few years. The Trump/clinton election really hi-lited it….blah blah blah i could go on.
Point is, America is a menace abroad now. Just a menace. Way worse than Putin or any other oligarchy in my own personal view. Not because Putin is a good guy, but because this ‘thing’ based in America is the most powerful ‘thing’ in Earth history. Its different than anything in history. There’s no comparison to other empires, etc. The technologies now make it unique.
We all talk about the Bernie phenomenon as a hopeful sign, and it is, but lets face it even if Bernie had been elected could he really change the deep state stuff? I dont think so. They’d wait him out. Etc.
…just think of me now, as the crazy, monomaniacal, curmudgeon of the board. I dont mind.
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wvParticipantThis means you’ve sipped water containing molecules that have passed through Bud Grant’s urinary tract.
You need to make peace with that.
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I have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.
Which means I am one with God.
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vJune 29, 2017 at 11:10 am in reply to: Chip Kelly on How The Media Made Up Lies About Kaepernick Being a Distraction #70554
wvParticipantWell thats what i thought. I’m glad Kelly got some airtime to verify that.
I think the folks that didnt like Kap’s politix just ‘assumed’ he was a distraction to the other players. As if NFL players are little snowflakes that can be distracted by one preseason political gesture. I’ve always thought MOST ‘distraction’ memes are lame.
What kind of professionals are that easily ‘distracted’ ?
Granted Nittany’s continuous posting on “the conspiracy to keep Amish players out of the NFL” is a distraction. But thats a whole other can of worms and i would never bring something like that up.
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wvParticipantCosell:
“…A bad line,
horrendous quarterbacking
and a poor offensive staff did not help. But Gurley needs to play much better than he did last season….”That prettymuch sums up the second half of the season. Keenum wasn’t ‘horrendous’ but he’s a good, career backup and couldnt be much more than that.
Frankly, every remaining player on offense “needs to play better” not just Gurley.
Will they?
Who knows. It starts with the OLine. Can they become a cohesive, healthy, unit? How long will it take if it does happen?
I think more than anything, McV looked at the situation and wanted VETERAN help for his OLine. I suspect that was his number one goal going into the season. To state the obvious he wanted to take pressure off Gurley/Goff and have a line that would not flounder early in the year because of rookie mistakes.
We’ll see if he and snead picked the ‘right’ veterans.
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vJune 29, 2017 at 7:29 am in reply to: Trump stumbles into another decade of war in the Middle East #70547
wvParticipant“The country is on its knees,” Elias Diab, an emergency management specialist for UNICEF based in Sana’a, told VICE News. “The restrictions are being imposed by both parties and are extremely impacting our work.”
Fighting between the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels has produced a civilian death toll of more than 10,000, put 17 million people at risk of famine, and pushed thousands more into the grips of cholera.”
=======================17 million people may die,
and US Funding of the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia is a significant and contributing cause of that situation.
And Obama funded them too. As did Bush. As did Clinton.This is why i call US Presidents ‘mass murderers’. Just my view.
They dont ‘have’ to fund ANY dictatorships. They could have COMPLETELY different policies. So…why dont they?
My answer? Deep State.
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vJune 29, 2017 at 7:25 am in reply to: Trump stumbles into another decade of war in the Middle East #70546
wvParticipantAnd there is no end. Ever.
That’s by design.
I had a different answer to this before. Now I say there’s a lot of truth to that.
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Can you explain that or expand on that ?w
vJune 28, 2017 at 8:30 pm in reply to: Trump stumbles into another decade of war in the Middle East #70528
wvParticipantFareed Zakaria: Trump stumbles into another decade of war in the Middle East
The Washington Post
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Yeah, I think i prettymuch agree with all or almost all of that.
Funding Saudi Arabian Dictators who are turning yemen into a wasteland all in an effort to weaken Iran (Israel’s nemesis) — is a war crime,
in my view.w
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wvParticipant<
Juan Cole 2017.06.27 09:41
https://www.juancole.com/2017/06/accuses-planning-attacks.htmlAm a huge fan of Sy Hersh; on this we disagree.
