Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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You can be ashamed of who represents you even if it isn't your personal fault that he does. I'm ashamed by the president every day.
Actually the Syrian government appears to be all right with US attacks on ISIL in Syria.
Turkey has taken 2.5 million! Most Syrian refugees are Sunni & anti-Bashar, so wouldn't want to go to Iran or Iraq. Egypt is poor but has taken tens of thousands
Then have a referendum. Just invading is illegal.
What you say is correct with regard to official Roman tolerance. However, it was at the level of practice, not conceptualization. The Romans don't appear to have had the conception of "a religion." Religio and pietas were about proper worship in general.
Solar and wind are cheaper than natural gas both in absolute terms and especially if you take into account environmental impact.
It wasn't Bill Clinton's idea to repeal part of Glass-Steagall. That was a Republican plot, which they used a rider to impose on Clinton (he didn't have a majority and didn't want to shut down the government).
The attribution to Hearst is also disputed.
Thx Carole, but I most often am functioning as a commentator or editorialist, not primarily as a hard news gatherer/ reporter. Blogging is in some part about attitude, and the attitude here is no to normalization.
registered Republicans are a minority of the electorate. It is his approval rating among independents (mostly unregistered Republicans, including Libertarians etc.) that matters.
It is circumstance, not race. French Canadians came over to pick potatoes in Maine. Dust Bowl Texans did menial jobs in California, too. The issue is that so far there hasn't been successful mechanization of strawberry picking so only the desperate will do it. Agriculture doesn't pay that well, so it is never going to be a UAW job.
try finding someone to pick strawberries
Yes, the Washington Post reported that the man fired his gun in the pizzeria and traumatized children and families
Iranian art was deeply influenced by China, via Mongols and Silk Road
In the US, that kind of thing goes up and down; I'd say nowadays Arabs are being browned again
Most of the Jews in late antiquity converted to Christianity and later to Islam. I.e. they were ancestor's of today's Palestinians.
Oorah, Sgt.! Excelsior!
In North African Arabic dialects, hut, the word for whale, is used for fish in general.
Yes but I'd wager few or no American journalists have been rubbed out on American soil by the orders of a sitting president. I cannot be so confident that a similar assertion would be true of Russia.
Don't encourage him
With Frum, I can't get past his invention of the 'Axis of Evil,' his role in drumming up a war on Iraq, and his defense of Dan Senor's lies (for which both of them have been richly rewarded, while Iraq critics and whistleblowers had to resign or were fired and lost their mortgages). I predict as long as I am editor in chief you won't see that perspective here.
At the moment, there isn't a groundswell of support in Japan for bringing in 50 million foreigners and naturalizing them.
Population will likely decline through this century. But sustainability does not require that.
Don't forget rest of world. India in hands of BJP.
Yes, that is what I said in my opening paragraph, that the courts could well recognize these measures. However, halting immigration from one country for 6 months is different from halting immigration from 7 countries and openly stating (Giuliani) that it was an attempt to find a way to institute a ban on Muslims, and then saying Christians will be privileged. I think the ACLU has some chance here.
I know this and you know this. But GOP politicians have often claimed that the constitution does not protect non-citizens and the law is not settled on the issue.
I'd rather go the other way. Nationals are not responsible for actions taken by other nationals with whom they have nothing to do.
I blogged against foreign regime change in Libya at the same time that I blogged for a no fly zone.
You can subscribe here: link to juancole.com
It is hard, however, to put one's finger on a false note. Certainly Trump will send aircraft to support the fight against ISIL. He will support strong man dictators like al-Sisi and al-Assad. He will try to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. If the report is fake in the sense of not actually being based on real sources, it nevertheless reaches plausible conclusions and tells us what pro-Syrian groups in the ME are expecting from him.
Now that's an informed comment! thx!
this is so off topic as almost to be a form of trolling. We aren't discussing whether Lewis is a mainstream Democrat or whether Bernie had earned any street cred with African-Americans. We are discussing whether downtown Atlanta is a slummy inner city in flames or whether John Lewis has accomplished anything in life.
the research shows that a nonviolent movement is twice as likely to succeed.
Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) controls the territory due east of Aleppo city; Turkish-backed rebels are fighting them at Albab to the north, too.
