The government is prosecuting political enemies for crimes it makes up, and invoking its regulatory and investigatory powers selectively against them.
The government is pressuring private entities to deny services and/or employment to political enemies, and private entities are largely going along.
The government has defined the parameters of speech acceptable to it, under the guise of misinformation, and private entities have cheerfully cooperated in implementing censorship.
Election laws have been changed to remove meaningful barriers to cheating, and the courts provide no remedy after the fact.
Given this, is it much of a stretch to say that the government selects itself, and that we have little left in the way of representative and accountable government?
NFIB (Natl Fed of Ind Bus) does actual surveys of small businesses. They show consistent loss of jobs at small businesses since the beginning of last fall.
ADT uses data from a large number of small businesses around the country. They show five straight months of declines in small biz jobs.
The govt uses a strange birth/death algorithm to try to estimate the number of small business jobs. It is notorious for getting the number wrong at times like these. (per economist Barry Knapp) It says we have created 400,000 jobs over the same period.
Who you gonna believe? [Per Groucho Marx, “me or your lying eyes?”], — the folks who actually talk to small business employers or the lying government that uses a computer program based on birth and death numbers without input from businesses or employees?
Firefox has been complaining about your site being a potential security threat for more than a week. When I try to access your site the following warning is issued:
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for neoneocon.com. The certificate is only valid for mail.neoneocon.com.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
Visitors are required to “Accept the risk and continue” to enter.
I thought you would like to know because it might affect your traffic. I skipped entry multiple times before hitting the accept button. I’m using the latest Firefox, 111.0.1
My Final Four. Creighton, Xavier, Gonzaga and K St.
Creighton and Gonzaga in the last game. Creighton wins! Big surprise.
TCNM:
Every now and then someone gets that message. Seems to be no rhyme or reason for it; my site is secure. Usually it’s just a couple of people who get it at a time. Unless a lot of people are getting it, I’m going to assume it’s got something to do with your browser or your computer settings. Sorry it’s happening, but it probably will be temporary if past experience is any guide.
Cornhead, Creighton has done well. Best wishes. So, you’re pulling for San Diego State and Miami tonight? And Creighton, of course.
Stan:
That “audit” article is an extremely good find. This among several highlights sticks out:
Not in 150 years has a candidate whose vote total jumped as much as Trump’s did from one election to the next ended up losing the election. Never has any incumbent who received over 75 percent of the votes in his party’s primaries (Trump won 94 percent) lost the general election.
MBunge:
I let your comment show because, even though you’re in comment moderation, it’s such a good example of the duplicitous game you play.
You write: “All you people trusting in Joe Biden to manage US involvement in the Russia/Ukraine war…” Guess what? You seem to be commenting at the wrong blog – because no one here matches that description.
Another strawman argument from MBunge – sort of like another day with the letters “day” in it.
Why don’t you just stop with the strawman stuff and do yourself a favor?
The problem is fixable, but tainted money puts DeSantis in a bit of a hole.
I should say ‘fixable’ in preparation for 2028. The issue bears watching until then.
To paraphrase Truman, when voters are given a choice of one corporate-owned politician versus another, they’ll vote for a corporate owned one every time.
Banned:
Otay. More spittle from the Conservative Nut House.
Time will tell.
@MBunge
And just when I thought I had gotten familiar with the level of despicable you habituate yourself to, you decide to go further. I wish I weren’t surprised, but I actually am.
I got used to the dishonesty, stupidity, accusations of bad faith while practicing bad faith, and insults and smears against me. But this is pretty bad even by your standards.
Neo already handily beat your ass over the bad faith part of this, so I see no need to ruminate much on that. Instead I want to focus on the utterly stupid and craven nature of your selective outrage and concern trolling.
Did it never occur to you that the Iranian dictatorship has been in a state of war with us since 1979? That it has conducted attacks like this during literally every President’s term since then? That one reason those of us who opposed Biden (which is essentially everyone on this blog) did so was BECAUSE how we did not trust him or his puppeteers to handle a situation like this? And how UNLIKE the decision by Putin to escalate the Ukrainian invasion, it was foreseen, foreseeable, and all but inevitable that the Mullahs would pull something like this?
And yet, in the face of more than forty years of terrorism and murder by the “Guardians” of the “Islamic Republic” from Tehran, you try and use this…. To attack those of us who do not favor appeasing Putin. Whatever that is supposed to be. Those of us who reject your claims and premises.
There’s something disgusting at trying to use grandstand atop a mountain of corpses even at its most justified. The fact that you are doing this to attack those of us who you deem as beneath you, and over a subject almost entirely unrelated from the Ukrainian War underlines that.
But you know what?
As loathe as I am to say it I trust Brandon (or rather his puppet masters) to handle the Ukraine war and even responses to blatant attacks from the Mullahs a hell of a lot more than I trust Putin to rein in Iranian terrorism, let alone his own appetites.
I would know, I saw Dubya Bush try to triangulate to do that only to get the short end of the stick.
But I suppose you will ignore all that in pursuit of your true passion. Being a dishonest asswipe.
Don’t be a Bunge.
@neo
Neo, you have been one of the great bloggers on the internet for years and a real gem in the rough. But I have to ask: how many more chances will “Mike Bunge” get?
I know you have been warning him for months (likely more than a year) on at least a couple dozen times. You have certainly put him in moderation something like a half dozen times and threatened to ban him if he continued. But continued he has.
At this point, is it safe to go with the working assumption that Mike will not change his spots and will not stop strawmanning, acting in bad faith, and insulting without provocation? And if so, how many more chances would he get before being banned?
Of course I defer to your judgement.
banned lizard, I take it you have contributed to Ron because you want him to have all his money coming from small doners like you.
Turtler:
Actually, this is the first time he’s been in moderation. My usual policy – for long-time commenters who are not over-the-top obvious trolls – is to do that for a while and see whether there’s any change. If there isn’t, I ban them, but I’m always reluctant to go that route.
Right now I have total control over which comments of Bunge’s display.
@Neo
Ah, in that case I must have misunderstood or misremembered prior threats of moderation for that actually being imposed on him. And your policy is a wise one, and above all has to satisfy you above any others. Especially since I will freely admit to being biased.
It may be good news, or just Lucy pulling the football.
The Arizona Supreme Court sent the signature verification portion of Kari Lake’s lawsuit back to the trial court, with the proviso:
“IT IS FURTHER ORDERED remanding to the trial court to determine whether the claim that Maricopa County failed to comply with A.R.S. § 16-550(A) fails to state a claim pursuant to Ariz. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) for reasons other than laches, or, whether Petitioner can prove her claim as alleged pursuant to A.R.S. § 16-672 and establish that “votes [were] affected ‘in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election’” based on a “competent mathematical basis to Arizona Supreme Court Case No. CV-23-0046-PR conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.” (Opinion ¶ 11.)
The good news is the ASC recognized the trial court mischaracterized Lake’s original complaint. The bad news is determining what constitutes a “competent mathematical basis”. Sounds very subjective. I don’t think any court has used statistics to overturn any election.
It doesn’t get us any closer to actually auditing the signature verification process, comparing signatures on the return envelope to voter registration signatures on file. This is the only way to determine which, if any, ballots were invalid.
Rather than characterizing these ballots as illegal or fraudulent, the more neutral term should be invalid.
And rather than fraud, if Maricopa County can be shown to have not followed the legal process, I think it’s really maladministration.
Maricopa County, of course, will fight an actual audit of signatures to the US Supreme Court. Signature verification was never allowed during the 2020 audit.
“You Win Again” was the comeback for the Bee Gees after the death of disco. Not a big hit in the US- I heard it on the radio only a couple of times, though the video did get some airplay on MTV and VHI.
Turtler:
Yes, I previously only threatened moderation for Bunge.
Ruth:
Yes, Barry is at his peak in that 1987 video featured there, in my opinion and the opinion of a billion other women.
