He’s “quite an accomplished man” if you’re a fan of Reaganomics which he was one of the architects of.
I however am not a fan of Reaganomics and think it was a terrible idea.
Anyway, I pointed out the man is a paranoid crank who’s not reliable or credible.
Questioning the credibility and reliability of a source has always been something that all reasonable people believe.
Now, I know that you’ve made it clear in your time on the Dope that you don’t actually care about credibility or reliability of your sources but merely look for people, regardless of their credibility who say what you want to hear.
However as one famous New York Times reporter said in relation to the Bush administration, that’s not reality-based thinking. I’m a member of the reality-based community and therefore think it’s not worthwhile to listen to cranks like Roberts.
There are plenty if sources out there who are credible. I’d recommend using them if you want people to pay attention.
How much more proof do you need than membership of openly fascist or neo-Nazi political parties? I truly don’t understand why people are claiming that this isn’t the case… Is it simply that you don’t believe that America and western Europe would support a fascist coup? That’s rather naive, to put it mildly.
Right, even if your wife wanted to have sex with him anyway, and you were planning to make a donation.
Huh? Didn’t you see the videos where protesters were throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, who were retreating rather than returning fire? (Oddly, the commentary over this when I saw it on the news was stressing violence by the police, which was directly contradicted by the footage … what was going on in the news editors’ heads?) There is no shortage of very clear proof that, however peaceful the protests might have been when they started, they did not remain peaceful. You simply have the facts wrong here, and I suggest you do a bit of research.
Japan was a vicious aggressor who surrendered. In Korea, US troops were not occupying South Korea. The US was there at the behest of the government, and protected its people from the nightmare that has been North Korea ever since. The fact that you even bring these up shows that you’re biased against the US government, no matter what it does. I suppose you were against the US invasion of Europe, attacking the legitimate Nazi government in WWII? That is consistent with your other examples here.
Afghanistan is a slightly grayer area: the Taliban attacked the US and the Afghanistan government was shielding them. After recovering Afghanistan from the Taliban, there was no viable government. To simply leave would have been a craven lapse of responsibility.
Iraq was an embarrassment and is a case in point for your argument. If we had any business being there, it was over only one thing: that they’d failed to live up to terms of surrender after invading Kuwait, but that wasn’t the argument we used to invade them, so we do lose the high ground there.
Debate 101: don’t argue facts. The quoted text is not an argument, but a list of assertions. Ad-hominem arguments are valid against bare assertions. This is why we can use them in court, to attack the veracity of testimony. We don’t use them in a debate, but that’s because debaters use arguments, not lists of unsubstantiated assertions.
For the third time, the debate was not whether or not the occupation was justified, buy whether or not said occupation makes the democracy illegitimate, as posters such as yourself have claimed for Crimea.
See above. You miss the point by a mile, bud. Maybe if you read my posts before you launched into American Apologist screed, you would have ascertained the gist of the debate. Maybe not. South Korea is currently occupied by the US government. They have supposedly free elections all the time.
The fact that I bring these up shows that I am able to objectively compare instances of military occupation and elections under such. The fact that you bring up shit indirect to the debate such as the wars preceding the military occupations shows that you are swinging blindly at the piñata.
Now that you’ve displayed that your awareness of the situation in Afghanistan is on par with that of an avid Msnbc or Fox News viewer, let me adjust my rhetoric accordingly. The Taliban never attacked the US. Al Qaeda did. The Taliban were the ones who offered to turn over Bin Laden. You’re welcome.
I am not asking you to justify the occupation of Afghanistan, settle down. I am asking you to explain how an election in Afghanistan is legitimate under such an occupation if the Crimean parliament is illegitimate under Russian occupation.
Even when you’re right, you can’t resist being dreadfully wrong.
He didn’t make an argument, he made a list of assertions.
He’s also a nut who thinks that 911 was an inside job.
Nuts are not reliable hence when presented as sources they are dismissed because they are paranoid lunatics.
Anyway, there are plenty of non-nuts out there and I don’t have a huge dog in this fight.
Truth be told, I’m not a fan of states drawn along ethnic lines and had very severe reservations about the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia during the 1990s(though from what little I know that hasn’t been an issue with Czechoslovakia).
Similarly, had I been alive back then I’d have had strong reservations regarding the partitioning of Palestine and India.
I do however find the automatic “Hmm…Putin’s doing something that pisses off America, he must be doing something right” approach that some(let me be clear just some) have been taking quite nauseating.
Having said that, I should also add, I do find those who seem to be jumping on the pro-Ukraine bandwagon motivated by leftover Cold War politics also less than agreeable.
I asked a simple question unanswered this far. If Russian occupation of Crimea makes their democracy illegitimate, are the democracies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, SK, and Germany legitimate or not? There are more American troops in Germany and Japan than Russian troops in Crimea, so be careful with your hyperbole.
I nearly die laughing every time you present your Washington-centric viewpoints as some sort of boundary of acceptable opinion. You’re a guy on a message board, bud. Not an analyst for the Brookings Institute.
You know RedFury, a lot of those stories were linked and discussed in the How Will the West React? thread already. Dumping them all at once and saying “argue with these!!” is beyond obnoxious.
Also, his arguments would be better if he actually made a point of picking reliable sources rather than discredited lunatics who believe that 911 was an inside job or something similar.
Instead, he seems vastly more concerned with just finding people who make really inflammatory statements then their credibility or even their politics(people will notice that he regularly cites lunatics from both the right and the left).
No warning issued but that’s bad form.
*
Edit to add: As has been pointed out, I was unclear. Do NOT just post an endless series of links and think that makes an argument. Again, bad form, wastes pixels, and irritates moderators when they’re at lunch and using their phone to issue mod notes. No one wants that, do they?*
Hm. Firstly, Cuba is not a democracy. One point I made, that you apparently didn’t read, was that Japan, SK, Afghanistan, etc. are heavily influenced by the demands of the US government. Cuba is not heavily influenced by the US government in case you had not noticed. They are often at odds with one another. So, it would be safe to assume that Cuba, while threatened by the US military by their presence in Guantanamo Bay in a similar way South Carolina was threatened by Ft Sumter, is not occupied by the US government.
The reason I think that the other countries are under a form of occupation is they are obviously puppets of the US empire.
There’s a reason Seoul isn’t standing holding the airport gate open while non-subtly checking its watch…and that reason isn’t so much American demands and expectations as complete terror of Pyongyang.
This constant “but Iraq!” argument is stupid, and it’s time to retire it. ** Things that are wrong are wrong, even if someone else did it too. **Even if they got away with it, in fact.
