Missing Babblers - Part IV

Eye sight restored as well?

 Just read the 'Crackdown' finale. This is bullshit. Truly progressive people do NOT allow their free and open discussions to be subjugated in such a manner. I fear Fidelio was right about the 'poisoned well' here. Advise me if/when Babble's chilly climate reign of the Crackdowners ends or is overthrown. Until then ndpp is 'on vacation'.

I'm sorry to see such controversy here, with interesting posters banned and taking vacations. Since my not-so-smart phone doesn't load more than a page, I can't view the full threads that initiated and discussed the current issue, but what I saw certainly gives pause for thought.

I think we are all wondering whether NATO's involvement in Arab countries will be shown in the long term to be purely altruistic or just more western intrusion to safeguard profit interests. I'm interested in information and thoughts on both perspectives. I see that as the function of a discussion board so I'm disturbed by this "crackdown" on relevant information by posters with the power of moderators.

Trolling with unsupported opinion is one thing and perhaps warrants censure, but presentation of verifiable facts should not, even if a poster with power disagrees.

With regard to the info about CIA training rebel leaders in Qatar, I learned from an acquaintance that "Qatar is helping" the rebels and now I know how. However, it still doesn't prove or disprove western motives and doesn't, in my opinion, warrant banning such information from babble. While perhaps there's some value in monitoring opinion that doesn't follow babble policy, banning information is another can of 'Big Brother' worms entirely.

Eta . . .
Perhaps I've missed or misinterpreted something and if so, I stand to be corrected.

I've decided to retire this account.

N.Beltov, after over 8 years of posting on babble, having never been suspended, much less banned, (but warned plenty of times) will come no more to play along the cherry lane known as babble.

However, I have bad news for those who would like to see the end of me. I've recently re-activated another account, thanks to a babble moderator, so I will be posting the same tiresome Marxist dogma (lol) as always under a different pseudonym.

Bye! Be seeing you!

The Brig Mercury Returns to the Russian Squadron after Defeating Two Turkish Battleships, 1848

I see now we lock threads after provoking confrontations rather than dealing with the issues. And we wonder why we have missing babblers.

It's summertime. Lots of babblers take a break. You've been here long enough to know that.

What "evidence" on Al-Q do you have? Maybe he's gone to the bathroom and is watching replays of old CFL games.

So this "evidence" isn't on babble at all? What are you playing at?

My point is only that there was no evidence that I could find here to confirm what you were saying about Al-Q. I got your PM.

I'll do it for you, Caissa. By my count, three babblers left (one or two non-babblers dropped in only to register their disappointment, of course) over the decision to stop discussions with credited the CIA, incredibly and without evidence, for orchestrating the Arab Spring. Perhaps you think babble should be a haven for such offensive conspiracy theories. One person was banned for repeated flouting of babble policy. You seem to think that because of the "droves" you perceive to be leaving babble, we should coddle such offensive posters (posters who have already been banned under previous auspices), clinging to the scraps we still cravenly possess.  Al-Q appears to have flounced because his feelings were hurt by a moderator. I like al-Q, but he has never been good at considering how mods have interpreted babble policy when it comes to race and gender, and rather than reconsider his remarks, he left. Pity. I hope he returns. 

I wonder why a babble dedicated to sarcastic contempt for leftist politics and white supremacist conspiracy theories should be saved at all, let alone what you think we (because I presume, based on your incessant niggling, pestering and hectoring, that this is somehow the mods' fault) could do to save it. Sometimes I wonder, with your constant backhanded pestering, why you don't just open your own progressive message board and you can set the rules and culture as you see fit. Then I realize that doing so would deprive you of the only act of pleasure babble affords you.

Yes, well forgive me if I don't take your accusations of gratuitousness seriously, Caissa. You've been needling the mods for at least a week (just this latest dose of your usual vintage).

Caissa, someties life's outcomes are not as we wish, and we have to accept that we are not seeing the world through the same lens as others.  At such times there is nought left to do but mumble to ourselves briefly about the folly of the world, let it go, forget about it and move on.

This is one such time.

Also, these recently departed (and alleged departed) aren't all gone for the same reason. Quite the opposite, actually.

Some of those who seem to think there is a problem are pointing in the direction of the mods, but frankly I don't see any one cause coming from any one direction, nor any one solution that would be sustainable and satisfy everyone.

Near as I can tell, changing things to create the perfect board for one would just cause even more grief for others, (or possibly even  Catchfire's nightmare scenario of a place with no one to blame and nothing to complain about).

I just started a new thread, Facebook-style "Like this" button on babble comments.  I was about to add it as a comment here but felt it deserved its own thread.