I'd advise you to get your commentary about Syria from Syria Comment/ Joshua Landis or Jadaliya, i.e. from people who know Arabic and Syria and have academic training in social analysis.
Eva Bartlett did some excellent journalism on Gaza. But in the case of Syria, she is avowedly pro regime and writes a blog for Russia Today, which is owned and directed by Putin's government. Some of her allegations have been disproven:
link to channel4.com
Of course, with Syria, everyone has a viewpoint. I tend not to depend heavily on people who seem blind to the horrors of the Baath regime and the al-Assad clique.
Syria is extremely complicated, and maybe it has been hard for me to convey my position, but just to underline: My understanding of Trump is that he wants to support Bashar al-Assad to the hilt as a strong man and let Syria become a Russian sphere of influence, and the Baathist totalitarian state should be reimposed on everyone. That is nothing like my position!
As for Flynn calling the Russian embassy 5 times on Dec. 25, this is highly irregular. The rule is that there is only one president at a time. The Trump team was already undermining Obama. It is completely outrageous and also very suspicious.
Oh, the Russians continue occasionally to hit Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), around Palmyra and north of Aleppo. But your general point is correct.
Actually there was substantial dissent on Iraq biological and nuclear weapons programs within the intelligence community. State Department I&R was especially critical and I think suffered for that. There was one CIA report that even a lot of the CIA didn't agree with, which was produced under extreme pressure and too quickly. Its author later apologized but noted, "When you want it bad, that's how you get it."
Hi, Mark. Obama ended waterboarding and the use of stress positions. He wasn't allowed to close Gitmo by the Republicans, who passed a law forbidding the expenditure of Federal funds on the closure.
I use the diction "Israel lobbies" to indicate the pluralities you point to. However, these lobbies supported Labor and Kadima governments as well.
Podesta's emails were phished
Two wrongs don't make a right. However, the US has not in fact unilaterally annexed territory in the way that Putin has.
Name one leaked email that got headline treatment or seems to have affected polls.
In contrast, Hillary's 'deplorables' speech sent her numbers right down.
Assassinating journalists with polonium and invading other countries?
Toby Dodge
Just share widely with friends & family; we're all publishers now
Turkey represented the rebels and got the Russians to recognize the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham) as *not* terrorists!
If the discussion is 1967, Israel fired the first shot, as is clear from Rabin's memoirs (he thought it a bad idea)
there is no nuclear complex at Fordo. All mothballed.
I'd guess 50% of the Syrian economy was in the public sector before the civil war and it is much higher now. Socialist India under Nehru had 25% of its economy in the public sector.
yes but we who voted for Obama in 2012 by a margin of 5 million votes were owed a third and it was stolen from us. I say, steal right back. As for the first two, you can't pat GOP senate on back for just doing their jobs.
Intel professionals use the term 'blowback.' The general public was told by our politicians that terrorism is senseless and has no motives.
The Viet Cong didn't win because of foreign help. They won because they were viewed by most Vietnamese as nationalists fighting for the cause of the nation. After the war it was revealed that many ARVN officers were double agents. The rebels don't have that broad acceptance in Syria.
Hi, Mark. The CIA set up safe houses along the Turkish border to prevent heavy weaponry from coming in to the rebels. They sent some Kalashnikovs and even some medium weaponry, but not all that much and not major. They used the Saudis as pass through for the 30 "vetted" groups. It was small potatoes.
You have to distinguish between Bush and Obama eras. As for details, you could look them up.
US funding and support for the Syria rebels has been minor and insignificant.
Obama reversed the regime change agenda of Bush and opened a US embassy in Damascus. This idea that the US was much involved in Syria post 2011 is a conspiracy theory.
Obama never had a legislature willing to work with him on these issues (or only had one for 4 months out of 8 years).
hadith is not scripture in Islam
It is just an analysis, not advocacy. If Tillerson wants to export Kurdistan petroleum, the Iran route may be the most viable, which puts him on the opposite side of his boss and several other cabinet members.
It would be nice to have the government on our side. It won't be. We have to do it ourselves. Coal plants can also be closed by peaceful protest and embarrassing the coal companies, as I said.
