Military Events in Syria and Iraq Thread #4

You're ok with racism as an exercise in free speech, but you're not ok with protesters having the right to criticize Putin and his allies in places like Syria and Kiev, and you seem to have no problem with much of it being banned in Russia, so it's not really about believing in free speech. Why are you not upset that hundreds and thousands are arrested at major anti-Putin protests and that organized gatherings are illegal without his permission? Do you believe homosexuals should be free to openly promote their lifestyles, or do you support their criminalization in Russia for doing so?

You said Belarussians are lazy and stupid, and they're pretty much a miniature copy of Russia itself. One can only imagine what Soviet Russians generally felt about Azerbaijanis and Uzbeks.

Not as close as the West was to Stalin in the second half of WW2, nor as close as Stalin was to Hitler in the first half. Israel and Saudi Arabia collaborate against Iran (as do several European and North American countries), otherwise one of them still maintains an official policy of wanting to replace the other with a population of refugees.

 

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And once again this is not even an argument.

Hm, an argument? Let's see: "That's very minor in the US - not even in the same order of magnitude as the rightwing operations. There's nothing on the left, for example, anywhere near equivalent to the book "Liberal Fascism", or the media efforts to classify the Nazi Party as leftwing - overt and flagrant corporate funded direct attacks on the meaning of the word "fascism". "

I would name this a claim. As usual one without evidence.

In a discussion about fascism, it is completely irrelevant that Obama together with the US Congress invites and gives standing ovations to the open fascist Poroshenko greeting this Congress with "Sieg Heil", ups, "Slava Ukraine".

In a civilized discussion, nobody will claim that he has better information, at least not without a relativization like "I think". To behave like a teacher is appropriate if you argue with somebody who accepts you as a teacher, else it is simply arrogance.

Thanks. This is what is called an argument. It contains not only a claim, that Obama is rightwing, but also some arguments to justify this, arguments about the content of his politics. Fine, you can do it. (Some "you are played" nonsense followed and had to be disposed of.)

You make the defamations, so it is your burden of proof. Elementary scientific rules, and, moreover, elementary rules of moral behavior.

I disagree. Of course, oil and gas play some role. But I think this role is overestimated in the Syrian case. Russia has enough of it itself. The main issue for Russia is the destruction of terrorism and reaching stability in the region. The main issue for Israel is simply weakening all the Arab states around it. For the Saudis the religious issue against the Shia seems more important than an oil pipeline too.

Wrong. Criticizing Putin is as common in the Runet as racism, and I have no problem with this. In fact, the ban of Telegram in Russia is something where I disagree with what is done in Russia. (The argument to do this is that it is used by terrorists. I don't think it is a good argument.)

I'm not upset about Western fantasies. The law in Russia is that a demonstration should be registered. The administration has the right to reject the place of the demonstration but is then obliged to make an offer for another place. This is what is done. If one insists nonetheless on doing the demonstration at the original place, one violates the law and can be arrested. I have seen a live video from such an illegal demonstration in RT, and the police behaved there in a quite normal way, so even these illegal protesters risked nothing if they behaved in a civilized way.

I think they should be free to do so. But I don't think this is a really important issue.

No. Quote, please.

 

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Of course not. It's observation. Evidence for some argument not present. So?

So you name things differently, without reason or argument or evidence, and they go away? No wonder you can't see fascism standing in front of you - you decided to name it something else, and it disappeared from your universe.

The latest item of evidence presented for my multiple thread beaten-to-death claim of predominance of rightwing vocabulary suppression in US mass media was the existence of heavy mass media promotion of the book "Liberal Fascism", without leftwing counterbalance. You yourself have verified the mass media presence of that book, its wide promotion and rise in the sales charts and so forth - that's why I selected it as illustration. I have also presented you - in the past - with the GOPAC memo, Mathew Dowd's campaign coverage memo, the pundit lineup stats of MSNBC, Fox News's vocabulary policies, the coordination visible in the patterns of vocabulary usage in American mass media, the financial support of Fox and Limbaugh's media endeavors in their early and money-losing development, the New York Times pro-Trump campaign coverage bias in 2016 including vocabulary restrictions, evidence of the sheer amount of money spent on media influence by the authoritarian corporate Right, and so forth.

