Juan Cole

The Juan Cole article is easily the best thing I've read so far, but I still don't think HN would produce any useful discussion about it. http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.ht…

Just to be clear (for people who don't read the entire post), Silver goes on to say, "In case this isn't clear, I am not suggesting that any and all statistical analysis purporting to show tampering in Iran's election results will turn out to be fruitless. I am merely suggesting that this particular analysis is dubious; it is not a smoking gun. "To properly analyze Iran's election results is probably something best left to Middle East experts, rather than experts on U.S. electoral politics. Juan Cole, for instance, who certainty does know a thing or two about foreign policy, sees plenty of things that smell fishy to him." And links to this excellent post about why it looks like the election actually was stolen: http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

If you want a secret tip to exploring a new world, download Papers (http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/), put all the interesting publications you find in one Dropbox folder, and import them. The annotation and note features - as well as the back-up option - makes this a really enjoyable way to publications. It really is something to read papers that define the way we think, and it's a nice alternative to short blog posts and (pop) articles versus (pop) books. Here are some papers to get you started: \* 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=0998565 \* Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 \* A technique for isolating differences between files: http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/ \* A Future-Adaptable Password Scheme: http://static.usenix.org/events/usenix99/provos.html Maybe this is cheating, maybe it isn't, but I definitely recommend it. --- If you want to get political, some left-of-centre-leaning writers you can't go wrong with: 1. Matt Taibbi on Wall Street, Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog) 2. Frank Rich in American politics, now at New York Magazine (https://twitter.com/frankrichny) 3. Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and foreign policy, in moderation (http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/) 4. Juan Cole on the Middle…

"The Obama administration set that threshold pretty high to prevent blowback for our actions and feeding terrorist propaganda." Really??? https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/120703074500-bergen-drone-pakis… https://www.juancole.com/images-ext/2012/06/graphs-of-death-us-drone-s… https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/120611015028-yemen-airstrikes-c…

Url changed from http://www.juancole.com/2017/02/terrorist-american-engineers.html, which points to this.

Likud platform of 1999: a. “The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.” b. “Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem” c. “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” d. "Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel... The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting."[1] So both parties are rejectionist in principle. However in practice Hamas has indicated they would accept a two state solution. Likud has not.[2] [1] http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/charter-destruction-palestinian.html [2] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.587047

Men between the ages of 18 and 34? Otherwise referred to by the Obama administration as enemy combatants[1] I'm not sure what it says about a conflict when the people most likely to be able to defend their homes leave, while their families remain. 1: http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/how-obama-changed-definition-of-civili…

Juan Cole disagrees. http://www.juancole.com/2015/05/strategic-against-assad.html Short summary: the text of the actual DIA memo is much more complicated than the interview lets on, but the memo itself was uncovered by conservative media sites who then spun it into "Obama sponsored ISIS".

Yea, wtf, why would people live with their families? And why don't they have fancy bomb shelters like Israel! The leaflets are practically taunts. Where are the people of Gaza to go? How are they to get out? http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/numbers-people-there.html

> Well, why should they curb it? Because ubiquitous surveillance undermines freedoms key to a functioning democracy. For example, freedom of the press: http://www.juancole.com/2013/11/censoring-scrutiny-mccauley.html I also think it undermines freedom of speech. When the Snowden stuff started coming out, I wanted to ask friends in government what they thought. But the only ways I can ask them are at risk from government snooping. Not wanting to put them at risk, there's no way I can ask them. Basically, all of them took an oath. They should live up to that.

The right thing would be to convince Assad to offer a truce According to Juan Cole (who IMO has a pretty good feel for the Middle East), Assad has the backing of ~50% of the population. http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/bombing-unlikely-effective.html this is not a war by an outside force like the Serbs of ethnic cleansing against a neighbor, but rather it is a civil war. The Alawis, Christians and secular-minded Sunnis in Syria are afraid of the rebel forces and either support or are neutral toward the Syrian government; together they may well come to half the country. That isn’t exactly a mandate for outside intervention. I don't think its just Assad driving this.

They're dropping SSH too, so I'd just assume that they're dropping everything. No block page for you. ^_^ The goal might not be censorship, even. Iran's most prominent recent actions have been provocative trade threats and hacking a US drone -- and US Presidential candidates have been discussing the possibility of eventually invading Iran. Iran has plenty of paranoia to spare: http://www.juancole.com/2011/12/iran-has-us-surrounded-all-right.html I'm guessing that they're dropping connections in part based on that; fear of spies rather than fear of speech. In which case they wouldn't really have any motive for a blockpage, either.