Assad would not be insane to launch chem attacks. He has been doing small ones here an there all along when his troops got in trouble. It is strategic and makes perfect sense (however morally vile and illegal it is)
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Nah, Juan makes no sense there. Assuming arguendo that Assad used some kind of gas strategically — ie, when he was on the ropes, and losing — it makes NO sense to use that kind of tactic when he was winning and had the backing of the Russians and the US had just announced it was not seeking regime change any
more. Hersh makes way more sense ‘to me’.Bottom line, again, for me is — i wouldnt trust anything the CIA/American-MSM said about ANYTHING anymore. (or the CIA allies in Europe, ie, the European versions of the MSM) (oh, and yes that included Sy Hersh’s ‘sources’ — i dont trust them for a second)
That leaves me (and others) in a position of continuous agnosticism/skepticism about…lots of stuff.
Also, on a strange but related tangent — i have been reading Noam since the 80’s and I’ve never known him to use the term ‘false flag’ before. But recently he used the term. I think it was referring to Syria but i’m not sure. When Noam Chomsky starts tossin around terms like ‘false flag’ things are entering the Salvadore-Dali-Zone.
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wvParticipantI dont expect anyone to read this, but from my perspective, Israel is the key to understanding what is going on in Syria. Just my opinion.
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link:http://theduran.com/reasons-perils-israel-dangerous-game-syria/Israel’s bombing of Syrian positions in the Golan Heights is part of a strategy of creating an Al-Qaeda controlled buffer zone as Israel’s strategic position deteriorates in light of the pending victory of the Syrian government in the Syrian war.
The Duran — ONE OF the most important things to have happened in the Syrian war over the last few months is that the veil of Israel’s neutrality in the war has been thrown off.
This veil was always very thin. It is no secret in the Middle East that the Syrian conflict has been all about breaking the ‘Axis of Resistance’ of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah by attacking Syria, which was supposed to be its weakest link.
The ‘Axis of Resistance’ of course gets its name because of its ‘resistance’ to Israel. It is not surprising therefore that Israel is implacably hostile to it, and has long sought to break it up. Since the ‘Axis of Resistance’ – and the extension of Iranian power that comes with it – is also seen as a threat by the conservative Arab Gulf States and by the US, that explains the de facto alliance between them and Israel which has been the main driver of the Syrian war.
Our contributor Afra’a Dagher – who is Syrian and who writes from Syria – has written about all this extensively. Israeli leaders have also spoken about all it with refreshing directness and frankness which one never gets from the leaders of the West. Consider for example the public admission in January 2016 of Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon that he would rather see the victory of ISIS in Syria than the perpetuation of Iranian influence there.
It is clear by now however that this plan has badly miscarried.
Following the intervention of Russia in 2015 it became increasingly clear that the Syrian government was going to survive. Following the liberation of eastern Aleppo last December it also became clear that the Syrian government was likely to regain control of the populous regions of ‘useful Syria’ on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Following the Russian-Turkish-Iranian ceasefire plan agreed in May the Syrian government’s control of ‘useful Syria’ has been consolidated. Following the offensives of the Syrian army in eastern Syria it is becoming clear that the plan to hive off eastern Syria in order to create a Sunni client state there has also failed. The US has now publicly admitted as much.
All of this from an Israeli point of view is serious enough. However of even greater concern must be that the result of the Syrian war is leaving Israel’s strategic position much weaker than it was before the war started. To see why consider the following four facts:
(1) The Syrian army is now a far more formidable force than it was before the war…see link…
wvParticipantI share the Max Blumenthal view about Syria/Sarin/Iran/US, etc. Fwiw.
Blumenthal wrote one of my favorite books btw. About Israel, called ‘Goliath.’
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transcript. Video also at: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19418:Is-Trump%27s-%27Warning%27-to-Syria-a-Prelude-to-Another-Strike%3FIs Trump’s ‘Warning’ to Syria a Prelude to Another Strike?
June 28, 2017Aaron Mate: It’s the Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. The US has issued a new threat to Syria over chemical weapons. On Monday, the White House said it believes Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is preparing a new chemical weapons attack and that he would pay a heavy price if one takes place. That statement appeared to catch the Pentagon off guard, but on Tuesday, military officials said the US had picked up chemical weapons activity at the same airbase that the US bombed in April. Syria and Russia have rejected the claim and call it a provocation. The US has been ramping up military operations inside Syria, recently shooting down a Syrian warplane and increasingly targeting Iranian-backed forces. The Washington Post reports that Senior White House Officials are “focused as much on Iran as on the Islamic state.”