Quite a pile, taken in all. You have presented no counterbalance, no counter-argument or counter-evidence. Instead, you have denied it all, piece by piece, for reasons ranging from your not caring about it or not knowing about it (seriously - that's actually evidence of something not existing, in your posts) to absurdly fallacious "arguments" based on presumptions you can't be bothered to check, ( easily sourced in US wingnut media; such as your quantity-based analysis of one day's NYT political coverage, declared by you to be pro-Clinton biased, and presented by you as therefore evidence of NYT pro-Clinton bias throughout). The end state is always the same: None of it gets into your bubble. The fact that the NYT campaign coverage was anti-Clinton, say, cannot enter your bubble. And so arguments like mine, based on realities you exclude, simply don't exist - they have no basis, no evidence, in your bubble. They are all "claims".

Willful ignorance is among the most arrogant of intellectual stances possible, btw. If you're worried about arrogance.

So does the US. Domestic oil and gas supply is not the concern of either Russia or the US, in Syria. Nevertheless, neither country would be involved in Syria if there were no oil or gas or pipelines involved. Neither would there be any terrorism issue in the West (which includes Russia, btw, from Osama bin Laden's point of view) without that overriding issue as instigation of US and Russian military presence. No evaluation of the military events in Syria is possible without considering the oil and gas that are at the center of the entire war.

 

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That was a repetition, very partial, of stuff I have posted many times here, including directly in response to you explicitly concerning your ignorance-based and multiply repeated misrepresentations of Obama's ideology and official behavior.

Here's what will happen, if you keep doing what you do: You will, in the future, when that posting on this thread is well buried and requires work to dig up, deny that I posted it and demand that I provide the evidence that I posted it. And when I tell you to pound sand, you will once again make your standard claims of bad character and uncivilized conduct and failure to provide arguments and so forth.

And I have posted that before, as well, that prediction - including, finally one time, an assertion that I have just now partially invalidated: that I would never again actually repeat any of the arguments, evidence, etc, that you were denying existed, beyond the first one or two courtesy repetitions. I think I said "three" would be my limit.

Clearly I backslid, there. But it's a temporary weakness. In the future, when you try to claim (without evidence or argument, btw) that Clinton, Obama, other Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party as a whole, the non-Fox US media as a whole, the NYT, MSNBC, college professors and academics in the US, and anyone else in the list of standard US corporate wingnut media targets, are "left" (or even centrist), I'm going to repeat the observation that you are wrong, and your source is US rightwing media corruption. When you ask for argument and evidence (after providing none yourself, notice), I will tell you to pound sand. I make this solemn vow on the graves of my sainted ancestors.

Meanwhile: the thread here is very thin on the matter of oil and gas interests - the dominant consideration in an evaluation of military events as they appear to be approaching some kind of conclusion. Just sayin'.

 

I'm still waiting to hear all about how the Zionist Illuminati ruined your life and made your country go to war in Syria. You drop hints about it all the time, why don't you share with us some of your privileged info?

 

Slava Ukraine does not mean the same thing as Sieg Heil. Nor does "Vive La France". Besides, you say Ukrainians can't be Nazis or fascists unless they name themselves as such, that was your whole justification for not calling Russia a fascist state.

You've said on countless occasions that western mainstream media spouts nothing but fake anti-Russian propaganda, without similarly challenging the veracity of Russian state media, and you've declared these statements as matters of fact, not personal opinion. You didn't say "I think the Douma gas attacks were faked," you claimed you had specific information about it being a US setup.

