John Cotter

Pray tell, William. When did you and that other genius @Kirk Gallaway come to the realisation that Prighozin is the Oracle?

Thanks for that very informative post, James.

William's comic-strip thinking is always most edifying.

Benjamin, It’s hard to know for sure if there a Mockingbird or Mockingbird-type operation in being, but there certainly may as well be. The RFK Jr tweet quoted in your first post above strongly indicates the existence of such an operation. So does the MSM’s lock-step pro-government propagandising in its covid and Ukraine war coverage. I have a subscription for the Irish Times and I can see a similarity in its treatment of RFK Jr to that described in your opening post. So far, the Irish Times has published only one article on RFK Jr, the subtitle of which is, “We’re [the Irish are] not ready to claim Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose stance on vaccines makes him part of a growing cohort of prominent reactionary Irish-Americans” The subtitle encapsulates the deviously vacuous manner of the article as a whole, because the article is a smear job on RFK Jr, notwithstanding that the only specific (?) “criticism” of him is that he is an “anti-vaxxer” (whatever that means) and a “reactionary” (whatever that means). It’s also worth noting that a photo of RFK Jnr is inserted in the article, the caption beneath which reads: “Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy jnr, a member of a storied US political dynasty, has announced he will be a Democratic US presidential candidate.” The first two words of this caption, “Anti-vaccine activist”, are the same two words with which the Independent, Yahoo News and Washington Post headlines quoted in the RFK Jnr tweet begin. This strongly suggests the existence of a coordinated hatchet job on RFK Jr, such as might be instigated by a Mockingbird-type operation. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/04/22/jennifer-oconnell-its-unlikely-a-robert-f-kennedy-jnr-plaza-will-be-built-in-new-ross/

How can the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) be a “defensive” alliance when it’s an instrument of the US foreign policy of global domination which, by definition, is aggressive rather than defensive? This is illustrated, for instance, by NATO being involved in the war in Afghanistan, since Afghanistan is 3,000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. How can the US or its cat’s paw NATO be a defender or exporter of democracy, given the US’s appalling record of “regime change” – not to mention the fact that the US and its NATO vassal states are plutocracies not democracies? US foreign relations are thus based on the “might is right” principle, in other words, Realpolitik. Accordingly, the claim that the US is morally superior to any other state, including Russia, is baseless. The US’s dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its carpet bombing of peasant societies in south east Asia, among other atrocities, reflects the US’s moral bankruptcy in its foreign relations. In view of these Machiavellian realities, the outcome will be decided by force of arms in the killing fields of Ukraine. As the proverb goes, “There has not been found, nor will there be found, a fairer judge than the field of battle.” When has the USA or its NATO flunkies last won a peer-to-peer war?

The whole western world is infected by that same disease – the MSM’s abdication of its democratic duty to hold governments to account and instead disseminate pro-government propaganda. Two notable examples are the MSM’s covid scaremongering and the Russophobic coverage of the Ukraine war. Western “democracy” is a sick joke, and I wouldn’t be surprised if 2023 is the year in which the whole rotten edifice – the empire of lies, as Putin called it – comes crashing down, and the junta that grabbed power 60 years ago is swept away. https://americansongwriter.com/behind-the-song-democracy-by-leonard-cohen/

William, I wasn't informed that the moderators had reprimanded you for that insult. I commend them for that, and I retract the inference I drew from my not being informed in that regard. As for the rest of your post, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Contrary to what you seem to be suggesting, Cliff, US foreign policy hasn’t essentially changed in recent years. For example, during Obama’s regime from 2011 to 2017 there was US instigated regime change in Honduras, Libya, and Ukraine and attempted regime change in Syria. Last year there was US instigated regime change in Pakistan. During his visit to Poland last year, Biden inadvertently (apparently?) alluded to the desirability of regime change in Russia. In February 2022, Biden, like his henchwoman Victoria Nuland, also made it clear that the Nord Stream gas pipeline which supplied western Europe with gas from Russia would be destroyed if Russia invaded Ukraine. Apart from the fact that we know the US was subsequently involved in the actual destruction of Nord Stream, what business is it of the US to threaten carry out such an act of economic and ecological terrorism? Such a public threat in itself is proof of the US’s criminality and its presumed – and indeed actual in many ways – omnipotence and unaccountability in respect of its aggressive activities far beyond its borders.