We’ll discuss all this. I spoke earlier with Max Blumenthal, award-winning journalist, author, and a senior editor for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project.
Let’s start with this White House statement on Syria. The Trump administration followed it up with the testimony today from Nikki Haley, the UN Ambassador, speaking to Congress. She said it was also meant as a warning to Russian and Iran.
Nikki Haley: The goal is, at this point, not just to send Assad a message, but to send Russia and Iran a message, that if this happens again, we are putting you on notice.
Aaron Mate: That was Nikki Haley speaking today in testimony to Congress. Max, can you talk about this White House statement about Syria and this potential chemical weapons attack they say and the context especially of what the Trump administration has been doing on the ground in Syria.
Max Blumenthal: First of all, this statement is bizarre by the Trump administration. We’ve seen Nikki Haley, who’s the neoconservative’s favorite member of the Trump administration take ownership of this statement, which reminds me distinctly of Bush administration statements about Iraqi WMDs, that they would launch a preemptive strike to prevent Iraq from deploying WMDs. Meanwhile, the Pentagon wasn’t alerted about the statement. There was no coordination with the State Department. This is bizarre in itself. It’s unclear what prompted the statement. However, as you mentioned or as you suggested, US troops are … Special Forces are actually training Syrian rebels on the Syrian/Iraqi border Al Tanf at the Al Waleed border crossing. US forces have just brought a advanced long-range rocket system into the area, which is supposedly a deconfliction zone.
They’re operating from within 100 kilometers of what is effectively a US base on the Syrian/Iraqi border, and they’re there to prevent what would amount to at least a symbolic land route between Ramadi and Iraq where a Shiite majority, which is friendly with Iran, controls the government through Syria to Lebanon to Hezbollah, which is the Shia militia, which functions in many ways as a proxy of Iran and has been supported by the Syrian government and effectively has been one of the most effective element of military resistance against Israel, one of the few ones left. The US is doing this partly in coordination with Israel and Saudi Arabia, which fears this nebulous concept of a Shiite crescent across the Middle East, and it’s doing it to help partition Syria. That’s one of the reasons why the mostly Kurdish Syrian defense force was armed, to take Raqqa back from ISIS.
I think this could lead to some kind of attempt to partition Syria if the US is serious about doing this. If the US is serious about disrupting this contiguity, it will find itself in direct conflict, not only with the Shia militias, which are already present in the area. It’s already weighed several attacks against them, but also with Iran and potentially with Russia, which has pledged to protect the Syrian government from regime change in state collapse.
That’s the background, but there are other aspects to this. If we go back to April 4th, when there was the alleged sarin attack at Khan Sheikhoun in Al-Qaeda controlled Idlib in northern Syria, what was the background to that? Assad was winning. The Syrian government was winning. There was really no reason to deploy a chemical weapons attack. The negotiations at Astana did not involve the US, between the Syrian government and the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition, and they were going very well for the Syrian government.
Trump, through Nikki Haley and Rex Tillerson, had just reversed course on the longstanding official US policy, advancing regime change in Syria, so you had all these factors converge into a chemical attack, which violated the red line. The US went back on its reversal of the regime change policy. Trump was overwhelmed by these images he saw of writhing children produced by organizations connected to the Syrian armed opposition, the White Helmets, the Syrian American Medical Society, etc., and he launched a cruise missile strikes, but the cruise missile strikes weren’t enough. They were symbolic. They destroyed some grounded planes at the Shirat Airbase, and the national security state seems to want more, so we have this bizarre statement about a possible Syrian chemical weapons strike.
The day after Bashar al-Assad visited Hama, which is considered a bastion, a long-time bastion, be Islamist resistance against his government, he actually had a friendly visit there for the first time in years, just highlighting how well the war is going for the Syrian government. Why would they want to deploy chemical weapons and trigger another military strike with US troops already in the country. It doesn’t make sense. To me, it just looks like a psyop, and it makes me worry that in the next 48 hours, there could be some kind of unilateral US strike in Syria.