No. The main issue for Russia is the preservation of its military presence in the Mediterranean, and the protection of an old regional ally while preventing the US from gaining any influence there. If Hezbollah had tried to throw Assad out and close the Russia base at Tartous, you'd be labelling them as terrorists just the same (and if Russia's alliance with them ever breaks down, strained as it already is, I have no doubt that you will).

It's the same argument you use to support mass-starving and bombing Syrian civilians- just label everyone a terrorist for refusing to be governed by Assad or his henchmen or to "reconcile" under his authority, and fire away.

That sounds a lot more like an unsubstantiated statement of fact than a "personal opinion".

According to you and the Kremlin, there are plenty of violent protests against Putin's rule. If that's true, then there's clearly a major body of discontent within Russian society which would obviously be interested in legal protests. Can you please cite an example of the last time Russia's government approved a major anti-Putin protest within reasonable transport distance to a major city?

But what matters is that they're not free to do so. So do you acknowledge that Russia's government is extremely cruel and repressive towards homosexuals?

I will admit that I may have overzealously interpreted your response there, but it looks like you're implying that Belarussians are worse workers than Germans, and that this is a trait independent of the Russian vassal that rules them. Are you saying that if Alexander Lukoshenko was in charge of Germany, and Angela Merkel was in charge of Belarus, that the relative levels of economic prosperity would remain roughly the same?

 

You have no access to my sources, thus it is not observation but a claim. And it goes away because it is irrelevant.

LOL. Thanks for reviving the memory about the quality of your arguments. I remember, I was quite surprised, and have simply taken by accident some period and simply counted pro- and anti-Trump articles in NYT, with anti-Trump being the clear winner.
including vocabulary restrictions, evidence of the sheer amount of money spent on media influence by the authoritarian corporate Right, and so forth.

So, you have again lied. And lied knowing that I have presented counterevidence. That you did not accept the counterevidence as decisive, ok, but it was nonetheless counterevidence. And you have not even tried to check the sources yourself and to argue that one or another particular article which I have counted as anti-Trump was pro-Trump.

There is no necessity at all to deny something you posted. Once you claim you have posted something, and that that is somehow important to make a point, feel free to dig and quote yourself. Else, such claims will be ignored. You have so often made such claims about what has been posted that you were unable to support with evidence, many of them (mainly about my position) plainly wrong, other distorted, that your claims about such questions have zero reliability.

In other words, this example of providing some evidence was an accident, you will never repeat it, and in the future restrict yourself to empty claims and nonsensical speculations about the sources. (In this case, what I have given (the - for Obama being rightwing) followed simply conventions common in Germany (if there are two parties, one is named right, the other left, and the Democrats are in the US what is named left, and it was not really an argument, I have simply written down my opinion on how to evaluate these guys according to your fascism criteria, and if I had an aim there, it would have been to present Obama as fascist too, thus, rightwing would be better for me. So, why I would argue about this.)

 

"Slava Ukraine" was the official greeting of the UPA, the Bandera-fascist military organization, which has murdered a lot of Russian, Polish and Jewish civilians, as much as they were able to, a clear case of genocide. So, the UPA is the Ukrainian analog of the SS, so that "Sieg Heil" is the correct analog of the greeting "Slava Ukraine". The support of the Bandera-fascist movement is completely open in the Ukraine, the founding day of the UPA became an official holiday under Poroshenko, so according to my criteria, Poroshenko is clearly fascist. And, what was the main point of my application of Iceaura's criteria, according to them too.

I have presented and discussed the evidence for the thesis that the Douma gas attacks were faked, so, I have done what I asked for here. In my description of what the Russian media present, I have often made clear that I don't use Russian mass media except occasionally, thus, have even indicated that my personal impression, which is the base of my conclusions, is quite limited.