Yancey Ward:
It’s a great song but I’d never heard it before till I saw it on YouTube about 2 years ago. That’s because of the US radio boycott of the Bee Gees back in the 80s.
I have no idea, what the objective seems to be of our policy, it seems to be to alienate the largest powers, brazil india, et al, driven the saudis into the iranians under chinese auspices, lost virtually every country in the hemisphere, to chinese influence, (we meant to do that)
Regarding Lake mathematically proving improper signature verification cost her the election.
There was testimony from people in the auditor’s office that signatures that were being rejected were counted.
In 2012 the Maricopa County rejection rate was 2.24%, dropped to 1.2% in 2016.
Miraculously, Maricopa County voters’ penmanship improved to the point only 0.00030% were rejected in 2020, and in the primary election of 2022 the rejection rate jumped to 0.00441%.
Mathematically, Lake is going to have to prove somewhere between 2-3% of mail-in ballots should have been rejected. If an audit of signatures were allowed, that could probably be shown– but given the ridiculously low “official” rejection rate, I don’t see how Lake can prover her assertion.
I’ve said it many times before– Washington State did an audit in 2021, looking for bias in the signature verification process. Their report found no bias, but did show that the rejection rate of signatures should have been much higher than the official rejection rate statewide of 0.7%. That wasn’t one of their published conclusions– but was buried in some of their process text.
TCNM: Have you tried clearing your cache for Neo’s site?
Yancey Ward,
Yep, ‘One’ in 1989 was their only big(ish) US hit after the disco era. It peaked at #7 and is their only US top ten after 1979.
Interestingly ‘You Win Again’ was a massive world wide hit but not in the US and “One’ was a top ten hit in the US but nowhere else.
Griffin:
I’m pretty sure “One” was a huge hit in Germany. I’ve read that its popularity had partly had to do with the unification of West and East Germany. But the Bee Gees were very popular in Germany in general.
neo,
#37 in Germany according to Wikipedia which for this kind of thing is pretty reliable.
It’s better than the disco falsetto. That’s as far as I can go.
Griffin:
I think I was basing my statement on a video I saw of a Bee Gees concert in Germany around that time, and when they sang “One” the crowd really went wild. But those were Bee Gees fans, and maybe it wasn’t as popular generally as that indicated.
neo,
It appears the song ‘One’ was released in June of ‘89 so its possible it had peaked before the wall fell and reunification began. Maybe one of those songs that has a second life after it’s initial release.
“Right now I have total control over which comments of Bunge’s display.”
Why? Both Art Deco and om have been as insulting as I, and I’m sure there are at least a few more. I don’t use profanity. I don’t spam threads with ridiculous numbers of comments. I don’t stalk other commenters. I’m certainly rude and blunt but my arguments are no less intelligible or grounded in reality than anyone else’s. I do like to rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, but that’s not strawmanning. That’s trying to cut past semantics and get to the point. About the worst you can say about me is that I don’t actually spend that much time here, so I probably miss quite a bit of the conversation. I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever noticed being moderated.
No argument I’ve ever made, Neo, has ever been as bad as the people around here who equate Putin and Russia to Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s historically ignorant emotional blackmail. Or how about Art Deco, who ultimately dissolves any discussion of the Iraq War to “So who did you prefer, Uday or Qusay?” THAT’S not strawmanning?
Oh, well. I thought this was a place of discussion, not a hot house full of flowers that need to be protected from the harsh elements. But since I know at least you’ll be reading this, Neo…
I hope things in Ukraine work out as marvelously as you expect. I really do. But if they don’t, I want you to remember that I tried to tell you. Other people tried to tell you. We tried and we tried and we tried and we tried, but you wouldn’t listen.
Worse than that, you did listen to people you think lie to you about almost everything else. You decided to line up and salute people you think are trying to destroy the country. And you’re old enough to know better.
Close to two months ago I issued you this warning. Perhaps you missed it the first time. I’ll quote it here:
“Maybe you ought to stop insulting people here in such personal ways. You’ve been commenting here a long time but you’ve stepped over the line many many times. I am reluctant to ban people, especially long-time commenters, but consider this a warning.”
Instead, you have become more rude and more tiresome. And you fail to take your own advice: don’t make a graven image out of your own judgment.
Consider this warning number two. If you don’t stop with the rudeness, the next step is putting your comments in moderation. After that the next step would be banning, but I hope it doesn’t get to either of those points.
You write, “you’re a complete idiot if you don’t realize DeSantis or any other candidate will be treated exactly like Trump.”
And you’re a bit challenged yourself if you haven’t noticed that I and just about all the commenters here have said that DeSantis or any other GOP candidate will be treated just as poorly by the MSM and the left as Trump was. The question, really, is how they will handle it, and how well it will stick.
Strawman argument of yours plus an insult to me. A winning combination – not. And no, other commenters aren’t doing that.
Here’s a crazy idea, Neo. Maybe stop to consider that you’re not as smart as you think you are…
I think it’s actually quite interesting that you seem to not know your own history here of giving out gratuitous general insults, not just to a certain person with whom you might be disagreeing on a certain thread – others do that, at times – but insults towards all the commenters here and towards me. And apparently you haven’t stuck around to read several warnings from me over the course of several months.
Your inattention to what you say and what is said to you in response may partially explain the prevalence of your strawman arguments, in which over and over again you mischaracterize the viewpoints of others. If you don’t pay attention to what people actually say, you can make up anything you want out of your own imagination. But those two reasons in particular – your constant strawman arguments, and also your global insults as well as insults to me (and in this post I have by no means given you all the examples of times you’ve done either or both) are the reasons you are in moderation and on track to being banned unless you cease and desist. You are either completely disingenuous about your history here or are simply not paying attention to what you say to people and what I’ve said to you. Then again, perhaps you are both disingenuous and inattentive.
And by the way, you appear to not know what the term “strawman argument” means, although it’s one of your favorite techniques. It does not mean “rephrasing the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, or “cutting past semantics and getting to the point.” In blog threads it means mischaracterizing the position of others and then knocking down and/or criticizing the fake positions you’ve created.
There are none so blind as those who will not see, and none so unlearned as those who outright refuse to learn.
Why? Both Art Deco and om have been as insulting as I, and I’m sure there are at least a few more.
Firstly: I have criticized both when I find them out of line, though perhaps not as consistently as I should. And Neo has noted my temper, though she also noted explicitly I tend to keep it under decent control.
Secondly: Art Deco and even om tend to provide more grist for the mill and things of substance than what you discuss. They also tend to provide sources and argumentation better than your own, and No I do not say that merely because I agree with them, in many cases I Do Not (you might have seen where I differed with Art Deco on Hitler’s skill as a politician and leader and the collapse of the German Republic).
You however have been monumentally incompetent, dishonest, and of poor faith. You do pathetically little to get your own sources or your own conduct, and it shows. Which is why you have handed me no short string of easy victories over you when you thought it was wise to do dumb nonsense like play dumb about my references go POTUSes trying to appease and make nice with Putin or claim that the only reason anybody would compare modern events to the 1930s was self-righteousness.
I don’t use profanity.
No, but you are profane in far more substantial and damaging ways than the occasional or even serial F Bomb. As we noted.
I don’t spam threads with ridiculous numbers of comments.
Bullshit.
You absolutely have and you absolutely do. And while in terms of conventional spam (ie filling up the thread with back to back comments) you may be better than myself, miguel cervantes, or om you sink below at least the former two of us in saying shit of substance with even a modicum of civility.
Oh yeah, and honesty. Such as when you accused me of strawmanning you when I pointed out you were the one enegaging in strawmanning. Another thing I had to pull apart.
I don’t stalk other commenters.