Yes, reports were as many as 80,000 escaped last week, 50,000 to Kurdish area and 30,000 to West Aleppo under regime control. Some other estimates had lower numbers of escapees, but I think by now 100,000 probably have gotten out. Once the rebel lines collapse, there is no one threatening to shoot the civilian escapees so they get out of the line of fire.
You have used several propaganda techniques in your comment. First, you begin by alleging errors but then it becomes quickly apparent that what you mean is that you disagree with it. NYT wrote, "On Sunday, they cheered the Department of the Army’s announcement that it would seek other routes for the pipeline and would not allow a crucial section to be drilled under the Missouri River just upstream from the tribe’s reservation, where there were worries it could pollute their drinking water and cross near sacred burial sites."
So the issue for the tribe was two-fold-- drinking water and *near* sacred burial sites. What I wrote was correct, as the NYT makes clear, and your way of putting the matter manages to make white people's definitions outweigh American Indian ones. The tribe gets to decide if they are offended by a pipeline near their sacred sites; you don't get to tell them how they feel about that.
Moreover, the protests were certainly peaceful and the only violence deployed was directed against the protesters:
link to vogue.com
Finally, that some locals, especially corporate oil employees, might have been disturbed by the idea of people protesting is plausible but also irrelevant. Your implication that they were endangered by the protest is the same implication given out by generations of white sheriffs in Alabama in the face of civil rights protests there.
France is an outlier on it laicite or strict separation of religion and state in the government sphere. Government schools in Britain and Germany have official Christmas celebrations. My point is precisely that if Muslim-world practices were compared to the mean of Christian countries they wouldn't look so different; comparing them to the US first amendment or French laicite is setting a bar that Germany and Greece couldn't reach either.
Uganda is a Christian-majority country were to be gay is a capital crime.
There are few Christian-majority countries where a non-Christian president would be elected. In Greece, Poland and many other countries the Church is given a public and often semi-governmental role in some spheres. Most Christian countries have religious education in state schools.
Yes, Richard, international law changed substantially at the end of WW II. We have the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent treaty instruments, the 2002 Statute of Rome, etc. etc.
By any measure both Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aeronautical Force are in severe and obvious violation of the laws of war, which forbid indiscriminate fire in non-combatant zones. There is a difference between taking a clean shot at an enemy combatant and killing dozens of children to get at that combatant. Some shots should not be taken because they clearly would endanger large numbers of non-combatants.
It's just analysis. Syria is an unsolvable calculus problem.
Iran is not conventionally powerful. Its military budget is between Norway's and Singapore's. Its vaunted intervention in Syria consists of 2,000 IRGC commandos, some of them Shanghai'ed Afghans. But Iran has enormous soft power, from Shiites in the region and also from Sunnis who are anti-imperialist. Stirring all those people up is a risk.
The vast majority of working class people who voted,voted for Clinton.
the vast majority of working class people did not vote for Trump.
The hawks are quite willing to use the rebels to overthrow Assad & thereby weaken Iran
Assad doesn't do amnesty
It is the last part that give it teeth; if the sanctions were international, Trump could not undo them.
Read Ma'an news daily and you'll see there's already a low-intensity civil war.
Losing 3 million votes off of Obama is not making party faithful sufficiently enthusiastic to win. Which is why she lost.
Tump got the standard Republican 61 mn votes like McCain & Romney. The outcome of the election was determined by Clinton's inability to enthuse the Democrats, falling from Obama's 68 mn to 63 mn.
In 2011 they weren't Wahhabi types. Most youth wanted more freedoms. Even now most are not Salafis but MB
That's silly. The US has never given very much to the rebels. It is mainly Gulf and Turkish money. In fact the US interdicted medium and heavy weapons via observation posts on the Turkish border.
What is interesting is that when the US doesn't intervene significantly (Syria) it still gets blamed for killing "as many" as al-Assad, which is impossible, since al-Assad has killed 300,000 of the 400,000 dead. When the US does intervene, and probably stops a regime bloodbath, as in Libya, it is still blamed because the subsequent statemaking is messy. This isn't analysis, it is just lefty laziness.
Assad's regime has killed the lion's share of the 400,000 dead, and tortured 10,000 political prisoners to death.
the piece was about Castro and the Middle East
I can imagine Giuliani trying to overthrow the Iranian government.