That terrorists, if they are not stupid, will use communications with good encryption, is quite certain - they are not stupid, it is easy today. I reject the official justification because it creates more harm even if terrorists use it. The guys I name terrorists in Syria are Daesh, Al Qaida (including renamed variants), gangs which have cooperated with them in military operations, gangs which have disqualified themselves with what would be war crimes if done by an army. That there are also a lot of local militias, who have taken weapons to defend their families and villages, who have formally cooperated with those terrorists too, but mainly because they were too weak to fight them. Russians and Syrians are not bombing civilian population, but fighters. Civilians also die, of course, some collateral damage is unavoidable. But the numbers I have seen indicate that there are less civilian victims than fighters (one can take SOHR numbers, which openly count fighters which are not Syrian army defectors as civilians, and estimate the true number of civilians among them simply by the hypothesis that civilian male victims will be not more than female victims). Instead, in other wars (mainly those with US involved) the number of civilians killed is greater than the number of military personal.

I have substantiated the claim with facts about the legal situation in Russia. I can add that most of those taken by the police will be left home after some hours, so, nothing horrible happens to them.

Take every anti-Putin demo organized by Navalny in Moscow during the last years. There was always another place, inside Moscow of course, and even close enough to the center, which was proposed as a replacement for the place where Navalny wanted to make the demonstration. I have seen a video where the police have requested the demonstrators to go to the place where the demonstration was permitted. Note: To go, not to drive or so. Navalny simply ignores the places where the demonstrations are permitted and starts an illegal demonstration where he likes. So, I know for sure that the German police would behave in the same way. Been on German demonstrations myself, compared with the RT live video from the last illegal Navalny demo. Despite being libertarian, that means, prejudiced against the police, I acknowledge that both behave in a professional way and there is no big difference. (This was very different during the Yeltsin and early Putin time, I have information about cases of people, even children, beaten to death by the police around 2000.)

The number of such demonstrations is low, not plenty. There is not much violence. If compared, say, with the G20 protests in Hamburg, which was close to a civil war, with Molotov cocktails, burning cars and so on, they are quite peaceful.

No. Not permitting queer demonstrations is nothing I would name repressive. They have their bars and clubs, I have in a few seconds found some in Moscow, like this: https://www.mcentralstation.com/new Because of the extremely cruel and repressive government, you have to press the button that you are already 18 before entering the site.

This is a prejudice about Germans. (One traditionally shared by the Russians in comparison with themselves, btw, for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov. I know, in the PC universe such prejudices are not allowed. Between Russians and Belorussians I have not seen any evidence about national prejudices against each other.) And, yes, the relative levels of economic prosperity would remain roughly the same, simply because Merkel vs. Lukashenko makes no difference in the economy, other things are much more important, in particular, the communist past. It makes a difference even inside Germany, even after now almost 30 years.

 

I do have access to your sources - I am surrounded, inundated, by their output and manipulations and tactical ploys. I live in the US.
And I of course have overwhelming evidence ( that is what I have observed) that these are your sources - consistent, obvious, and observable in a majority of your posting here. I have provided you with many examples, and laid out the entire argument from them. Several times.
When you have parroted characteristic errors and nonsense and deceptions and lies and terminology and phrasing and choices of emphasis and so forth in multiple discussions over a wide range of topics for months on end, you have identified your source.
Meanwhile, I have accepted your claim that you are completely unaware of where your bullshit came from in the first place, although the evidence you proffer in support is weak (you assert naivety, which does not adequately explain your willful rejection of information).

Blatant parroting of propaganda and deceptive labeling in line with Republican US media manipulations is common in the US, but is not excused under the auspices of following some kind of "convention".
Camouflaging one's nature and agenda by rendering political terms meaningless via overwhelming propaganda campaigns is not a "convention" - it's a tactic.
Meanwhile:

You chose one day, misclassified the articles (you had no way of evaluating them, lacking information as usual), projected your count of your misclassification of one day's articles unto the entire season's coverage, and offered that as counter-evidence against the conclusions of a competent study of the coverage of the entire campaign that had been linked in the thread.
It is not possible to parody such posting. It's ridiculous. You claim to be an educated person, competent at argument and reasoning, and you posted that? The only issue remaining is what, exactly, is going haywire with you. Are you paid to do that? Are you a completely fictional entity, some kind of wingnut running a scam here? These are genuine possibilities, after that kind of posting.