I think it’s appropriate that I post this here on the “Dear Moderator” thread. Moderator Sandy Larsen has issued a warning to me and imposed penalty points on me for allegedly belittling EF member William Niederhut. I consider the allegation unfounded, since what I was doing was commenting on William’s posting habits, not on William himself. My being censured in this way implies that anyone who exposes the illogicality of a fellow member is guilty of belittling that member. That is unacceptable. My comments related to William’s persistently perverse posting behaviour and to the likelihood that such behaviour reflected William’s occupation as a psychiatrist. I substantiated my observations in that regard by reference to cogent critiques of mainstream psychiatry by internationally acclaimed highly qualified mental health experts. William was unable to logically rebut my comments in these respects. He instead resorted to his usual tactic of “shooting the messenger” by way of denigrating the mental health experts I cited and myself. William’s default stance seems to be that of presumed intellectual superiority based on his academic credentials which he has frequently invoked. In this instance, he adduced his 40 years as a psychiatrist as supposed evidence that my comments and citations were spurious. I need not spell out the ironic import of such a disclosure. I recently reported William for calling me an “anti-vaxxer” – a largely meaningless culture war insult – but the moderators seem to have ignored it. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the moderators are politically biased in relation to some subjects. However, I would add that the fact that I was warned instead of being summarily banned is a welcome sign of some improvement in how the forum is moderated.

Yes, James, James Douglass brilliantly elucidated JFK’s struggle to break out of the Manichean Cold War deadlock by trying to communicate with the Russians as human beings rather than demonising them as the epitome of evil which must be defeated. It’s easy to see the connection between the JFK assassination and the disastrously aggressive US foreign policy which has led to the current shambles in Ukraine which, ironically, looks like the final nail in the coffin of US global dominance and hastening the emergence of a multipolar world order.

Cliff, The core tenet of US foreign policy for most of the past century is global domination. It was on that basis, for example, that the US dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki mainly to show the Russians how dangerous and ruthless it was. It was also on that basis that the US fought and won the Cold War. Domination is never absolute. As Michael Polanyi wrote in his book Personal Knowledge (p 225), “Even men like Hitler and Stalin, who had perfected to the utmost the machinery of naked power, have never ceased to supplement it by a flow of public self-justification”. The fact that the US failed to achieve absolute dominance and sometimes used “soft power” rather than brute force to achieve its ends doesn’t negate the fact of its global dominance. The question of which faction within the US government apparatus is chiefly responsible for the US’s aggressive foreign policy is a red herring.

Please don't misrepresent what I said. The question I asked was: "Do you agree with the statement that the core tenet of US foreign policy is global domination?" You left out the phrase "US foreign policy". You're persisting in ignoring the difference between policy and the successful implementation of that policy, despite my pointing it out. Your strawmanning in that regard indicates that you're unable to rebut my actual argument. Thanks for the validation. https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/29209-dear-moderator/?do=findComment&comment=503989

William, I have already dealt with all these issues on the "Dear Moderator" thread. Please stop spamming threads with repetitious and irrelevant nonsense.

There's a difference between having a policy of global domination and the successful implementation of that policy.

Thanks for that post, Kirk. It gave me a good laugh on a Monday evening. Keep them coming. I hope you're still enjoying your holiday and get home safely.

William, I’ve already explained on the “Dear Moderator” thread that this question by you is a “tu quoque” fallacy, despite which I answered it anyway. This kind of persistently perverse behaviour by you is the reason I raised the question of whether you had been “institutionalised” by the years you have spent as a psychiatrist. In this regard I referred to the Rosenhan experiment, which reflected what Thomas Szasz wrote in The Manufacture of Madness (p 283): ‘“There is no human dialogue between the hospital psychiatrist and his committed patient; instead the patient’s talk is “clinical material.” The mental patient is a living corpse.’ You’re not engaging in dialogue. You treat the arguments of your opponents as if they’re non-existent and instead constantly repeat assertions and arguments already refuted and questions already answered.

William, Thank you for validating the contents of my post by your failure to logically rebut any of it.

Well said, Roger.

You seem to have a hysteria problem. Perhaps you should consult Dr Niederhut.

How's it going?