Aaron Mate: Max, it could just be a coincidence, but in terms of timing, I have to wonder, too, or at least point out that this statement from the White House came right after Sy Hersh, who we interviewed here, published a story saying that Trump went ahead with that airstrike on the Syrian airfield despite US Intelligence saying they had no evidence that Assad had carried out a chemical weapons attack.
Max Blumenthal: Sy Hersh citing a advisor to the intelligence community, someone who’s been in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, asserted that the strike in Khan Sheikhoun in April was a conventional strike by the Syrian government, coordinated with Russia and that the Jihadist elements who control that area had actually staged a propaganda [ku 00:07:43] and managed to get Trump to strike the Syrian government and reverse his entire policy on Syria, the one he campaigned on, which was against regime change.
That report really dovetailed with my understanding of what happened, although I can’t prove it was a false flag. The evidence that there was a sarin attack by the Syrian government is … It’s not only hard to come by, it just doesn’t add up logically, and the explanations for why Assad would have authorized such a strike seemed ridiculous to me, that we would just let him get away with anything, so he just feels like he can do whatever he wants.
Even if you go back to 2013, when Sy Hersh poked holes in the official narrative of the chemical strike at East Ghouta just east of Damascus, which nearly triggered a US war regime change. We have to remember that that strike occurred. We have to consider the timing of that strike. Two days after inspectors from the organization for the prevention of chemical weapons arrived in Damascus, this attack occurred. The timing was very fishy. We have three instances of fishy timing leading up to this current bizarre statement by the Trump administration, and Sy Hersh has surfaced again to punch holes in the official narrative. I think that’s another aspect of the timing of this statement, and we have to wonder what it will lead to. We still don’t understand the logic behind it, and I think even people in the Pentagon are wondering what triggered it.
Aaron Mate: On that point of a disconnect between the Pentagon and the White House, there have been all these reports showing that there’s White House officials, like Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who are leading the push for a confrontation with Iran, but are being met with resistance from people in the Pentagon who say that they don’t want to commit US forces to that goal inside Syria.
Max Blumenthal: It’s an unwinnable war. It would be an unattainable goal. The US just isn’t willing to pour in the amount of blood and treasure that Iran, Syria and Russia are, but particularly Iran. This is almost existential strategic importance to the Iranian government to maintain contiguity between Iraq and Syria. For the US, it’s another delusional imperial gambit that can go very wrong, and if US troops start to die, that will be nobody’s fault but the Pentagon’s for allowing, for putting them in this situation, and they would not have been defending any critical American interest. If anything, they’re defending the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Aaron Mate: There was a piece in The Washington Post last week in which a White House official, who wasn’t named, but was quoted, confirmed that the US is essentially placing Iran on the same level as ISIS inside Syria in terms of it being a priority. The official said, I’m going to quote what they said. “If you don’t think America has real interests that are worth fighting for, then fine.” Let me ask you, on the issue of Iraq, doesn’t the fact that the US relies on these Shia militias that are backed by Iran inside Iraq, give Iran leverage over preventing US confrontation inside Syria or does the Trump administration simply not care about that anymore?
Max Blumenthal: That’s not the only leverage that Iran has. Their elements can be activated that can make the security of the US Embassy in Baghdad absolutely untenable if the US wants to be extremely provocative and aggressive inside Syria, inside Iraq or elsewhere. The popular mobilization units were basically the frontline in the capture of Mosul from ISIS. It’s ironic because these groups were celebrated in US media and Western media for taking out ISIS, but when Shia militias assisted the Syrian government in extricating Jihadist militias from East Aleppo, al-Jabhat al-Nusra being the leading militia among them, the Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate, they were accused of genocide by the US government and every kind of atrocity. Very few of them have actually been established, but there’s this hypocrisy there on what’s been happening in Syria versus Iraq or this disparity in the narrative on what Shia militias are allowed to do, and it’s because it was of strategic importance for the US to recapture Mosul, but the battle of Aleppo and the defeat of the Jihadist militias actually represented a defeat for Western proxy groups and a defeat, to put it crudely, for the empire.
