Ivo and his friends work for people like the Brookings Institution where ivory tower academics spend their time musing on the infallibility of their arguments
Stop right there! 
Most think tanks are there to give a veneer of academic credibility to ideas that would get shot down, sliced up, and shat out by any panel of a half-dozen decent academics. Global warming denialists, neocons, theocons, those guys are all bread in think tanks, not universities.
and that should read "those guys all breed in think tanks"
Someone was kind enough to ZIP up the archive of the PNAC site ca. 2001/2002 here:
http://www.truthaction.org/
forum...60cc423bfa9cdcc
(see, 911 conspiracy theorists can be useful once in a while)
Direct link here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6P235Z2M (35MB)
I think we need to set up a little memorial to the neoconservatives' hard work destroying America's repuation over the last 8 years.
Stalinist assholes, trying to erase history. This isn't fucking ancient Egypt. Never forgive, and never forget.
From the PNAC Wikipedia page:
"As of May 20, 2008, The Project for the New American Century website was inoperable. A message saying that the account has been suspended and to contact the billing department was put on the site's page"
The butcher's billing department, no doubt.
Just clarify for me - this guy is NOT an advisor to Obama, right?
"...hoping we won't notice when they become advisors for the Obama campaign or do foreign policy speeches at universities."
That hasn't happened, right?
PNAC and rest of these "Think Tanks are nothing more than circle jerk factories where these wankers can spew their shit without fear of intelligent peer review.
Send them all to Detroit!
Just clarify for me - this guy is NOT an advisor to Obama, right?
"...hoping we won't notice when they become advisors for the Obama campaign or do foreign policy speeches at universities."
That hasn't happened, right?
BarbinAtl |
Sounds like a homework assignment:
bookmark the truthaction.org PNAC link, memorize the signature names, scrutinize the Obama campaign.
Ivo and his friends work for people like the Brookings Institution where ivory tower academics spend their time musing on the infallibility of their arguments
I grew up in a society absolutely saturated with anti-intellectualism.
Same as I did with conspiracy theories and racism and misogyny and class prejudice. Same way earlier generations grew up with smallpox and polio, but there's no vaccine for these diseases.
It's expected behavior, from Americans, and it no longer surprises me. So I'm not surprised to see it here. After all, I see it everywhere else.
OTOH, I no longer try to teach your kids anything, either. I washed my hands of that 20 years ago.
Since intellectual work is so despicable, why then, ANYBODY ought to be able to do combinatorics or calculate expectation values or use polynomials the way they breathe, right?
It's intuitively obvious.
The same way intellectual integrity is.
It doesn't need to be taught.
About the American culture of anti-intellectualism ...
Back in high school (sophomore year), I was branded as a know-it-all. It was true, I suppose; I knew more than my biology teacher, and by the end of the school year was actually teaching the course (including exams). Needless to say, I spent a great deal of time in school being as invisible as possible, and to this day I will pre-emptively denigrate myself to save others the trouble.
However, when I see these so-called Smartest People In The Room from these rather badly named 'think tanks,' I can't think of enough vitriol to spew. A true intellectual has the ability to set aside ideology and think clearly and objectively, something these rubes seem unable to do.
And you're right - they should not be allowed back into polite society until they have confessed and performed some act of contrition.
Off-Topic, but:
http://whaven33884.blogspot.com/...-wuz-
pwned.html
Every last one of those fuckers should be on trial.
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”
Some of the personalities that participated in the Rebuilding America’s Defenses… project (“The Pearl Harbor Project”):
Thomas Donnelly – Director of Communications, Lockheed Martin.
Fred Kagan – U. S. Military Academy at West Point.
Robert Kagan – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
William Kristol – The Weekly Standard.
Mark Lagon – Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Lewis Libby – Chief of Staff for the Vice President.
Gary Schmitt – Project for the New American Century.
Barry Watts – Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Paul Wolfowitz – Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Dov Zakheim - System Planning Corporation.
Eliot Cohen – Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Donald Kagan – Yale University, conservative columnist.
Steve Rosen – Harvard University, Professor of National Security and Military Affairs.
Abram Shulsky - The RAND Corporation.
Roger Barnett, Phil Meilinger, and Mackubin Owens – U.S. Naval War College.
Alvin Bernstein and Stephen Cambone – National Defense University.
Anyone who tries to give them some legitimacy is not worthy of our trust!
Richard Clarke got my attention before the 9/11 hearings, and I've never let go.
Nor has he let me down.
As much as I enjoy all his books, I think it's time he got a job in government again.