Myself, I put it down to propaganda victim. Your delusion of competence in evaluating professional American media feeds has opened you up to manipulation at a fundamental level of perception. With respect to American issues, you're in a bubble - the same one the Republican voting base is in.

And the immediate relevance here, with respect to military events in Syria (Iraq has kind of gotten lost, which is not an accident imho) is the effect of the Republican bubble on evaluations of Syrian military events involving US interests - which boil down to oil and gas.

 

I chalk it down to Schmelzer just being extremely determined to believe what he wants to believe in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary. It's a pattern I'm seeing all over the place these days, in real-life encounters as well as online. If the global reality doesn't appear to agree with you, dismiss it as an illusion and make up a new reality. He could also potentially be a paid propaganda agent, but I don't think it would be hard to find people with his mindset who are happy to do it for free.

 

So what? I use other sources, most in Russian or German language, others in English but not from the US. What left-libertarians think is rather irrelevant to the world and ignored (same for libertarians in general) and what completely inconsistent left-libertarian extremal defenders of government think even more. Blame the world for ignoring your position.

I'm sufficiently aware of my sources because if I post something I try to find the origin and post the origin. One time this origin appeared to be Breitbart, so what. What matters is something different: I'm aware that all Western sources are full of propaganda bs, and that to use them one has to use the techniques of extracting information from propaganda sources. Some of these techniques I have learned during my childhood by myself, in particular, back-translating into a neutral language.

Maybe, but it does not matter, because I do not care much about reft and light, so even if I'm "manipulated" to confuse them, it does no harm to me.

The way of evaluating them was simple and open for both of us in the same way. You have not objected to any particular classification, so "misclassified" is an empty claim. Of course, your study was supported by a lot of money, my own was done for free, but the point of testing it was that I thought the study has to be heavily prejudiced to get such results. To evaluate this, a small test for a short period is sufficient, given the big difference between the two results.

BTW, the test was simply another part of my general strategy, namely what to do if there appears a claim which questions something you believed to be true. Of course, the reaction depends on how important the claim is. If it is quite uninteresting, simply mark it in your memory as "has been questioned". If the claim is more interesting, try to check it. So, if there is a link, read it (very often the difference between title and content is quite big, and that between text in the link and the content of the link even bigger, and, of course, reading it usually gives enough information about the low quality). If the claim survives this, think about ways to check the claim independently. If you don't find one, the belief is put into a different category, "questioned and hard to verify". In the case of NYT, what I have done was simple, affordable, independent, so I have done it. Do you have a better way to check your source independently? At least, you have not proposed one.

Note that the "check yourself independently" strategy has always the problem that what you are able to check, without great effort, from your home is, from an objective third party position, inferior to what a professional journalist or a researcher can do. And for the third party, the main advantage of this method (namely, that you have done it yourself, interested in finding the truth) is missed. You believe that I'm prejudiced and try to distribute pro-Trump propaganda or so, and starting with this position, the original study will be superior from your point of view. This is, in fact, one of the main problems with many personal experiences. Say, some people visit now Russia, because of the soccer. They obtain, in this way, first-hand information about Russia, and compare this with what their press has told them about Russia. This is very valuable for these people themselves but almost worthless for anybody else. The statistical power of a single observation is zero, the guy who talks about this has own prejudices, and so on. The situation for these guys themselves is different. They intuitively look for contradictions between what they thought about Russia before and what they see now themselves.

I would also recommend you to think about the publication bias. What happens if I receive some information from you which I check, and find it correct? You guess, nothing visible to you. You have no way to check if I have checked something or not if I do not react. The only situation you will learn about my check is if the check was not in favor of your claim. As a consequence, your claims that I have ignored something are empty, you simply cannot distinguish ignorance from a successful check. (All that you can do is to make guesses. Such guesses may have reasonable results only if you start from reasonable assumptions about what is interesting enough for me to check.