What the Fuck is that even supposed to mean in the context of a rather small, intimate, and cozy personal blog with a tight knit community? If this were a Forum of some size and you had people following you and replying to your comments and continuing fights without end that’d be one thing. But it isn’t. This is Neo’s blog and all of us in the commentariat who abide by the rules have a right to speak. And no, making reference to shit you put out in a prior thread is not “stalking.”
I’m certainly rude and blunt
Bullshit.
I can be rude and blunt (just look at my profanity laced rant at Mearsheimer), though rarely as much as you are and certainly not to other blog commenters (let alone our host) without what I view as due provocation.
You on the other hand are simply an asshole. Worse, on the subject of history and debate you’re an incompetent, ignorant asshole. As I outlined in more than one comment. Which I can dig up if necessary.
It is this trifecta that makes so many of your recent posts completely devoid of merit or redeeming value. If they really were “rude and blunt” we might be able to say they at least made a point. If they were blunt and wrong we might at least say that they were made civilly. If they were rude and wrong then then at least that would provide room for nuance or an attempt to build an argument.
But you, oh Mike, do all of the above. Which in practice amounts to petty, bullshit sniping using an ever changing array of double and even triple standards while hiding behind cherry-picked (and often outright fallacious) sources meant to stand as proxies for your stance but which provide a level of plausible deniability.
It’s a rather awful mixture of dishonesty, stupidity, incompetence, deceit, and bluntness.
And I am far from the only person who has noticed.
but my arguments are no less intelligible or grounded in reality than anyone else’s.
Again, bullshit.
And you wonder why I outright call you a liar?
Because that is what you are.
Your arguments are fairly intelligible, I will confess. But that is mostly because there is vanishingly little behind them. Mostly assertions with maybe simple argumentation and cherry-picked “proof” to justify overweening arrogance and insults.
But intelligible does not mean Intelligent, correct, or grounded in reality.
And make no mistake: so much of what you write is absolutely not grounded in reality. As I pointed out at length and with great patience, and which you have Never been able to make a coherent rebuttal to.
Because any moron claiming that comparisons between Ukraine today and events in the 1930s are driven solely by self-righteousness is grounding their claims in deluded hubris, not reality.
And while I will not entirely claim to be devoid of deluded hubris, I can at least say my species of deluded hubris is able to do Basic Fucking Fact Checking and Background Research.
I do like to rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, but that’s not strawmanning.
Oh Mike, the problem is my that you “like to rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like.”
He problem is you’re such n ignoramus that you either fail to do it Properly or accurately and wind up with a strawman, or you have always intended to do so in bad faith but assume you will never be caught.
I happily rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, but the only person on this blog I recall alleging me of committing a strawman was you. Which I handily destroyed by the arcane art of using your own words and those of your “source” to crush that claim.
I’m also not dependent on your species of “analogies for me but not for thee” where you condemn anybody for making note of the obvious parallels between things like say Hitler, Stalin, and Ishiwara’s misadventures in the 1930s to Ukraine as being acting in bad faith and motivated by self-righteousness, but that you can make an overwrought and fallacious comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis to try and whitewash Putin’s actions. Which I and many others pointed out the flaws with.
You are the one trying to gatekeep and hypocritically demand everybody only use the kinds of evidence you arbitrarily and self-I interestedly deem kosher at a given moment. I never condemned you for drawing historical parallels, I just chewed you out for doing a really damn bad job at it.
That’s trying to cut past semantics and get to the point.
No, it absolutely is not.
And if you were actually so blinded by your ego to think that you had the right to dictate and define what the point of others was without proof, you’re more fool than I thought. Which is admittedly quite the bar.
About the worst you can say about me is that I don’t actually spend that much time here, so I probably miss quite a bit of the conversation. I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever noticed being moderated.
Mike, stop lying to yourself. As Neo pointed out, you’re guilty of much worse than not spending much time on here (which is if anything admirable in a way). Moreover, this is the first time you were put in Moderation. Keep up like this and it won’t end.
No argument I’ve ever made, Neo, has ever been as bad as the people around here who equate Putin and Russia to Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s historically ignorant emotional blackmail.
No, your bullshit attempts to deny any of the incredibly obvious parallels between Putin’s Russia and Nazi Germany are the historically ignorant emotional blackmail. And made worse because you had no coherent rebuttal to them but also because you – in your overweening idiocy – tried to condemn any of us who compared Putin’s actions to those of other dictators of the era no matter our arguments or evidence. Especially when I stomped on one of your arguments that “not every bad guy is Hitler” and that Putin is not Hitler (both of which I agreed with) by saying I found many of Putin’s strategies to be more reminiscent of the Soviets and Imperial Japanese, especially the deniability and use of paramilitaries and farcical puppet regimes.
And ironically just as you spout this bullshit, Den Haag has finally been pushed to act by inducting Putin and one of his Henchwomen for kidnapping Ukrainian children in order to forcibly Russify them. Which to those of us who know an iota about the Third Reich is rather similar in concept to Herr Shicklegruber’s Lebensborn program.
Now obviously the scale and severity of these atrocities are far, far smaller than the most egregious ones in the 1930s or the full tally of what Hitler, Stalin, or even any given Japanese junta head was guilty of. But that doesn’t change the similarities in Execution, Method, or in some cases Intent.
It is historically illiterate, morally bankrupt, legally incoherent, irrational, and frankly disgraceful blackmail to pretend otherwise as you have. Or certainly to outright condemn any possibility that people of good faith can disagree on that.
And I know MY arguments where I compared Putin and Hitler are not as bad as plenty of yours, Mike, because unlike myself you were never able to come up with a coherent rational rebuttal to them.
Or how about Art Deco, who ultimately dissolves any discussion of the Iraq War to “So who did you prefer, Uday or Qusay?” THAT’S not strawmanning?
Agreed, which is why I disagree that. It is a legitimate question to ask in the context of a debate, but not to the exclusion of others. It is fair to ask people what they would rather have or what their plans to deal with the House of Hussein would be alternatively, but I will not strawman everyone who criticizes or even condemns the Iraq War as a Baathist.
Though your dishonesty on that note was plenty jarring, such as the obsessive denial about WMD being found in Iraq and attempts to whitewash the ties between AQ and Saddam as not an alliance (which would be a matter of semantics when Manila had to stomp on the Iraqi embassy staff under Saddam’s direction for giving material and operational support to freaking Abu Sayyaf under the aegis of OBL),.
Oh, well. I thought this was a place of discussion, not a hot house full of flowers that need to be protected from the harsh elements.
That would be more convincing if you hadn’t spread manure around so widely.
But since I know at least you’ll be reading this, Neo…
I hope things in Ukraine work out as marvelously as you expect. I really do. But if they don’t, I want you to remember that I tried to tell you. Other people tried to tell you. We tried and we tried and we tried and we tried, but you wouldn’t listen.
Oh, poor persecuted Mike Bunge, the true Jeremiah speaking out against doom. Practically worthy of taking the titular role in
Skarga’s Sermon. Woe to be the Cassandra!
What a pile of self-serving shit.
Mike, I cannot speak for Neo, but I can speak for myself.
The reason I heap such condemnation of you and your conduct, why I regard you as a dishonest liar, a fool, and a knave, is NOT because I “wouldn’t listen”, But Because I D I D. At GREAT length and depth.
I have patiently listened to you and your comments, even when they disagreed with mine, when they moved past disagreement to offending my ethical sensibilities, when they went past that to being aggressively dishonest and insulting to the intelligence of those who read them, and when they attempted character assassination of me. And then I listened to most of your sources just to be sure.
Did it ever occur to you, Mike, that are not the learned prophet you think you are? That others would reject you not in spite of your behavior and your “warnings” but BECAUSE of them and the abysmally low quality of both?
Worse than that, you did listen to people you think lie to you about almost everything else.
Ah yes, the old fucking cliche of “everybody who disagrees with Putin shilling is a tool of Biden.”