Now, all of the forces have converged on the Syrian/Iraq border. There used to be two wars. There was the war against ISIS, and then there was the war that the US was supporting against the Syrian government. The two wars were contradictory. The Syrian government as the British military think tank IHS James is established, has fought almost half of its engagements against ISIS and is, in the words of James, the hammer to what should be the US’ anvil against ISIS, but the US always was attacking the Syrian government through proxies while trying to fight ISIS. It can’t do that anymore because the Syrian government has recaptured so much territory.
The armed opposition is confined to some areas in Daraa, Quneitra in the south, and in the north to Idlib, so the wars are converging into one, and the question is, will the US allow the Syrian government and its allies, the Shia militias and Russia to actually take on ISIS. For example, there’s the city of Darazor in the northeast of Syria. This city has been surrounded by ISIS for years. You have about 200,000 people who are completely surrounded by ISIS, and they’ve been defended by the Syrian army, basically prevented from being overrun like Raqqa was, and the Syrian army is starting to make serious gains in Deir ez-Zor.
Does the US throw the Syrian defense forces in the majority Kurdish militia that the US is arming and complicate the Syrian army advance because it’s afraid that the Syrian army will start to recapture more territory, start to capture oil fields that ISIS had seized, upset the US partition plan, or do they allow ISIS to be defeated? I think we’re going to see, and I’ve seen conflicting quotes and conflicting reports on what the US wants to do around Deir ez-Zor, but let’s not just look at Raqqa, let’s also look at Deir ez-Zor and what the US intends to do there.
Aaron Mate: What do you think that intention is?
Max Blumenthal: You can go back to December 2016 when Secretary of State John Kerry hashed out the first cease fire with Russia, which allowed the civilians population in Syria to breathe for a while. The whole point was to let people start having some kind of existence without perpetual warfare and conflict. That was completely upended around Deir ez-Zor, and it was upended because the Pentagon was extremely upset about one of the main planks or conditions of the ceasefire, which was that the US would coordinate with Russia against ISIS. The Pentagon did not want to coordinate with Russia against ISIS, at least under Obama, under the watch of Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
The United States Air Force attacked the Syrian army on a strategic hilltop, defending Deir ez-Zor from ISIS, killing 80-100 soldiers. ISIS advanced, took the hilltop, and nearly overran Deir ez-Zor, and the cease fire was dead, and there’s a lot of indication. Gareth Porter, the investigative journalist, has done a great report establishing that this strike was intentional, and it was designed to prevent Russian-Syrian coordination. Is that the thinking that prevails in the Pentagon? If so, I think it’s extremely dangerous, and in light of Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, in light of this current statement that Nikki Haley, the UN Ambassador’s taken ownership of, we have to wonder if the Trump administration is deprioritized the fight against ISIS and has empowered and emboldened the Iran hardliners, like Defense Secretary Mattis, National Security Council
Director HR McMaster, to take the fight to Iran.Aaron Mate: Just to clarify, the official Pentagon line on that attack in September from the US on the Syrian military was that it was a mistaken airstrike. That was the official explanation given.
Max Blumenthal: They made a big mistake. The Syrian army in no way resemble ISIS and had armored vehicles and hardware that ISIS just simply didn’t have. If it was a mistake, it was a really boneheaded one.
Aaron Mate: Max Blumenthal, award-winning author, journalist, and senior editor for AlterNet Grayzone Project. I’m Aaron Mate. Thanks for joining us on the Real News.
wvParticipantI just don’t buy the deep state terminology. I just don’t. I think it’s a media invention that twisted an older term used in different contexts.
If you don’t buy ANY 2017 Syria sarin narrative then what are the flaws in Hersch’s narrative?
You are after all posting people who DO buy a certain view of things, and not indicating any hesitation or qualification. For example there’s this, from the Counter-Punch guy:
let us … concentrate instead on what Hersh’s critics must concede if they are to argue that Assad used sarin gas against the people of Khan Sheikhoun.
I personally found his 4 points to be pretty empty and full of assumptions.
So what are your hesitations regarding the Hersch/Counter-Punch narrative?
My main one is that different sources DID find evidence of sarin…and at one point, the Russian version was that yeah that there was sarin there but it came from Syrians inadvertently bombing Jihadist sarin weapons.