William, Thomas Szasz was a professor of psychiatry. Therefore, he was at least one grade above you in the academic hierarchy (if you were a professor, you would certainly have told us about it). By your “logic”, you should defer to Szasz as your academic superior. Instead, you condemn him as a heretic, presumably because your livelihood depended on it. As someone once said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Dr Terry Lynch is another eminent medical expert who has debunked mainstream psychiatry in his books such as Beyond Prozac and Depression Delusion which have been praised by other eminent medical experts. Your “phenomenology” seems somewhat selective. The Rosenhan experiment showed how psychiatric hospital staff could be so institutionalised as to be unable to see what was in front of their eyes. You enumerate various “psychiatric disorders” as if their existence were as uncontroversial as that, say, of a broken leg or a stab wound. However, to take just one of these disorders, schizophrenia, on page 174 of his book Beyond Prozac Dr Terry Lynch quotes the Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry as follows: “Of all the major psychiatric syndromes, schizophrenia is much the most difficult to define and describe. The main reason for this difficulty is that over the past 100 years, many widely divergent concepts of schizophrenia have been held in different countries and by different psychiatrists. Radical differences of opinion persist to the present day.” This is just one illustration of the fraudulent and pernicious nature of mainstream psychiatry – fraudulent because it masquerades as science when in fact it’s patent nonsense; and pernicious because, despite its fraudulent nature, society has conferred on psychiatry the power to incarcerate and otherwise abuse people in all kinds of ways. In his book The Manufacture of Madness Thomas Szasz rightly compares institutional psychiatry to witch hunting. He writes “…there is no behaviour or person that a modern psychiatrist cannot plausibly diagnose as abnormal or ill”. Institutional psychiatry is a form of scapegoating, in that people who suffer mental distress as a result of societal, familial, sexual or workplace abuse are further abused by being stigmatised and dehumanised as “mentally ill”, thus effectively blamed for the abuse and mistreated accordingly. Szasz quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in this respect: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” As Kierkegaard said, we are herd animals first and foremost, and therefore for most people conformity is the ultimate value. Institutional psychiatry, like religion, is one of the main weapons of authoritarianism. As explained in the following extract, Dr Gabor Maté has also written about this: In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.” He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the “mechanization of birth,” how the lack of social services for parents has led to “a massive abandonment of infants,” and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates. https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental#:~:text=In%20an%20extended%20interview%2C%20acclaimed%20physician%20and%20author,woundedness%2C%20underlies%20much%20of%20what%20we%20call%20disease.%E2%80%9D And to return specifically to the JFK assassination, Thomas Szasz wrote the following: “When we call men like Ezra Pound or Lee Harvey Oswald mad, we establish, by ascription, a characteristic of that person which overshadows with transcendent badness the individual whom it is supposed to describe. Once the characterization is accepted, it negates the individual’s other human – especially good – qualities. He is thus degraded and dehumanised. We then no longer worry about him as a person with rights and talents. If he is a poet, we can dismiss him as an artist; if he is an accused criminal, we can ignore his guilt or innocence; and if he is a suspected presidential assassin, murdered in jail, we can simplify a hopelessly unresolved event with far-reaching political and international implications by attributing everything about it to the madness of a single, virtually unknown, individual. In short, psychiatric heresy, like religious heresy, is a functional concept. It is useful for the society that employs it; were it not so, the concept would never have evolved and would not continue to receive popular support.”

I'm stepping back from this "debate" for now at least because I'm spending too much of my precious time rebutting nonsense.

You don't seem aware of Professor John Mearsheimer's talks on this subject. I highly recommend them.

Mark, Regarding your third paragraph, it's a common mistake (putting it benignly) to interpret my pointing out an opponent’s error (especially an ad hominem) as my taking personal offence, when what I’m really doing is trying to keep the debate honest and rational. The insinuation thereby made that I’m some kind of a “snowflake” is of course an ad hominem which distracts from the real issue, which is the illogicality or inaccuracy I’ve pointed out. As for your question(s), you haven’t clarified the matter at all, since you’ve asked two different, albeit somewhat related, questions in your second and fourth paragraphs respectively. However, by way of responding to what you seem to be driving at, here is what I said in a post a few days ago on this thread: I would just say that the claim that eastern European countries willingly joining NATO legitimizes NATO’s eastward expansion is disingenuous, because NATO is an instrument of the US foreign policy of global domination. Therefore, by definition, the actions of these countries in joining NATO are not neutral or innocent vis-à-vis Russia – they clearly constitute an existential threat. https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/29209-dear-moderator/?do=findComment&comment=503984 I hope this helps.

Mark, Since your post seems to refer to me, among others, I hereby respond. Firstly, insofar as your post immediately succeeds my refuting William Niederhut’s baseless accusation that I had dodged a (fallacious) question he had asked me, I hope you’re not insinuating that William’s accusation has any credibility. Indeed, the confused nature of your post could be interpreted as you opportunistically rushing in to that effect. When I say your post is confused, I refer to the fact that, among other things, your third paragraph doesn’t follow logically from your second paragraph. Whereas your second paragraph accurately describes the “poking the bear” argument that I and others have presented, your third paragraph is as scattered as a hare’s urine. Could you please try to recast your third paragraph so that (a) it follows logically from your second paragraph and (b) we have a clear idea of precisely what question you are asking? I would add that since the “poking the bear” argument is self-explanatory, your third paragraph seems redundant.