This is unspeakably dumb and fallacious guilt by association and always has been, and by now it has been beaten quite to death. But I might as well do it.
Firstly: Listening to a source or sources does not mean BELIEVING in said source or supporting them. I would know. I have listened to you peddle this almost complete and unalloyed pile of self-serving, insulting lies.
Secondly: It is IMPORTANT to listen to those that lie to you, if only to understand what they are claiming. Whether it is because they MIGHT be telling the truth or to understand their lies to better refute them.
Basic research.
You decided to line up and salute people you think are trying to destroy the country.
The irony is rich. On one hand you conflate conditional, limited agreement with malcontents trying to destroy the country with lining up and saluting them. On the other hand you line up whitewash people and dictatorships whom we know are trying to destroy the country, and those that shillfor them. Putin. Xi. The Ayatollah and Mullahs. And thanks to their shilling Sanders and AOC.
Et tu. Bunge?
And you’re old enough to know better.
If age was what determined knowledge, Mike, you wouldn’t have made the mistakes you have or tried to cover them up by lying.
@MBunge
Also on the subject of
No argument I’ve ever made, Neo, has ever been as bad as the people around here who equate Putin and Russia to Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s historically ignorant emotional blackmail.
I meant to add this in to my giant omnibus post, but delay in getting to the computer meant the edit window elapsed. So I’ll make it here.
In addition to my prior points, what is interesting is
Firstly: It’s worth remembering a very basic point. Hitler didn’t START OFF as the Hitler of Infamy we know today, springing forth fully formed with his bloody track record. And indeed, I’d note that as far as comparisons go, Hitler actually killed far fewer people in his quest to gain and then consolidate power over his home country and retake its “core territory” up to 1938 than Putin did, even though you and I both agree that Putin is nowhere near as bad as Hitler was. Certainly YET.
Secondly: the “Putin/Hitler Comparisons” weren’t MERELY used by those of us that condemn the man and recognize him as a bad, bad man but ALSO by at least one major Pro-Kremlin outlet, who tried to compare Putin to the “Good Hitler” in 2014, ie a mythical Hitler who stopped after seizing Czechoslovakia and did not start WWII.
For obvious reasons this was never particularly popular as a line of defense and was dropped fairly quickly, especially because people like myself and a host of others recognized that
A: Hitler was never “Good”, even if he would not have been condemned as being so bad had he not taken the greatest plunge in 1939.
and
B: That by its very nature, Hitler and Putin were unlikely to actually STOP their behavior at some kind of defined, limited line that they could be seen as “Good” at. Neither were Bismarck and even Bismarck’s own bloody bill has been underestimated.
@ Frederick > “Given this, is it much of a stretch to say that the government selects itself, and that we have little left in the way of representative and accountable government?”
That resonates with the post on the protests (mostly peaceful, it appears) in Israel over the proposed changes in the selection of judges: where the judiciary selects itself, and the people have very little to say about it in their elections.
Neither were Bismarck and even Bismarck’s own bloody bill has been underestimated.
==
Prussia was appallingly high-handed with smaller German states in 1866, but it was accomplished with little bloodshed. None of the Bismarck era wars lasted longer than nine months.
@ Banned Lizard > “when voters are given a choice of one corporate-owned politician versus another, they’ll vote for a corporate owned one every time.”
And the “corporations” don’t have to all be businesses.
Note that these excerpts are referring only to the Republican Party; the Democrats have a different way of selecting their “corporate-owned” candidate, but the results are much the same.
The voters THINK that THEY are selecting a candidate in the primary, but it ain’t necessarily so. And they only get a choice among the people who make it into the primaries, which the article points out as something they have no control over at all.
Time to redesign the GOP presidential nominating process.
by Jeffrey H. Anderson
…
The current process is an outgrowth of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
…
The resulting system of direct primaries and caucuses was supposed to empower voters, but things haven’t played out quite as expected. Political science professors Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller write in The Party Decides (2008) that “elected officials, top fundraisers, interest group leaders, campaign organizers, and ordinary activists” work to “scrutinize and winnow the field before voters get involved.” This winnowing is sometimes called, somewhat delicately, the election before the election; sometimes more plainly the “money primary.”
These power brokers unite “behind a single preferred candidate, and sway voters to ratify their choice.” Their “control of campaign resources (money, knowledge, labor)” usually seals the deal, especially on the Republican side. The new system also greatly empowers the press, which decides how to portray candidates, what issues to amplify or mute, and when to assign momentum. As Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick observed in Dismantling the Parties (1978), written just a few years after the new system replaced the old,
Advocates of the direct primary intended to wrest control from the bosses and return it to the people; presumably they did not intend to vest power in Walter Cronkite and other media moguls or to speed the development of a personalist politics with standards and practices more relevant to entertainment than to public affairs.”
…
It wasn’t the conservatives who picked Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. They were the picks of the donors, the consultants, the establishment—and the press corps.
I don’t totally agree with these statements.
IF the power brokers DO unite “behind a single preferred candidate,” then they can probably “sway voters to ratify their choice.”
That’s how we got those three losing candidates.
As has been universally acknowledged, Donald Trump was not the first choice of any of those groups, either in 2016 or 2020 (although I think he did pick up some of the donors who benefitted from his policies).
2016 may have been the first and only GOP primary where the voters DID get their preferred candidate!
@ stan > “You may find this of interest on the outrageous election fraud in 2020.”
The post is a very good collection of most of the irregularities long known, although there were a couple of situations listed that were new to me.
You write: “When Pennsylvania’s ballots were counted, the total number exceeded by 202,000 the number of registered voters. Steven Miller, a professor of mathematics at Williams College, found that around 90,000 of the absentee ballots purportedly requested by Republican voters had either been requested by persons other than those GOP voters or had been completed and sent in by those voters but never counted. This number exceeded Biden’s winning Pennsylvania margin. (He was awarded 3.46 million votes to Trump’s 3.38 million.)”
I am the person referenced above, and this is not what I found. What I was asked to do was to assume that the people surveyed by third parties were representative of Republican voters with requested ballots and responding accurately to questions, and if these assumptions held to confirm the extrapolated number of ballots that might have been sent in but not counted. This is very different than finding 90,000 ballots were not counted – this is all conditional on the two assumptions being correct, and if they are not then the conclusion may not hold. Additionally, this analysis says nothing about what might have happened to requests from Democrats, Independents and others.
This is typical of all journalistic restatements of studies: they leave out the nuances of the procedure.
Not that it matters, but with the cowboy hat I sure thought that was Toby Keith in the still for the Bee Gees video.
@Art Deco
Prussia was appallingly high-handed with smaller German states in 1866, but it was accomplished with little bloodshed. None of the Bismarck era wars lasted longer than nine months.
Agreed, though I wasn’t even thinking of the smaller German states per se. If anything his occupation policies were much worse among non-German occupied populations like the Danes in 1864, the French in 1870-3, and the Poles throughout. People don’t talk about things like reprisal killings, ethnic cleansings, or the wholesale massacre of villages by the Bismarckian era regime too much, but they probably should.
But again, by the standards of Shicklegruber, Wilhelm, Stalin,g or even Putin the numbers involved were quite small.
Food for the dead horse?
Is this The Go To Guy for Bunge’s foreign policy talking points?
Andrew Bacevich is interviewed here on Democracy Now (a leftist 501C3 organization) three days ago.
Baecvich spoke glowingly of Xi’s peace initiative for the “Ukraine-Russian War”; not the Russo-Ukrainian war, BTW. And of course the 20 year anniversary of the global infamy of the Iraq war was the main draw. Goody, goody! Double plus good!
Andrew Bacevich on China’s Rise as Global Superpower & Decline of U.S. Empire After Iraq Invasion
As an aside, funny how YouTube algorthyms work; it sent this video after I listened to Anders Puck Nielsen give an appraisal on the state of the Russo-Ukraine war. From
reality/truth to fiction?