Actually, the scientists prefer climate change. The average surface temperature will go up over the next few thousand years, but here and there other things could happen. If the Atlantic conveyor belt bringing warm water up north were interrupted by Greenland ice melt, e.g., you could have a little Ice Age in the US/ Canadian Northeast! But it would be temporary-- a few decades or perhaps a few hundreds of years depending, and then it would get very hot everywhere.
link to hollywoodreporter.com
Oh, no. The majority of Iraqi-Americans in southeast Michigan is almost certainly Shiite, who also suffered a lot of persecution.
There is a difference between overcoming the colonial heritage, as Singapore did with massive effort, and not being held back by it. The British created a seedy little crime-infested port. The Singaporeans have made a modern nation in the aftermath.
There aren't 3 million undocumented immigrants who are criminals in other respects than immigration status. Maybe a few thousand. So the rhetorical ploy you mention is meaningless.
Places for Michigan students at the University of Michigan are the same now as they were thirty years ago. It is not more competitive than it was then. That the student body is bigger and includes more out-of-staters, including international students, helps Michigan students in two ways. First, they pay more and subsidize the Michigan students. Second, they widen our horizons.
In an ideal world, Michigan would have several campuses of the quality of U-Mich Ann Arbor, and tuition would be low because the state would support the university at greater than 7% of its operating budget. The University of Michigan is no longer a state university because the state doesn't back it in the way one would a state university. Michigan is 48th out of 50 in its support for higher education. That's on the legislators in Lansing.
The University of Michigan has made Washtenaw county a high tech corridor that is one of the few bright spots in the state economically. We need more eds and meds, which is how Pittsburg and other Midwest cities turned around, and it won't happen without state support.
The student body was expanded over the past 30 years from 36,000 to 42,000, so the international students are extra and being brought in because they pay 2.5 times full tuition. Michigan students are not being disadvantaged.
How long CO2 lasts in the atmosphere depends on how saturated the oceans are. It will take roughly 100,000 years to get all of the output of the past century and a half back out of the atmosphere.
Your statistics on income are meaningless unless you disaggregate by race.
White working class vote for the Democrat was off at least 20%, and all you have to do is look at where white workers live to see which districts went for Trump this time that went for Obama last.
Germany didn't give up its industries.
How could they afford higher education any more?
Franklin also didn't think the differences were racial in the sense of biological. He knew the British were descended from Germans. He though they had become "white" because of the rule of law in Britain, which was lacking in Germany. So living a long time under tyranny made you swarthy.
If he had followed through on his theory he would have had to conclude that if America gained liberty after a while all its peoples would be "white" as he defined the word.
Not white, I guess.
Please just go google the mosque arson in Florida and read about the alleged perpetrator and his Trumpist social media posts. There isn't any doubt that Trump is stirring these people up.
Thank you!
There is no way to remove significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Actually of the 400,000 Syrians killed, most have been killed by al-Assad, not the rebels. It is also not clear that more Iraqis have died since 2003 on an annual basis than under Saddam, who started two wars and committed genocide (typically it is said he killed 300,000 Iraqis, and that's not counting people in other countries.) I wouldn't judge these things this way, but just so you know, I don't think your statement is statistically correct.
They have already resegregated the schools all around the country.
to get a third party, you likely have to change the first past the post system. This can be done at the state level, but it would have to be done by legislators who were elected under the old system and so are not motivated to change it. Just a caveat. Italy has a multi-party system and it hasn't impeded gridlock or late capitalist oligarchy. Basically in the US the two parties function as pre-election sets of parliamentary constituencies. In Europe they often form the coalitions after the election. Doesn't seem to matter that much.
The new Chevy Bolt and Tesla 3 have a range of 200 miles on a charge, which is more than enough for ordinary driving. Fast charge ports are being put in around the country. Both will retail for $28,000 after a $7500 Federal tax rebate (in some states you'd get a state offset, too). That's not expensive for a middle class family, and they are nice cars. The fuel is very inexpensive and is free if you power them off your rooftop solar panels. You are underestimating battery costs. Batteries are a tough nut to crack because there isn't that much give in chemical processes. But they are coming down in price and becoming more efficient.