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Well deep-state works fine for me. I think it makes perfect sense.As for Sarin… my reading is that some sources suggested sarin OR a ‘sarin-like substance’. So i dont think its clear that it was Sarin. Could have been Sarin. Could have been something similar.
I dont think anything has been proven. And i think some of the powers-that-be just want to push regime-change in Syria and demonize Assad and so….blah blah blah. Not much different than the way Saddam was demonized, and Gadaffi etc, etc etc.
And yes those guys were all bad, but…blah blah blah, you know my thots by now.
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wvParticipantHersh on RealNews:
wvParticipantWell, you said you liked the fact Cole had connections with the CIA. Do you give Hersh the same deference?
Lot to clear up here. What I liked when I fell for the (misreported) idea that he was a consultant for the CIA was that THEY were getting info from HIM. That is, knowledge, info, insight, expertize. I would rather have that then political appointees makin up stuff that suits an agenda.
In this case, with Hirsh, it’s the other way around. Normally, right, you say you don’t trust the CIA. I normally say they are not a unitary thing. So it did not surprise me that one clique in the CIA is aghast at Trump’s ignorance.
But there are threads to this story that are not being addressed. So for example at one point the Russian story was that there was sarin present because the Syrians had bombed a jihadi facility that had sarin in it. So the Russians were basically saying, yeah there was sarin, but it didn’t come from the Syrians. Now the story is, well no there was no sarin. That’s just one example of all the inconsistencies that are out there.
There are several accounts of this that say no we tested and YES there was sarin.
Meanwhile Hirsch famously denied the Syrians were using sarin in 2013, when we know they were–they even publicly stated they would dismantle that weapons program, with external oversight. (All very similar to Hussein.)
In terms of your other points.
1. I don’t buy the narrative that in doing this Asad would be desperate etc. I am not sure where that narrative comes from, but it never struck me as real. He uses chemical weapons already and would just add sarin to the list for the same reasons…that he is showing his enemies are simply not safe. It’s the same logic the Saudis use in Yemen—they make war on the population to (presumably) undermine confidence that they can be opposed. (Or that’s the intent. It’s not working in Yemen either.) Asad doesn’t do this not out of desperation, but with a strong Russian presence essentially making him immune, out of impunity. He has the impunity, is ruthless, and shielded from any effects. He does not worry about consequences. There won’t be any.
2. Putin is deranged, but not in the ways you imply. But that’s not relevant. There are no consequences for either Asad or Putin for doing this. So if Putin was even involved, it just looks like cold calculation on his part.
3. Hirsch has been wrong before and on the same issue—he denied the Syrians used sarin in 2013. In terms of his investigatory skills, he didn’t use those. This is not a full blooded real wide investigation—he reports on the views of a couple of sources. For example he never even addresses the fact that the French and Turks and OPCW (Organisation For The Prohibition Of Chemical Weapons) did find evidence of sarin. Can someone like Hirsch be wrong? Well sure they CAN. Is he right or wrong this time? Well there are conflicting accounts and he is just one person in that mix.
4. First, we don’t know the number…who knows if it’s significant. Second, we get one account among many (from people you say you normally don’t trust) and that looks to me like it could mean there’s actually division within the particular agencies involved (which again doesn’t surprise me, they are never one homogenous thing). Did we get an inside report on what the consensus is among the intel professionals? No, so far it looks like a dissenting position. One which apparently only Hirsch has heard.
None of those points hold up enough for me to dismiss the idea that there are conflicting stories so far.
What am I accusing YOU of? Buying into one of the narratives. Which isn’t an “accusation.” This happens all the time with complex and shadowy issues like this. I see on your part a sincere and honest claim that one set of accounts is more valid. Well it’s the same for me, just from a different side of this. I just have all sorts of hesitations about that narrative, for what seem to me anyway to be good reasons.
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Well there’s a lot there i disagree with. For starters i dont buy the idea that ANY narrative has been ‘proven’ regarding the 2013 attack. I think there are different narratives and none has been proven. You disagree. You buy into one of the narratives. I am open to various narratives because i dont think any have been proven. And i’ve read the same stuff you have.