Andrew Bacevich is interviewed here on Democracy Now (a leftist 501C3 organization) three days ago.
==
Bacevich during the period running from 1993 to 2002 used to place articles in starboard publications. Retrospectively, it seems as if he was snookering their editors, as you’d be hard put to find anything in those articles which advanced the purported editorial mission of the publications in question. After that, he seemed to retreat to quasi-academic publications like The National Interest. However, he also placed articles in Commonweal, which was once a Catholic publication but has been for some time a redoubt for church-o-crats.
==
I’ve long had the suspicion that Bacevich various publications could never withstand an audit which would compare his projections with subsequent events or even one which would verify factual assertions. I recall a rant in some publication about a dozen years ago complaining that among our unified commands was a ‘Southern Command’ operating in Latin America. Wouldn’t it be great, he says, if our relationship with Latin America was ‘mature’ enough not to have any such thing as a ‘Southern Command’. At the time he said this, the Southern Command had all of 2,000 billets; 46% of the billets were to be found at Guantanamo Bay, which had been a possession of the United States since 1902 (and which had no residents other than employees of the U.S. military and their dependents). The other 54% were in dribs and drabs around the region, with no country having more than 200 U.S. military personnel in residence. The primary activity of the Southern Command at that time was drug interdiction. Note, the number of billets had declined by 90% over the previous sixty years and Bacevich was still complaining.
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All you people trusting in Joe Biden to manage US involvement in the Russia/Ukraine war better start wishing on that star a little bit harder.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-base-syria-attacked-iranian-proxy-forces-retaliatory-airstrikes.amp
Mike
So what we’ve learned in the last year:
The government is prosecuting political enemies for crimes it makes up, and invoking its regulatory and investigatory powers selectively against them.
The government is pressuring private entities to deny services and/or employment to political enemies, and private entities are largely going along.
The government has defined the parameters of speech acceptable to it, under the guise of misinformation, and private entities have cheerfully cooperated in implementing censorship.
Election laws have been changed to remove meaningful barriers to cheating, and the courts provide no remedy after the fact.
Given this, is it much of a stretch to say that the government selects itself, and that we have little left in the way of representative and accountable government?
Oh Neo!!
Ooh Barry!!!
Frederick,
You are correct sir.
You may find this of interest on the outrageous election fraud in 2020. https://www.frontpagemag.com/auditing-bidens-victory/
How bad is the data? More on jobs.
NFIB (Natl Fed of Ind Bus) does actual surveys of small businesses. They show consistent loss of jobs at small businesses since the beginning of last fall.
ADT uses data from a large number of small businesses around the country. They show five straight months of declines in small biz jobs.
The govt uses a strange birth/death algorithm to try to estimate the number of small business jobs. It is notorious for getting the number wrong at times like these. (per economist Barry Knapp) It says we have created 400,000 jobs over the same period.
Who you gonna believe? [Per Groucho Marx, “me or your lying eyes?”], — the folks who actually talk to small business employers or the lying government that uses a computer program based on birth and death numbers without input from businesses or employees?
Firefox has been complaining about your site being a potential security threat for more than a week. When I try to access your site the following warning is issued:
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for neoneocon.com. The certificate is only valid for mail.neoneocon.com.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
Visitors are required to “Accept the risk and continue” to enter.
I thought you would like to know because it might affect your traffic. I skipped entry multiple times before hitting the accept button. I’m using the latest Firefox, 111.0.1
My Final Four. Creighton, Xavier, Gonzaga and K St.
Creighton and Gonzaga in the last game. Creighton wins! Big surprise.
TCNM:
Every now and then someone gets that message. Seems to be no rhyme or reason for it; my site is secure. Usually it’s just a couple of people who get it at a time. Unless a lot of people are getting it, I’m going to assume it’s got something to do with your browser or your computer settings. Sorry it’s happening, but it probably will be temporary if past experience is any guide.
Cornhead, Creighton has done well. Best wishes. So, you’re pulling for San Diego State and Miami tonight? And Creighton, of course.
Stan:
That “audit” article is an extremely good find. This among several highlights sticks out:
Not in 150 years has a candidate whose vote total jumped as much as Trump’s did from one election to the next ended up losing the election. Never has any incumbent who received over 75 percent of the votes in his party’s primaries (Trump won 94 percent) lost the general election.
MBunge:
I let your comment show because, even though you’re in comment moderation, it’s such a good example of the duplicitous game you play.
You write: “All you people trusting in Joe Biden to manage US involvement in the Russia/Ukraine war…” Guess what? You seem to be commenting at the wrong blog – because no one here matches that description.
Another strawman argument from MBunge – sort of like another day with the letters “day” in it.
Why don’t you just stop with the strawman stuff and do yourself a favor?
94% of all Ron DeSantis’ money comes from Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires and multinational corporations. Only 6% comes from small donors, or what you might describe as “regular people”. [Link to article DeSantis Taps Donors Griffin, Tudor Jones in $142 Million Haul] Additionally, you don’t spend 3-days with billionaire donors at Four Seasons donor retreat in Palm Beach, followed shortly by 3-days at a Club for Growth donor retreat in Miami, and then get to claim you “deal better with regular people.” This is just a lie.
The problem is fixable, but tainted money puts DeSantis in a bit of a hole.
I should say ‘fixable’ in preparation for 2028. The issue bears watching until then.
To paraphrase Truman, when voters are given a choice of one corporate-owned politician versus another, they’ll vote for a corporate owned one every time.
Banned:
Otay. More spittle from the Conservative Nut House.
Time will tell.
@MBunge
And just when I thought I had gotten familiar with the level of despicable you habituate yourself to, you decide to go further. I wish I weren’t surprised, but I actually am.
I got used to the dishonesty, stupidity, accusations of bad faith while practicing bad faith, and insults and smears against me. But this is pretty bad even by your standards.
Neo already handily beat your ass over the bad faith part of this, so I see no need to ruminate much on that. Instead I want to focus on the utterly stupid and craven nature of your selective outrage and concern trolling.
Did it never occur to you that the Iranian dictatorship has been in a state of war with us since 1979? That it has conducted attacks like this during literally every President’s term since then? That one reason those of us who opposed Biden (which is essentially everyone on this blog) did so was BECAUSE how we did not trust him or his puppeteers to handle a situation like this? And how UNLIKE the decision by Putin to escalate the Ukrainian invasion, it was foreseen, foreseeable, and all but inevitable that the Mullahs would pull something like this?
And yet, in the face of more than forty years of terrorism and murder by the “Guardians” of the “Islamic Republic” from Tehran, you try and use this…. To attack those of us who do not favor appeasing Putin. Whatever that is supposed to be. Those of us who reject your claims and premises.
There’s something disgusting at trying to use grandstand atop a mountain of corpses even at its most justified. The fact that you are doing this to attack those of us who you deem as beneath you, and over a subject almost entirely unrelated from the Ukrainian War underlines that.
But you know what?
As loathe as I am to say it I trust Brandon (or rather his puppet masters) to handle the Ukraine war and even responses to blatant attacks from the Mullahs a hell of a lot more than I trust Putin to rein in Iranian terrorism, let alone his own appetites.
I would know, I saw Dubya Bush try to triangulate to do that only to get the short end of the stick.
But I suppose you will ignore all that in pursuit of your true passion. Being a dishonest asswipe.
Don’t be a Bunge.
@neo
Neo, you have been one of the great bloggers on the internet for years and a real gem in the rough. But I have to ask: how many more chances will “Mike Bunge” get?
I know you have been warning him for months (likely more than a year) on at least a couple dozen times. You have certainly put him in moderation something like a half dozen times and threatened to ban him if he continued. But continued he has.
At this point, is it safe to go with the working assumption that Mike will not change his spots and will not stop strawmanning, acting in bad faith, and insulting without provocation? And if so, how many more chances would he get before being banned?