I think you're right. Remembering Skydome. Youtube goodies. Living together before marriage (to be fair, that would have been controversial, in about 1955). etc.

jeff is a bright guy but a pathological anti communist. no great loss. cue had his reasons. heph is gone, as in GONE. dont know about RB.

I guess , Ikosmos, you assume I need you to tell me the value of the posters I mentioned, not so, I was there, and participated, to a small measure at the time, jeff was awseome, as was heph, reality bites and the rest. funny though i don't recall an ikosmos. whatever, it's irrelevant.

Scrotout --- I remember them.  And miss them.

Reality Bites posted on En Masse at the very start for a few months, then left after some interpersonal disputes.

I miss Heph a whole lot and am certain his memory will live on.

Speaking of En-Masse, Al-Q and Fidel both seem to be posting there.

Remind seems to be as her status said - gone. She hasn't posted in going on two days now.

I fear I may be joining her as I am losing interest in posting here. Since I don't agree with what is and is not considered anti colonialism in the FN threads and more and more start seeing discrepancies in my beliefs and what the mods are siting as babble's beliefs (as in the thread remind decided to leave from) I am posting on a more like minded board and spending more time there than here and am missing days and very well soon may be missing weeks or months without checking in here. I enjoyed my time here when my beliefs were in line with what the mods stated, even when I was wrong because then it became a learning experience because I got to come up against like minded people who challenged what I thought and made me truly understand why I believed what I believed and either made me more firm in the belief or made me understand where the holes in my reasoning were.

I fear that Maysie, Michelle and Oldgoat who worked at their jobs and went way beyond their call of duty may have built up this board to something that rabble themselves aren't willing to sustain by investing money and creating positions that were invented by the previous mods which involved time and collaboration, research and talent to make the board run as smoothly as it did.

I wish there were something we could do as babblers to make rabble take babble more seriously and actually have people there who do what Maysie, Michelle and Oldgoat did with scraps. But I fear it will dwindle away to what effort rabble actually puts into babble and rabble won't see it and won't care.

So at this point Catchfire, though I am not official you can add 2 more to the MIA list which is 5 for you but likely much higher if people actually looked to see who isn't posting.

And if anyone has any ideas (activist site it is suppose to be) on how to get across to rabble start a thread, I would be very interested in following that.

Except for the ones who didn't.

Oh, and I am not setting out to quit babble. Only other places are much more attractive than this place because you can discuss issues learn and not be continue sly surprised by paternalism. I feel like it has become a little like Lord of the flies over here. There needs to be some place to go, someone to talk to to straighten things out if your unhappy because babble is so big now. But that is not happening. So off to a smaller forum where the members themselves can be the ones to help self moderate. That doesn't work on babble any more.

I just want to make this clear if anyone starts a thread please don't make it about thoughts on the moderators. My thoughts are on what is wrong with the bigger picture. There very well may be reasons for this moderator acting this way or that moderator doing it this way. These have to do with lack of training, lack of an ability to consult with other employees, to low pay and to little hours to do the job properly. Ah forget it, I will start a thread, just don't know if it will be me and the crickets.

What did y'all do with 'Remind' while I was away?

Not away from you Caissa.

Remind left

I really miss ALOT of babbler's...I feel my learning curve has dropped. And don't get me wrong, I LOVE the ones still struggling on.

Please come back. I don't have to name you. You know who you are. You are the reason I joined this site and I really miss you.

Happy New Year and all the Best to Everybody!!!

Well hi there, stranger!

U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings

The NED, USAID, IRI, NDI etc all do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, like election rigging, "Low Intensity Conflict",  and overthrowing governments of sovereign nations. They are agencies funded by the U.S. Government (ie. taxpayers) and are therefore absolutely not operating "at arm's length" from ... the U.S. Military Government. In fact, it's what democratically-minded people refer to as political interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries and against the law in the U.S.A. as well as most countries around the world.

To say that the CIA helped support some elements in the Arab Spring is far from claiming that the Arab Spring was nothing but the result of CIA-type operations. The first statement should be non-controversial; the second is obvious nonsense.

All I claimed is that the very imperialist CIA and its western cohorts in crime have been playing the game of democracy prevention since WW II. And Wilf is correct, I never claimed that the CIA, MI6 etc were all knowing and all-powerful god-like beings in control of everything everywhere all of the time. Because that would be absurd and an attempt to discredit even conspiracy theorists clinging to the weakest of theories.

But the military government is working on these problems/opportunities. The CIA has admitted that the drone wars are killing civilians as well as their former friends and the otherwise still in the mercenary business in far off lands. DARPA and thousands of private contractors are well funded in their search for new and better technologies to spy on and wage high tech warfare on mainly weak and defenseless countries now and in the future. They really do believe that they will one day be all-powerful and all knowing. And when it happens, it's basically check mate on democracy.