So, you know now that "NYT is pro-Trump" together with your link to the study was interesting enough for me to check. If you have ignored my test of NYT or not I cannot know, given that you have made only claims you can make without checking my evaluations of those particular NYT articles. If you would have rejected one of my classifications of some article as "anti-Trump", with a link, arguing that this article is, in fact, pro-Trump, I would have known that you have checked. But so I don't know.

Yes, it is indeed not an accident, my main interest is the US-Russia conflict because it is the unipolar vs. multipolar world order conflict, and this is not that present (or much more hidden) in Iraq.

You have the same problem that you are unable to know a lot about me. For me, this is a pro-American forum full of anti-Russian propaganda. I would not support any anti-Russian propaganda out of principle in such a forum. If there is something anti-Russian there, which is not a propaganda lie, I will remain silent about this. You have nonetheless, with direct questions, already been able to identify some points where I disagree with Putin (forbidding Telegram and pro-gay propaganda).

 

You don't know where your bs about several issues - climate change, US racial matters, Trump and Republicans, etc - is coming from.

You seem unaware of your cooption by US rightwing corporate authoritarian media feeds.

It hasn't been working, for you. You are consistently getting played by US pros, and making flagrant errors of assessment. My guess is your ignorance, your lack of a base in physical and historical reality, prevents you from recognizing "neutral" language in the first place. You don't know where neutral is, in a lot of US issues.

Your ignorance and lack of care, but insistence on presuming and assuming anyway, causes you to make silly mistakes (Obama as "left"?) Whether you regard that as harm is your business.

I did not claim the NYT was "pro-Trump". I claimed - with much evidence including linked studies and explanations - that its campaign coverage favored Trump and harmed Clinton.
You are unable to check that. You don't have the knowledge base - you have no way of determining what favors Trump and what damages him.

That's stupid.
Being completely ignorant, you needed to either accept the thorough and informed and carefully done study, and correct your misled assumptions of heavy prejudice by reference to physical reality as reported to you, or ignore the matter. You had no way of "testing" anything, even had you adopted an approach that would have worked for someone with information, and your actual attempt as set up was ridiculous, comical, nonsense, as noted. It wouldn't have worked for anybody.

I know where you are getting the bs you post about Trump, Clinton, climate change, Party politics in the US, racial matters in the US, and so forth.

The interesting matter would be how this manipulation influences your assessments even of matters you do know something about - such as the military issues between the US and Russia in Syria. We aren't hearing much about oil and gas.

 

It is not a high priority for me to know this, because having some information about the reliability of the sources is not decisive for my evaluation. It is important only in some particular circumstances (like information about the actual frontline). For scientific issues, it is not that important (successful peer review is sufficient there). US racial matters are not really important questions for me, they are only side issues. About Trump and Republicans, I prefer foreign analytics. Those which I prefer are making their own research, many have their own sources, and they all use arguments to justify their points.

I do not care about cooption. Those who have the better arguments can coopt me.

Why should I care much about mistakes in a domain which I consider to be unimportant? In such unimportant questions, simply copying common opinions is a reasonable technique. The left in Germany was very happy when Obama was elected. BTW, I do not insist at all that Obama is left. All I have done is to distribute some + and - in a quite big table. Simply like an opinion poll.

I have very well understood that Trump was able to play the anti-Trump media. They have cried a lot about Trump being politically incorrect, but none of those who elected Trump cared about this. Instead, they were happy that he hates political correctness, so all these anti-Trump writings may have, indeed, helped him. But this was clearly not the intended effect. They simply continued to do what has always worked over the last years, where a media campaign against somebody talking incorrectly was many times successful. (Else, I would have to change my opinion about all the anti-Russian hate in the Western media being subtle pro-Russian propaganda too.)