Of course I defer to your judgement.
banned lizard, I take it you have contributed to Ron because you want him to have all his money coming from small doners like you.
Turtler:
Actually, this is the first time he’s been in moderation. My usual policy – for long-time commenters who are not over-the-top obvious trolls – is to do that for a while and see whether there’s any change. If there isn’t, I ban them, but I’m always reluctant to go that route.
Right now I have total control over which comments of Bunge’s display.
@Neo
Ah, in that case I must have misunderstood or misremembered prior threats of moderation for that actually being imposed on him. And your policy is a wise one, and above all has to satisfy you above any others. Especially since I will freely admit to being biased.
It may be good news, or just Lucy pulling the football.
The Arizona Supreme Court sent the signature verification portion of Kari Lake’s lawsuit back to the trial court, with the proviso:
“IT IS FURTHER ORDERED remanding to the trial court to determine whether the claim that Maricopa County failed to comply with A.R.S. § 16-550(A) fails to state a claim pursuant to Ariz. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) for reasons other than laches, or, whether Petitioner can prove her claim as alleged pursuant to A.R.S. § 16-672 and establish that “votes [were] affected ‘in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election’” based on a “competent mathematical basis to Arizona Supreme Court Case No. CV-23-0046-PR conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.” (Opinion ¶ 11.)
The good news is the ASC recognized the trial court mischaracterized Lake’s original complaint. The bad news is determining what constitutes a “competent mathematical basis”. Sounds very subjective. I don’t think any court has used statistics to overturn any election.
It doesn’t get us any closer to actually auditing the signature verification process, comparing signatures on the return envelope to voter registration signatures on file. This is the only way to determine which, if any, ballots were invalid.
Rather than characterizing these ballots as illegal or fraudulent, the more neutral term should be invalid.
And rather than fraud, if Maricopa County can be shown to have not followed the legal process, I think it’s really maladministration.
Maricopa County, of course, will fight an actual audit of signatures to the US Supreme Court. Signature verification was never allowed during the 2020 audit.
https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/ariz-supreme-court-allows-lake-argue-signature-verification-issues-dems
“You Win Again” was the comeback for the Bee Gees after the death of disco. Not a big hit in the US- I heard it on the radio only a couple of times, though the video did get some airplay on MTV and VHI.
Turtler:
Yes, I previously only threatened moderation for Bunge.
Ruth:
Yes, Barry is at his peak in that 1987 video featured there, in my opinion and the opinion of a billion other women.
Yancey Ward:
It’s a great song but I’d never heard it before till I saw it on YouTube about 2 years ago. That’s because of the US radio boycott of the Bee Gees back in the 80s.
I have no idea, what the objective seems to be of our policy, it seems to be to alienate the largest powers, brazil india, et al, driven the saudis into the iranians under chinese auspices, lost virtually every country in the hemisphere, to chinese influence, (we meant to do that)
Regarding Lake mathematically proving improper signature verification cost her the election.
There was testimony from people in the auditor’s office that signatures that were being rejected were counted.
In 2012 the Maricopa County rejection rate was 2.24%, dropped to 1.2% in 2016.
Miraculously, Maricopa County voters’ penmanship improved to the point only 0.00030% were rejected in 2020, and in the primary election of 2022 the rejection rate jumped to 0.00441%.
Mathematically, Lake is going to have to prove somewhere between 2-3% of mail-in ballots should have been rejected. If an audit of signatures were allowed, that could probably be shown– but given the ridiculously low “official” rejection rate, I don’t see how Lake can prover her assertion.
I’ve said it many times before– Washington State did an audit in 2021, looking for bias in the signature verification process. Their report found no bias, but did show that the rejection rate of signatures should have been much higher than the official rejection rate statewide of 0.7%. That wasn’t one of their published conclusions– but was buried in some of their process text.
TCNM: Have you tried clearing your cache for Neo’s site?
Yancey Ward,
Yep, ‘One’ in 1989 was their only big(ish) US hit after the disco era. It peaked at #7 and is their only US top ten after 1979.
Interestingly ‘You Win Again’ was a massive world wide hit but not in the US and “One’ was a top ten hit in the US but nowhere else.
Griffin:
I’m pretty sure “One” was a huge hit in Germany. I’ve read that its popularity had partly had to do with the unification of West and East Germany. But the Bee Gees were very popular in Germany in general.
neo,
#37 in Germany according to Wikipedia which for this kind of thing is pretty reliable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Gees_discography
It’s better than the disco falsetto. That’s as far as I can go.
Griffin:
I think I was basing my statement on a video I saw of a Bee Gees concert in Germany around that time, and when they sang “One” the crowd really went wild. But those were Bee Gees fans, and maybe it wasn’t as popular generally as that indicated.
neo,
It appears the song ‘One’ was released in June of ‘89 so its possible it had peaked before the wall fell and reunification began. Maybe one of those songs that has a second life after it’s initial release.
“Right now I have total control over which comments of Bunge’s display.”
Why? Both Art Deco and om have been as insulting as I, and I’m sure there are at least a few more. I don’t use profanity. I don’t spam threads with ridiculous numbers of comments. I don’t stalk other commenters. I’m certainly rude and blunt but my arguments are no less intelligible or grounded in reality than anyone else’s. I do like to rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, but that’s not strawmanning. That’s trying to cut past semantics and get to the point. About the worst you can say about me is that I don’t actually spend that much time here, so I probably miss quite a bit of the conversation. I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever noticed being moderated.
No argument I’ve ever made, Neo, has ever been as bad as the people around here who equate Putin and Russia to Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s historically ignorant emotional blackmail. Or how about Art Deco, who ultimately dissolves any discussion of the Iraq War to “So who did you prefer, Uday or Qusay?” THAT’S not strawmanning?
Oh, well. I thought this was a place of discussion, not a hot house full of flowers that need to be protected from the harsh elements. But since I know at least you’ll be reading this, Neo…
I hope things in Ukraine work out as marvelously as you expect. I really do. But if they don’t, I want you to remember that I tried to tell you. Other people tried to tell you. We tried and we tried and we tried and we tried, but you wouldn’t listen.
Worse than that, you did listen to people you think lie to you about almost everything else. You decided to line up and salute people you think are trying to destroy the country. And you’re old enough to know better.
Mike
[Note from neo: I have taken this comment out of moderation in order to answer you, which I have done in this comment addressed to you at 12:09 AM.]
On March 15, 2023, I addressed you in this way:
That was written by me after you had called the commenters here “morons.”
On January 13 I wrote this to you:
Earlier in the thread I wrote this to you:
Strawman argument of yours plus an insult to me. A winning combination – not. And no, other commenters aren’t doing that.
Even earlier in that same thread, you had written:
I think it’s actually quite interesting that you seem to not know your own history here of giving out gratuitous general insults, not just to a certain person with whom you might be disagreeing on a certain thread – others do that, at times – but insults towards all the commenters here and towards me. And apparently you haven’t stuck around to read several warnings from me over the course of several months.
Your inattention to what you say and what is said to you in response may partially explain the prevalence of your strawman arguments, in which over and over again you mischaracterize the viewpoints of others. If you don’t pay attention to what people actually say, you can make up anything you want out of your own imagination. But those two reasons in particular – your constant strawman arguments, and also your global insults as well as insults to me (and in this post I have by no means given you all the examples of times you’ve done either or both) are the reasons you are in moderation and on track to being banned unless you cease and desist. You are either completely disingenuous about your history here or are simply not paying attention to what you say to people and what I’ve said to you. Then again, perhaps you are both disingenuous and inattentive.
And by the way, you appear to not know what the term “strawman argument” means, although it’s one of your favorite techniques. It does not mean “rephrasing the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, or “cutting past semantics and getting to the point.” In blog threads it means mischaracterizing the position of others and then knocking down and/or criticizing the fake positions you’ve created.