On the latest chemical incident, I have the same exact view. I dont buy any of the narratives. You do. I’ve read the same stuff you have. I dont think any of the narratives have been proven. I think its just as likely Hersh is right as it is the ‘mainstream’ narrative is right.
Again for emphasis — i did not say i bought into the Hersh view. I think he may be right. I think he may be ‘part’ right and part wrong. I think the Putin version might be right (which is different from the Hersh view). I think any number of narratives may be right.
I am skeptical of all the narratives.
I sure as hell dont trust ‘anything’ the CIA or mainstream corporate-media have to say abut any of this.
I suspect much of my growing skepticism about ‘anything’ i read anymore, comes from the changes in media-ownership. Over the last two decades (as you know) media ownership has gone from 50 big corpse, to about 6 now. I think the media is much much much easier to influence/control now than ever before. This dynamic coupled with all the basic ‘deep-state’ stuff (which is NOT a conspiracy-theory — i recommend the vids i posted under the jimmy carter thread) leads me to a more ‘skeptical’ perspective than i’ve ever had before…. Blah blah blah…i could go on.
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wvParticipantWell, I’m just not a Bradford fan. I cant quite put my finger on it, but there’s just something about him i dont much like. Its just a ‘gut’ thing for me. I would not want him on my team.
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wvParticipantPostol is controversial too and has come up before.
As far as I am concerned, he went after the writer and didn’t address the argument. He also doesn’t address the fact that Hirsch also denied in 2013 that Syria was using sarin, yet those incidents led to the Syrians publicly agreeing to destroy their nerve gas weapons.
This looks like it;s devolving into one of those left v. left things that happens. For example the Counter-Punch people declaring Juan Cole consulted for the CIA.
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Well, you said you liked the fact Cole had connections with the CIA. Do you give Hersh the same deference? 🙂link:http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/27/hershs-new-syria-revelations-buried-from-view/
June 27, 2017
Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View
by Jonathan Cook“…see link…
….So let us set aside for a moment the specifics of what happened on April 4 and concentrate instead on what Hersh’s critics must concede if they are to argue that Assad used sarin gas against the people of Khan Sheikhoun.1. That Assad is so crazed and self-destructive – or at the very least so totally incapable of controlling his senior commanders, who must themselves be crazed and self-destructive – that he has on several occasions ordered the use of chemical weapons against civilians. And he has chosen to do it at the worst possible moments for his own and his regime’s survival, and when such attacks were entirely unnecessary.
2. That Putin is equally deranged and so willing to risk an end-of-times conflagration with the US that he has on more than one occasion either sanctioned or turned a blind eye to the use of sarin by Assad’s regime. And he has done nothing to penalise Assad afterwards, when things went wrong.
3. That Hersh has decided to jettison all the investigatory skills he has amassed over many decades as a journalist to accept at face value any unsubstantiated rumours his long-established contacts in the security services have thrown his way. And he has done so without regard to the damage that will do to his reputation and his journalistic legacy.
4. That a significant number of US intelligence officials, those Hersh has known and worked with over a long period of time, have decided recently to spin an elaborate web of lies no one wants to print, either in the hope of damaging Hersh in some collective act of revenge against him, or in the hope of permanently discrediting their own intelligence services.
Hersh’s critics do not simply have to believe one of these four points. They must maintain the absolute veracity of all four of them.”
wvParticipantHiggins and S.Hersh have disagreed before:
link:http://www.mintpressnews.com/the-failed-pretext-for-war-seymour-hersh-eliot-higgins-mit-professors-on-sarin-gas-attack/188597/“..It might have been a battle between a Pulitzer Prize winner and a data-collecting blogger if a team of rocket scientists and weapons experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hadn’t taken issue with Higgins’ analysis.
“It’s clear and unambiguous this munition could not have come from Syrian government-controlled areas as the White House claimed,” Theodore Postol told MintPress News.
Postol is a professor in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group at MIT. He published “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21st, 2013” in January along with Richard Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories who previously served as a United Nations weapons inspector and also boasts two books, 40 patents and more than 75 academic papers on weapons technology.
Higgins, Postol said, “has done a very nice job collecting information on a website. As far as his analysis, it’s so lacking any analytical foundation it’s clear he has no idea what he’s talking about.”