This may be a choice for you, but if I see a possibility for such a check, I use it. As explained, for you it makes no sense to follow me. What for you is a "thorough and informed and carefully done study" is, for me, a highly questionable study, with a quite implausible result, which raises the suspicion that it was paid to reach this result. I like to check even scientific research if I have reasons to doubt the results. Given that I have sufficient scientific background, this is possible for me.

As explained, I think the role of oil and gas in Syria is overestimated. Actually, the Syrian army is of control of some parts of the Syrian oil and gas. A minor part, but much more than two years ago, and they have yet to work to rebuild what has been destroyed. The greatest part of the Syrian oil is now controlled by the US puppets, and they sell it as before the IS via Turkey. So, rebranding IS into SDF has advantages, Russia no longer bombs the oil transports.
The priority for the Syrian army is not the control of the oil fields - they are actually left untouched. The priority is Daraa and Idlib. Both have no oil I'm aware of (maybe a little bit, but irrelevant). In Iraq, there is much more oil.
Note also that in the fighting against Daesh the Russians have nicely cooperated, found an agreement that the US takes the part East of Euphrat, Russia the West, and all the dirty things (the US simply buying some tribes to switch flags from black to yellow) were quite hidden. So, at least Russia have decided at that time not to fight for the oil fields, but part of this agreement was the Iran-Lebanon land route via Abu Kamal under Syrian control, quite important for Iran, very much hated by Israel. So, either Trump preferred oil field control to Israeli interest or there simply was no other way for the US - say, without an agreement the Syrian army would have attacked Daesh on the Eastern side of the Euphrates, and in this case, they would have no chance to reach Abu Kamal too.

 

As you so embarrassingly demonstrated, there wasn't one.

And the question of how a thorough and careful and well-informed study, with its methods published and its reasoning published and so forth, immediately comes to strike you as questionable and implausible and biased and bribed, never crosses your mind.

You seem completely unaware of your ignorance in the matter, and the fatuity of your assessments. How is that even possible? From where would you get the idea that the results of that study - which matched the assessments of informed analysts all along, and had been made with less rigor by dozens of closely involved and well-informed observers, and was easily in agreement with essentially everyone's analysis except that of the corrupted punditry of the Republican rightwing corporate-manipulated media - were "implausible"?

Not according to that ridiculous post. You'd flunk a schoolboy assignment on "Our Friends the Bees" with something like that.

Good thing we aren't evaluating intentions - we can skip the mindreading, and examine the actual published stuff.

And you once again reveal your sources. Political correctness was a Republican bs talking point, not a major factor in the actual NYT reporting or its evaluation.
Far more important: the anti-Clinton writings, the excusing-Trump writings, the "bothsides" writings (a huge bloc, all favoring Trump), the writings that focused on matters damaging to Clinton regardless of their presentation, and the matters favoring Trump regardless of their presentation.

But the role of oil and gas in Russian and US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is almost impossible to overestimate.

But the priority of the US and Russian interests - the oil and gas of the region - would inform any analysis of Russian and US behavior.

As already mentioned, several times, the oil and gas actually inside Syria is not the major concern.

 

It looks like the long-awaited operation of the Syrian army against the jihadists in Daraa has started. The place is one where it would have been rational to start - a place where it will be quite easy to split the jihadists and to establish a better connection between Suweida and Daraa along the street 109. The result of this would be a pocket in the North of Daraa, which could be liquidated quite easily.

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This would be the part most far away as from the occupied Golan Heights, as from the Jordanian border. Especially near the Golan Heights one has to expect problems with Israel.

 

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It struck me as questionable because it was in conflict with what was my personal opinion about NYT. It is, last but not least, a leading paper, and even if one does not regularly read it, but prefers the web, as a politically interested person who often follows links to the original sources one end in NYT often enough to get some impression.

Fine. Which is what I have done, and it appeared that the actually published stuff was predominantly anti-Trump. You have not questioned this in any particular case I have considered so that your general claim that I got it all wrong does not count.