Take a look at this explanation and educate yourself, in case you really are unaware of what the term means.
@MBunge
There are none so blind as those who will not see, and none so unlearned as those who outright refuse to learn.
Firstly: I have criticized both when I find them out of line, though perhaps not as consistently as I should. And Neo has noted my temper, though she also noted explicitly I tend to keep it under decent control.
Secondly: Art Deco and even om tend to provide more grist for the mill and things of substance than what you discuss. They also tend to provide sources and argumentation better than your own, and No I do not say that merely because I agree with them, in many cases I Do Not (you might have seen where I differed with Art Deco on Hitler’s skill as a politician and leader and the collapse of the German Republic).
You however have been monumentally incompetent, dishonest, and of poor faith. You do pathetically little to get your own sources or your own conduct, and it shows. Which is why you have handed me no short string of easy victories over you when you thought it was wise to do dumb nonsense like play dumb about my references go POTUSes trying to appease and make nice with Putin or claim that the only reason anybody would compare modern events to the 1930s was self-righteousness.
No, but you are profane in far more substantial and damaging ways than the occasional or even serial F Bomb. As we noted.
Bullshit.
You absolutely have and you absolutely do. And while in terms of conventional spam (ie filling up the thread with back to back comments) you may be better than myself, miguel cervantes, or om you sink below at least the former two of us in saying shit of substance with even a modicum of civility.
Oh yeah, and honesty. Such as when you accused me of strawmanning you when I pointed out you were the one enegaging in strawmanning. Another thing I had to pull apart.
What the Fuck is that even supposed to mean in the context of a rather small, intimate, and cozy personal blog with a tight knit community? If this were a Forum of some size and you had people following you and replying to your comments and continuing fights without end that’d be one thing. But it isn’t. This is Neo’s blog and all of us in the commentariat who abide by the rules have a right to speak. And no, making reference to shit you put out in a prior thread is not “stalking.”
Bullshit.
I can be rude and blunt (just look at my profanity laced rant at Mearsheimer), though rarely as much as you are and certainly not to other blog commenters (let alone our host) without what I view as due provocation.
You on the other hand are simply an asshole. Worse, on the subject of history and debate you’re an incompetent, ignorant asshole. As I outlined in more than one comment. Which I can dig up if necessary.
It is this trifecta that makes so many of your recent posts completely devoid of merit or redeeming value. If they really were “rude and blunt” we might be able to say they at least made a point. If they were blunt and wrong we might at least say that they were made civilly. If they were rude and wrong then then at least that would provide room for nuance or an attempt to build an argument.
But you, oh Mike, do all of the above. Which in practice amounts to petty, bullshit sniping using an ever changing array of double and even triple standards while hiding behind cherry-picked (and often outright fallacious) sources meant to stand as proxies for your stance but which provide a level of plausible deniability.
It’s a rather awful mixture of dishonesty, stupidity, incompetence, deceit, and bluntness.
And I am far from the only person who has noticed.
Again, bullshit.
And you wonder why I outright call you a liar?
Because that is what you are.
Your arguments are fairly intelligible, I will confess. But that is mostly because there is vanishingly little behind them. Mostly assertions with maybe simple argumentation and cherry-picked “proof” to justify overweening arrogance and insults.
But intelligible does not mean Intelligent, correct, or grounded in reality.
And make no mistake: so much of what you write is absolutely not grounded in reality. As I pointed out at length and with great patience, and which you have Never been able to make a coherent rebuttal to.
Because any moron claiming that comparisons between Ukraine today and events in the 1930s are driven solely by self-righteousness is grounding their claims in deluded hubris, not reality.
And while I will not entirely claim to be devoid of deluded hubris, I can at least say my species of deluded hubris is able to do Basic Fucking Fact Checking and Background Research.
Oh Mike, the problem is my that you “like to rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like.”
He problem is you’re such n ignoramus that you either fail to do it Properly or accurately and wind up with a strawman, or you have always intended to do so in bad faith but assume you will never be caught.
I happily rephrase the arguments of others in terms they don’t like, but the only person on this blog I recall alleging me of committing a strawman was you. Which I handily destroyed by the arcane art of using your own words and those of your “source” to crush that claim.
I’m also not dependent on your species of “analogies for me but not for thee” where you condemn anybody for making note of the obvious parallels between things like say Hitler, Stalin, and Ishiwara’s misadventures in the 1930s to Ukraine as being acting in bad faith and motivated by self-righteousness, but that you can make an overwrought and fallacious comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis to try and whitewash Putin’s actions. Which I and many others pointed out the flaws with.
You are the one trying to gatekeep and hypocritically demand everybody only use the kinds of evidence you arbitrarily and self-I interestedly deem kosher at a given moment. I never condemned you for drawing historical parallels, I just chewed you out for doing a really damn bad job at it.
No, it absolutely is not.
And if you were actually so blinded by your ego to think that you had the right to dictate and define what the point of others was without proof, you’re more fool than I thought. Which is admittedly quite the bar.
Mike, stop lying to yourself. As Neo pointed out, you’re guilty of much worse than not spending much time on here (which is if anything admirable in a way). Moreover, this is the first time you were put in Moderation. Keep up like this and it won’t end.
No, your bullshit attempts to deny any of the incredibly obvious parallels between Putin’s Russia and Nazi Germany are the historically ignorant emotional blackmail. And made worse because you had no coherent rebuttal to them but also because you – in your overweening idiocy – tried to condemn any of us who compared Putin’s actions to those of other dictators of the era no matter our arguments or evidence. Especially when I stomped on one of your arguments that “not every bad guy is Hitler” and that Putin is not Hitler (both of which I agreed with) by saying I found many of Putin’s strategies to be more reminiscent of the Soviets and Imperial Japanese, especially the deniability and use of paramilitaries and farcical puppet regimes.
And ironically just as you spout this bullshit, Den Haag has finally been pushed to act by inducting Putin and one of his Henchwomen for kidnapping Ukrainian children in order to forcibly Russify them. Which to those of us who know an iota about the Third Reich is rather similar in concept to Herr Shicklegruber’s Lebensborn program.
Now obviously the scale and severity of these atrocities are far, far smaller than the most egregious ones in the 1930s or the full tally of what Hitler, Stalin, or even any given Japanese junta head was guilty of. But that doesn’t change the similarities in Execution, Method, or in some cases Intent.
It is historically illiterate, morally bankrupt, legally incoherent, irrational, and frankly disgraceful blackmail to pretend otherwise as you have. Or certainly to outright condemn any possibility that people of good faith can disagree on that.
And I know MY arguments where I compared Putin and Hitler are not as bad as plenty of yours, Mike, because unlike myself you were never able to come up with a coherent rational rebuttal to them.
Agreed, which is why I disagree that. It is a legitimate question to ask in the context of a debate, but not to the exclusion of others. It is fair to ask people what they would rather have or what their plans to deal with the House of Hussein would be alternatively, but I will not strawman everyone who criticizes or even condemns the Iraq War as a Baathist.
Though your dishonesty on that note was plenty jarring, such as the obsessive denial about WMD being found in Iraq and attempts to whitewash the ties between AQ and Saddam as not an alliance (which would be a matter of semantics when Manila had to stomp on the Iraqi embassy staff under Saddam’s direction for giving material and operational support to freaking Abu Sayyaf under the aegis of OBL),.
That would be more convincing if you hadn’t spread manure around so widely.
Oh, poor persecuted Mike Bunge, the true Jeremiah speaking out against doom. Practically worthy of taking the titular role in
Skarga’s Sermon. Woe to be the Cassandra!
What a pile of self-serving shit.
Mike, I cannot speak for Neo, but I can speak for myself.
The reason I heap such condemnation of you and your conduct, why I regard you as a dishonest liar, a fool, and a knave, is NOT because I “wouldn’t listen”, But Because I D I D. At GREAT length and depth.