Stormcrow, anti-intellectualism is something that should disturb us all, but these fuckers operate in an accountability free zone. Since their stuff is not peer reveiwed in the traditional sense, they can say whatever they want without anybody ridiculing or debunking their theories. It's why the right set up all those circle jerk factories in the first place.
Let me add this from Haaretz
Odigo says workers were warned of attack
By Yuval Dror
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI.
"I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don't know the sender.
Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya.
As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their "buddy" list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.
Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and the actual sender of the original message
"Stormcrow, anti-intellectualism is something that should disturb us all, but these fuckers operate in an accountability free zone. Since their stuff is not peer reveiwed in the traditional sense, they can say whatever they want without anybody ridiculing or debunking their theories."
Nail Ivo Daalder to a cross. That's absolutely fine with me. He's got more blood on his hands than Dillinger. And he prostituted himself and the work of his mind, selling lies for truth and fallacy for reason. The people who trained me wouldn't spit on this whore if he were on fire. He's no more an intellectual than Josef Mengele was a physician.
But talk about "ivory tower academics" around me, and you're going to get pretty much the same sort of response you'd get if you used the word "nigger" around a black, "kike" around a Jew or "c**t" around a woman.
I've been over this ground with painful intimacy over five decades, and I hate every shit-stinking inch of it.
I really don't give a leaping curse if I make enemies by getting in people's faces about this. I am, by this time, pretty much outside of society anyway, so I don't have a goddamn thing left to lose.
If you don't like that, then either do something about the situation that gave rise to it, or STFU.
However, when I see these so-called Smartest People In The Room from these rather badly named 'think tanks,' I can't think of enough vitriol to spew. A true intellectual has the ability to set aside ideology and think clearly and objectively, something these rubes seem unable to do.
Let's call them what they are: Paid shills of the hard-right faction of the ownership class.
I am, by this time, pretty much outside of society anyway,
Yep, it's difficult not to end up that way if you're the sort who is easily rankled by hypocrisy and narcissism, isn't it?
Brookings used to be a relatively independent think tank. But over the last 10 or so years it's become increasingly tied into the neoconservative orbit. Daadler works closely with Michael O'Hanlong, Ken Pollack and Martin Indyk of the Saban Center. All of them were apologists and propagandists in the run up to the Iraq debacle.
The naked ambition of these men to get their faces on the screen, their words in print, and their client's interest represented is unbelievable. Their world view is an unacceptable mutation of a realist's view of foreign policy. The international world may be red in tooth and claw, but that doesn't mean that's the only way to advance.
Stormcrow,
it was not and is not anti-intellectual. HS is a close friend. He is not anti-academic. He looks up to real scholars, real thinkers... That is why he used "Ivory-tower" intellectuals. Plenty of smart academics people do not sep. themselves from the world and "speak from on high" as do the ivo dadler types. That is what he was complaining about. It is a specific expression, agree with it or not, that speaks to people who forget there is a world out there that they are making pronouncements on. It is no different than beltway politicians who forget that the world does not begin and end in DC.
These guys are traitors.
Traitors to the USA and the US people.
Traitors to the academic world.
"Just clarify for me - this guy is NOT an advisor to Obama, right?"
Apparently he is, via his Brookings Institution posting. This is definitely cause for concern, and now Obama's supporters will have to press him on Daalder related issues. It was slightly troubling to see him reading Fareed Zakaria's new book, but having a PNAC war whore in a senior advisory position is very disturbing. The first of many predictable disappointments to come.
"it was not and is not anti-intellectual. HS is a close friend. He is not anti-academic. He looks up to real scholars, real thinkers... That is why he used "Ivory-tower" intellectuals."
You're correct about HS. However, in this case it was a very poor choice of words, given that real anti-intellectuals regularly use it to denigrate and stereotype all scholars. "Pseudo-academic shills" is a better term to describe intellectually dishonest and ideologically compromised think-tankers like Daalder.
[and let me clarify that I was being sarcastic above regarding the 9-11 Truth Tinfoil Cap brigade. One of them did a useful service by capturing the PNAC site, but that's just about the only constructive contribution to public discourse I've seen any of them make since 2001]
Stormcrow,
I have one criteria for Presidential Policy Advisors, they have to be smarter than me.
Never refer to the PNAC clique as whores - it's patently vicious: no decent whore should ever be compared to these specimens.
Nuking their website is indeed both Stalinism & psychosis ... the Interwebs do not erase well. Such a pathetic act simply serves to further damn them. Their folly will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
He's still at it -- check the history page for the WP article
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