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wvParticipantGlenn Greenwald on the ‘deep state’
wvParticipantOne version of the ‘deep state’:
wvParticipantHow very Alex Jones of you.
Is that what you’re going for? Alex Jones?
Cuz that’s who you sound like right now.
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Well at least he’s not a Seahawk fan.
An Amish Alex Jones? Sure.
But there’s worse things.
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wvParticipantI’m not being very clear apparently. What I quoted from you there? That’s precisely what I am saying is not true.
The only people spinning it that way are Russian.
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Nope. Not true.
As far as being ‘even-handed’ — i think ‘you’ are the one not being even-handed.
So, now what?
See to me, the US-corporotacracy is more murderous than the russian-oligarchy simply because the usa CAN be more murderous. Its got more power. I think they are both ‘imperialist’ or what i prefer to call ‘murderous’. I dont think Obama is more ‘evil’ i think he just has more power. And thus he murdered more innocent people. Using the CIA, economic policies, and bombs.
I’m done now, in this thread. I’ve had my say. I think Chomsky would agree with me, btw.
We dont have to agree on this meta-stuff. I am completely in agreement that ‘leftists’ should be inclusive, form alliances, and have a big tent. You and i agree on health care, corporate-personhood, citizens united, a gazillion other real-world policy issues.
I dont think we agree on what the ‘system’ ‘is’ or how bad it is. No big deal. Shrug.
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wvParticipantBob Murray just sued him and HBO.
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And Bob Murray will lose.
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wvParticipant26,000 bombs in one year.
Count the bombs in Chechnya. Weigh the blood in Chechnya. Add Syria. One difference is that you won’t find the numbers for Russia. That’s because it’s controlled information. The propaganda result of that is that Putin gets to pretend he is offering a valid critique of imperialism when in fact he is just suppressing information and playing a transparently cynical imperialist game. Meanwhile the figures you cite from an american source? It’s the Council on Foreign Relation’s adding up the defense department data. Quote me a Russian private think tank critical of Russian imperialism. Plus of course we are not being beat up by secret police gangs for discussing the american info.
Russia just does the internally authoritarian thing of suppressing numbers and lying and limiting access, and somehow this KGB asshole manages to convince some western leftists he has the high ground?
The issue isn’t who uses propaganda. They both do. The issue is whether or not WE see through it. I will say I make an effort to see through both.
I already posted a quote from a Russian leftist saying that this national self-obsession is not genuinely analytic. Here it is again because I find it compelling:
For the American left, of course for them only American imperialism exists, yes? I can’t understand it. . . . In Russia, there are a lot of leftists who also believe that Russia is the main evil in the world, it’s a reactionary empire, and it should be destroyed. Or, at the same time, you have a lot of leftists who believe somehow Russia is resisting American imperialism [and] who support these “republics” in the East of Ukraine.
But you have a huge provincialization of the left as a whole because they can’t even understand each other and every leftist community, they believe in their own national reality. And that’s why they can be so easily manipulated. By whom? By Russia Today? I think it’s a very pitiable situation because the Russian propaganda machine, which is not the most clever, not so smart . . . it can so easily manipulate such a big sector of the Western left. It points to the problem of the Western left itself, but not the strength of Russia Today.
That quote sums it up for me on this issue.
Plus, of course, one of the old self-defeating routines of the left is to engage in conflicts over who is more “pure.” I have to admit that “purity wars” always leave me exasperated.

Speaking of which I wish others would chime in to this discussion. We’re hogging it.
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Enh, there’s a lot of strawman stuff in your post. I mean who is arguing that Russia does not have a more authoritarian internal domestic system? Who argued that? Not me.The US-corporotacracy is a fascinating mix of domestic-freedom, fake-democracy, and foreign-policy-mass-murder. Its the Foreign policy where the US beats Russia in brutality.
I say Obama/Clinton/Bush are bigger mass-murderers than Putin. I dont think Russia has come close to 26,000 bombs per year (and thats leaving out a lot of stuff). If someone can come up with decent actual numbers/stats on humans the USA has killed compared to humans Russia has killed, I’ll be glad to move Obama into the SECOND biggest mass-murderer behind Putin.
I have to go to NY City now, for a few days.
Carry on,
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