I have patiently listened to you and your comments, even when they disagreed with mine, when they moved past disagreement to offending my ethical sensibilities, when they went past that to being aggressively dishonest and insulting to the intelligence of those who read them, and when they attempted character assassination of me. And then I listened to most of your sources just to be sure.
Did it ever occur to you, Mike, that are not the learned prophet you think you are? That others would reject you not in spite of your behavior and your “warnings” but BECAUSE of them and the abysmally low quality of both?
Ah yes, the old fucking cliche of “everybody who disagrees with Putin shilling is a tool of Biden.”
This is unspeakably dumb and fallacious guilt by association and always has been, and by now it has been beaten quite to death. But I might as well do it.
Firstly: Listening to a source or sources does not mean BELIEVING in said source or supporting them. I would know. I have listened to you peddle this almost complete and unalloyed pile of self-serving, insulting lies.
Secondly: It is IMPORTANT to listen to those that lie to you, if only to understand what they are claiming. Whether it is because they MIGHT be telling the truth or to understand their lies to better refute them.
Basic research.
The irony is rich. On one hand you conflate conditional, limited agreement with malcontents trying to destroy the country with lining up and saluting them. On the other hand you line up whitewash people and dictatorships whom we know are trying to destroy the country, and those that shillfor them. Putin. Xi. The Ayatollah and Mullahs. And thanks to their shilling Sanders and AOC.
Et tu. Bunge?
If age was what determined knowledge, Mike, you wouldn’t have made the mistakes you have or tried to cover them up by lying.
@MBunge
Also on the subject of
I meant to add this in to my giant omnibus post, but delay in getting to the computer meant the edit window elapsed. So I’ll make it here.
In addition to my prior points, what is interesting is
Firstly: It’s worth remembering a very basic point. Hitler didn’t START OFF as the Hitler of Infamy we know today, springing forth fully formed with his bloody track record. And indeed, I’d note that as far as comparisons go, Hitler actually killed far fewer people in his quest to gain and then consolidate power over his home country and retake its “core territory” up to 1938 than Putin did, even though you and I both agree that Putin is nowhere near as bad as Hitler was. Certainly YET.
Secondly: the “Putin/Hitler Comparisons” weren’t MERELY used by those of us that condemn the man and recognize him as a bad, bad man but ALSO by at least one major Pro-Kremlin outlet, who tried to compare Putin to the “Good Hitler” in 2014, ie a mythical Hitler who stopped after seizing Czechoslovakia and did not start WWII.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-crimea-and-the-good-hitler/25322600.html
For obvious reasons this was never particularly popular as a line of defense and was dropped fairly quickly, especially because people like myself and a host of others recognized that
A: Hitler was never “Good”, even if he would not have been condemned as being so bad had he not taken the greatest plunge in 1939.
and
B: That by its very nature, Hitler and Putin were unlikely to actually STOP their behavior at some kind of defined, limited line that they could be seen as “Good” at. Neither were Bismarck and even Bismarck’s own bloody bill has been underestimated.
@ Frederick > “Given this, is it much of a stretch to say that the government selects itself, and that we have little left in the way of representative and accountable government?”
That resonates with the post on the protests (mostly peaceful, it appears) in Israel over the proposed changes in the selection of judges: where the judiciary selects itself, and the people have very little to say about it in their elections.
Neither were Bismarck and even Bismarck’s own bloody bill has been underestimated.
==
Prussia was appallingly high-handed with smaller German states in 1866, but it was accomplished with little bloodshed. None of the Bismarck era wars lasted longer than nine months.
@ Banned Lizard > “when voters are given a choice of one corporate-owned politician versus another, they’ll vote for a corporate owned one every time.”
And the “corporations” don’t have to all be businesses.
Note that these excerpts are referring only to the Republican Party; the Democrats have a different way of selecting their “corporate-owned” candidate, but the results are much the same.
The voters THINK that THEY are selecting a candidate in the primary, but it ain’t necessarily so. And they only get a choice among the people who make it into the primaries, which the article points out as something they have no control over at all.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/getting-the-candidate-we-deserve/
I don’t totally agree with these statements.
IF the power brokers DO unite “behind a single preferred candidate,” then they can probably “sway voters to ratify their choice.”
That’s how we got those three losing candidates.
As has been universally acknowledged, Donald Trump was not the first choice of any of those groups, either in 2016 or 2020 (although I think he did pick up some of the donors who benefitted from his policies).
2016 may have been the first and only GOP primary where the voters DID get their preferred candidate!
@ stan > “You may find this of interest on the outrageous election fraud in 2020.”
The post is a very good collection of most of the irregularities long known, although there were a couple of situations listed that were new to me.
I do recommend reading it; however, please note this comment (which I suspect is boilerplate triggered by some automatic internet app that watches for mentions of selected names).
https://www.frontpagemag.com/auditing-bidens-victory/#comment-45403
This is typical of all journalistic restatements of studies: they leave out the nuances of the procedure.
A look at what ails the movie industry at
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/03/24/nolte-woke-poisoned-hollywood-has-doomed-once-unbeatable-movie-industry/
Not that it matters, but with the cowboy hat I sure thought that was Toby Keith in the still for the Bee Gees video.
@Art Deco
Agreed, though I wasn’t even thinking of the smaller German states per se. If anything his occupation policies were much worse among non-German occupied populations like the Danes in 1864, the French in 1870-3, and the Poles throughout. People don’t talk about things like reprisal killings, ethnic cleansings, or the wholesale massacre of villages by the Bismarckian era regime too much, but they probably should.
But again, by the standards of Shicklegruber, Wilhelm, Stalin,g or even Putin the numbers involved were quite small.
Food for the dead horse?
Is this The Go To Guy for Bunge’s foreign policy talking points?
Andrew Bacevich is interviewed here on Democracy Now (a leftist 501C3 organization) three days ago.
Baecvich spoke glowingly of Xi’s peace initiative for the “Ukraine-Russian War”; not the Russo-Ukrainian war, BTW. And of course the 20 year anniversary of the global infamy of the Iraq war was the main draw. Goody, goody! Double plus good!
Andrew Bacevich on China’s Rise as Global Superpower & Decline of U.S. Empire After Iraq Invasion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=317sSDF6nQA
As an aside, funny how YouTube algorthyms work; it sent this video after I listened to Anders Puck Nielsen give an appraisal on the state of the Russo-Ukraine war. From
reality/truth to fiction?
How is the war going? — Late March 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWKwPeSnvTE&t=25s
Andrew Bacevich is interviewed here on Democracy Now (a leftist 501C3 organization) three days ago.
==
Bacevich during the period running from 1993 to 2002 used to place articles in starboard publications. Retrospectively, it seems as if he was snookering their editors, as you’d be hard put to find anything in those articles which advanced the purported editorial mission of the publications in question. After that, he seemed to retreat to quasi-academic publications like The National Interest. However, he also placed articles in Commonweal, which was once a Catholic publication but has been for some time a redoubt for church-o-crats.
==
I’ve long had the suspicion that Bacevich various publications could never withstand an audit which would compare his projections with subsequent events or even one which would verify factual assertions. I recall a rant in some publication about a dozen years ago complaining that among our unified commands was a ‘Southern Command’ operating in Latin America. Wouldn’t it be great, he says, if our relationship with Latin America was ‘mature’ enough not to have any such thing as a ‘Southern Command’. At the time he said this, the Southern Command had all of 2,000 billets; 46% of the billets were to be found at Guantanamo Bay, which had been a possession of the United States since 1902 (and which had no residents other than employees of the U.S. military and their dependents). The other 54% were in dribs and drabs around the region, with no country having more than 200 U.S. military personnel in residence. The primary activity of the Southern Command at that time was drug interdiction. Note, the number of billets had declined by 90% over the previous sixty years and Bacevich was still complaining.