Your obsession with my sources becomes funny.
Then, once I checked the plausibility of your source, I cared about what this source claimed, instead of shifting the criteria to some "matters damaging to Clinton regardless of their presentation" or whatever else.

Everything can be overestimated.

The imaginable pipelines may have played a decisive role for SA and Qatar. But I doubt they have been decisive for Russia. and even for the US. Given that we are both not insiders, this necessarily remains a vague guess.

 

The Syrian offensive started yesterday but is successful already today. Starting with taking the air defense base, the Syrian army has taken Al-Museikah and Al-Dallafa according to https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/syrian-army-scores-first-major-advance-in-southwest-syria/. If Museikah is what is named Musaykah on the map, this already cuts the only (or at least the main) street connection of the jihadists, so that those in the Northern part are essentially already in a pocket.

PS: I see they have corrected their information, the two villages were not been taken, there is only fire control over them. https://www.almasdarnews.com/articl...elves-besieged-as-syrian-army-troops-advance/

The success for the first day nonetheless remains big.

 

It's the most interesting thing about your posting.
Aside from your occasional forays into matters you know something about - Syrian military events and circumstances, say, in this thread, or the bad aspects of US policy in places you know - it's the only thing interesting about it.

Aside from the matters in which you are informed, you haven't posted much I can't download practically verbatim off an American rightwing authoritarian corporate media feed's propaganda outlets. You're an indefatigable source of the Republican Party line, essentially, on any subject you about which you have no personal background information, no base in reality to defend you from American professional marketing operations.

And that's kind of interesting, to me.

You never did that. You lacked the means and ability, and did not take the time to overcome that initial barrier. You never even pretended to dig into the methods, data, analysis, etc, of the link ; also never compared it with other work from those guys, traced its funding, anything that might bear on plausibility - you set all that aside, and set out to check not its plausibility but an oversimplified and misleading paraphrase of some of its conclusions.
Which your adopted method had no chance at anyway.

The interesting thing is that you genuinely believe you did. That completely ridiculous showing somehow morphed into an actual check on the linked study, in your eyes. That's fascinating, actually. It would be quite informative to figure out what happened to you - what the scope, nature, and range of that Trump campaign's (and colluders) media manipulations actually were.

And there you have your essential mistake, once again laid out for us.
When confronted with a conflict between new information and prior opinion,
information well presented and transparently compiled and explicitly argued and all that good stuff,
opinion formed in ignorance and unfamiliarity,
what normally comes into question first, as the initial reaction, is the opinion. If you are thinking clearly.

No, it didn't.
No such appearance existed.
Had it existed, your methods could not have discovered it.
Had you altered your methods to become effective, you could not have evaluated their results.

Your perceptions have been manipulated, and your ability to reason crippled, by (I need to program this into a key) American rightwing authoritarian media manipulators, professional propaganda from the intellectual wing of the American fascist movement currently in control of the Republican Party.

And that's part of the reason information on oil and gas issues - the underlying base of the entire Syrian conflict - does not and will not appear in your otherwise informative descriptions of the military events in Syria.

 

the UPA was not fascist it was extremely nationalist which admittedly is part of fascism but not the same thing. russia under putin is more fascist than ukraine ever was.

oh and slava ukraine was started in the 1920's by partisans who pushed some to the office of hetman of ukraine.

 

While it is yet not clear if there really has been reached an encirclement (no confirmation yet), there appeared already a map which claims it. I post it here without confirmation because it gives a nice overview over the whole region of the fight during the next time:

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Feel free to whitewash a terrorist organization which has, with the intention of ethnic cleaning, murdered whole villages of Poles, Russians, and Jews.

The greeting used today is the official greeting of the UPA, "Slava Ukraine, Heroyam Slava". In the UPA, it was combined with the Roman greeting one knows from other fascists. By the way, "Heil" has also earlier traditions.