Catchfire said there was no evidence, but obviously there is. And it's as close to Glasnost as it gets in North America.

Wilf asked a question which is typical in law: Who benefits? And it's been glaringly obvious who benefits from democracy prevention in oil-rich and geostrategically situated countries bordering resource-rich Russia and the vast oil basin of Central Asia etc in the grand chess game. It's perhaps more obvious to those of us born before 1989 or so.

No one here has said that the protesters are not genuine in their quest for democracy. I don't know how or why anyone jumping to the defense of the imperialist CIA liek this could possibly misinterpret what I have said in that way. It does sound a lot like kangaroo court style accusation, though. False accusations are no better than when the imperialist CIA waterboards innocent people to knowingly extract false information to use and abuse as propaganda in the phony war on terror.

I did not do it and will continue refusing to make false confessions. 

As the character Jerry Fletcher said in Conspiracy Theory: No! Noooo not gravy nooooo!

Thanks. I'm not all that wild about me some days, either.

Even if you don't believe that these groups now do what the CIA used to do covertly, which is what I actually said before, you can't possibly believe that "democracy assistance" has anything to do with democracy. 

What I actually said was that the CIA was not behind the door at rigging elections, assassinations of foreign leaders, and overthrow of foreign governments in the good old days, ie. the cold war era. And today the exact same ends are achieved by "democracy assistance." And the election rigging still occurs with Haiti being but one example in recent years.

The fact that NED's offshoots claim to be operating at "arm's length" from U.S. Government is a lie, because the U.S. Government funds NED, which is an umbrella organization funding IRI, NDI, USAID and so on. The money eventually flows to "NGO's" allegedly without linkages to U.S, Government. Whether "quasi-private", NGO or otherwise, the money trail is directly traceable back to the same people in power funding the CIA and that agency's annual portion of the Pentagon's "black budgets" on a scale of what the province of Ontario spends on health care annually. Black budgets have nothing to do with democracy, either, but that's another thread.

That it is the U.S. Government funding "democracy assistance" and not the CIA actually going into these countries and assassinating foreign leaders or rigging elections makes no difference as the CIA and U.S. Gov't have been synonymous since signing of the National Security Act in 1947. The CIA has operated above international law ever since and are continuing to do so today.

IOW's, these are U.S. Government funded agencies whose goals are not to encourage democracy in any country but to further U.S. Government interests and those of U.S. corporations and multinationals with interests in countries targeted for "democracy assistance"/regime change, overthrow of nationalist governments, and even the organizing and funding of protest groups in those countries. Money has no place in "democracy building" or democracy assistance much less foreign money from foreign sources. The U.S. itself would never allow "democracy assistance" funding to flow into U.S. primaries or presidential elections, because there would be some people being thrown in jail for a long time for accepting foreign aid to overthrow the government. It's called sedition, a high crime against the state and one which is on every country's law books.

This is not democracy assistance - it's crossing over the line into political interference. It's the same goal but different method whether by the CIA's cold war era maneuvering or by "democracy assistance" today. With U.S. democracy assistance and western aid to developing countries in general, there are always strings attached, which is another reason that the Washington consensus started losing out to "Beijing consensus" in the 2000s. This is colder war baloney and the same tune the old cow died on.

Happy holidays, D watchers!

What ever happened to Tony Cartalucci? I rarely see him posting here anymore.

Seems we haven't heard from Stargazer in ages.

Haven't seen LeFauvre in a while.

GGood lord. I missed that lovely thread.

I should know better than to read ones that I had been avoiding- even of the avoidence decision was not really evaluated.

There are 3 that it would be nice if they remained missing.

But I'm violating the spirit of this thread.

Dunno, I think rumours of Gaian's death have been greatly exaggerated, no?

And in keeping with the spirit of the thread, if I may quote another great thinker:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

Please excuse the dated,  exclusionary language. I don't mention it just as a reminder that I don't think any of us wants to be spoken ill of after we have gone (and I know you acknowledge that, so I am not slagging you).

But I also think, in the spirit of this thread, that we are worse off for losing people who perhaps have not been so prudent in expressing themselves, but were nevertheless here in good faith.

I've become so rural that I don't even mind anymore that no one picks up their dog poop.

Never mind. I want to know what's up with those dog owners who put their dog poop in a cute little plastic bag and then leave that on the ground beside the trail. 

Do they think the magic dogshit fairy is going to clean up after them?

Meh, get over ourselves.

What're we gonna do?

Wake up call!

Finding something good.

So, where do we go?

Yeah! Go to sleep! Right!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngH0fkiNo-g&feature=related

I always gotta ask when I get bumped? I got some good tunes. I miss G. Pie and friends. Cueball, where r u?

probly get bumped again.

He was banned

I loved jeff House.