I do, I'm sure there are many who do. You shouldn't be ashamed of standing up for truth (unless, of course, you feel that doing so is causing more harm than good, and there's the rub, but I feel Wikileaks is on the whole a force for good, and the world is better off with it than without). Just as an example of someone of prestige and integrity, standing up for Wikileaks and kicking ass while doing so (on national television), is Ray McGovern, "former high-ranking CIA official": http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/former-cia-official-ray-close-defends-…

I've read two responses to these events that nicely cover this question from what amount to opposite sides, although the distance between them is small: 1) Ross Douthat in the NYT, saying "In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly offensive and 'inflammatory' (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content." http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/ 2) This piece by Juan Cole: "Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination." http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.ht… While I appreciate what Cole is saying, I come down on Douthat's side. When people are being murdered for having an opinion the question of whether or not that opinion is in good taste or presented in a well-mannered way is... secondary. So I personally think that "escalating" by making more fun of murderous nutjobs is a pretty good move to make, even if it will be…

The planned military intervention does not want to "solve" the problem. It wants to send a message beyond Syria. It's about holding people accountable for genocide. I have raised my concerns about this position here. [1] I also have to ask: Why exactly is it that the FSA is "completely overwhelmed"? At the start that was clearly not the case. Hm, now is there some authority in Syria that wanted to frame the conflict from the start as a democratically elected leader against foreign jihadists? Could it be that said authority targeted primarily the non-jihadists over the last two years? I think that the most plausible explanation is that the jihadi movement had more external support. War is expensive: all sides of the conflict are in need of arms, food, medical and other supplies, training and expertize. And the FSA has got least. I think that Assad is generally not a good guy. And that FSA has had legitimacy at the start of the war. Probably, Assad would've liked to frame the conflict as "Assad" vs "Jihadists/Foreign-sponsored freedom fighters" from the very beginning. But the conflict has indeed became a proxy war with many sides, and the FSA has got caught in the middle of them. [2] [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6327563 [2] http://www.policymic.com/articles/28414/syria-civil-war-u-s--backed-ir… [3] http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/government-rejects-strike.html

If you can't see the hypocrisy of the media then please ignore my post and move on. Is it a bigger crime to kill civilians or to kill soldiers? Is James the dozen-civilian-killer a terrorist or not? Media calls him a "suspect", why was the Fort Hood shooter not called a suspect while he was being investigated? Can't you see the pattern that if the murderers is a European / white American he is a "suspect" and if it's a brown American (like the Fort Hood killer) he is a "terrorist". Did you see the sympathetic posts about the person who went on a killing spree in Afghanistan? The poor guy had issues so we wanna consider that rather than call him a terrorist, how about the brown guys killing civilians, maybe they had issues? Maybe they had trauma from their folks being murdered or tortured? I am not justifying any crimes, I am only highlight how the media is justifying some crimes and calling other perpetrators terrorist from the get go. >Obama trying to kill a terrorist and then accidentally killing civilians is not terrorism. >It all comes down to intent, no? Oh yeah, when we bomb wedding parties out intent is good, when they killed civilians their intent was bad, that was simple, now I get it. https://www.google.com/search?q=afghanistan+wedding+bombed Clinton knowingly bombed Sudan pharmaceuticals factory (I have posted the link somewhere on this page) and killed half million infants by sanctions alone (1996 UN estimate of the period 1991-1996), Bush knowingly went to…

After having a long conversation with a close friend in Iran, and also reading this post guess post on Juan Cole's blog [ http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/jahanpour-as-us-and-iran-confront-each… ] I'm starting to realize more and more that the way we have treated Iran since Carter (read: 1979 revolution) is completely wrong. Instead of finding ways to pressure the Iranian government we are hurting the Iranian people. The sanctions we place on Iran hurts the Iranian people and their small businesses much more than the Iranian government and it's abundant(for now) oil resource. Obama really tried at first to bring in a different approach. First off he understood the structure of power in Iran and so wrote a letter to Khamenei directly. Then he tried to talk to the Iranian people in parallel by sending the message for Norooz (Iranian New Year). Next he offered to sit and talk with the Iranians without any preconditions, but what messed everything up for him was the Iranian elections. That was (read: is) a big pile of mess that no one really knew (read: knows) how to deal with.

Putting aside the completely unsourced FUD in your comment Which of my claims are you questioning? My question was why would you consider a network that is openly financed by Qatar objective, and an organization that is not financed by Israel "Israeli PR"? I think Al Jazeera is relatively objective (compared to other news networks) because they often include people with opposing views on their shows. Beyond that, I don't think objectivity is the be-all and end-all of news networks. I can't watch CNN because its programming is directed towards children: lots of flashy opinion, idiotic conventional wisdom, a shockingly limited window of acceptable discourse, very little actual news content regarding issues that matter (as opposed to celebrity 'news'), etc. I'd hesitate to trust Al Jazeera's reporting on Qatar, but Qatar isn't a very important country and Al Jazeera has managed to piss off a lot of middle eastern dictatorships and monarchies. In contrast, MEMRI has been strongly criticized by scholars like Juan Cole: http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/intimidation-by-israeli-linked.html Beyond that, how do you know that MEMRI isn't financed by Israel?

weird that this is greyed out, since it seems to match all the source my fb friends and i have found: http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/09/13/libya-attacks-a-wake-up-call-for-u… http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/romney-jumps-the-shark-libya-egypt-and… http://www.libyaherald.com/?p=14332 http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0912/Libya-attack-Who-s-behi… http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/libya-fast-team/