In short, Aziz, your type of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with the political process. You stay within the corporate media’s boundaries of “acceptable” debate, and you therefore never step back to examine whether the whole process is fucked. (See Fallujah ’04, and your enthusiastic support for the war crimes committed there. Unfortunately for you, I have a long memory.) I say without reproach or sarcasm that you should work at some teat-sucking government think tank and write policy papers on the “pragmatic approach” to harnessing the Arab spring for our own imperialist purposes (never using the world imperialist, of course; instead veiling it in terms like “feasibility” and “democracy” and “undue Islamist terrorist influence”); that sort of job, parroting back to the government what it already believes, and dismissing those who disagree as “fringe”, would suit your mindset very well.
Ahmed, a friend of mine who pulls no punches
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aziz
Admin, 
aziz 9:55 am on April 25, 2011 Permalink
He’s a good guy and I think his critique, while more hyperbolic than usually seen here at TI, is probably not unique.
But the real problem here with the political process is that there isn’t room for compromise. I favor a pragmatic approach that is informed by principle, not a Don Quixote style rush to irrelevance.
This requires a belief on my part that incremental change forward does change the landscape, enabling further change. In the end I think we can get to where we all agree we want to go.
aziz 11:01 am on April 25, 2011 Permalink
i don’t remember being an enthusiastic supporter of anything in Fallujah, either, incidentally.
Ahmed 5:46 pm on April 30, 2011 Permalink
Wow, how could you forget that? It always frightens the bejeezus out of me when people claim to forget supporting something that they once favoured so passionately, especially when that something involves the death of thousands of innocent people. I’ve been procrastinating for sometime writing a blog post about this phenomenon – mainly because I don’t know to whom my blog is directed, and because no one reads it, and also because I’m lazy – as it’s come up several times with friends of mine, both from the left and right, who once argued ferociously for invading Iraq and now claim either to have forgotten having held that position or lying outright (inventing memories, if you will) and saying that they NEVER were in favour of invading.
I will dig through my old e-mails from ’04 to see if I have the relevant ones in which you enthusiastically, proudly, almost boastfully, supported the absolute destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes committed there. I said something like, “This will make My Lai look like a tea party [this was before the current conservative "tea party" movement], and I bet if you’d been around back then you’d have supported that, too.”
(What you call “hyperbolic” I call “eloquent”
)
sleepercell.talkislam.info
aziz 7:26 pm on April 30, 2011 Permalink
i remember finding the argument for an assault on fallujah to be persuasive in the broader context of the war (which I hadnt supported). But your assertion my support was “enthusiastic” is basically slander. I am sure I have the same copies of emails you do and if you want to publish the debate, I am fine with that as long as you include every argument I made as well as every insult you made. But this insistence on your part to engage is personal attacks at the expense of what usually is a justifiable argument ion your part is your undoing.
There were a few years, Ahmed, where I basically killfiled you and all emails from you. Only years later did you seem to realize how destruictive a path you were on with respect to debate. If you’re treading that path again, then I’m not coming.
Ahmed 2:02 pm on May 12, 2011 Permalink
I guess it’s bad manners to tell someone his ideas are dangerous. But it isn’t worse for that guy to support massacres and war crimes in the first place?
Is it worse to tell someone, “You’re an asshole,” or worse for that supposed asshole to say, “I don’t give a frak about the Palestinians. They’ve turned their back on God and deserve whatever they get”?
To me, it’s far worse to condemn an entire nation and judge its relationship with God than it is to tell someone, “Hey, your support for war crimes sucks ass.”
But that’s just me.
(Regarding the killfile years, there are at least three people whom you consider your “friends” who have mocked you behind your back and called your political ideas “crazy rot and nonsense” – to quote one of them. Not my place to reveal who they are, but perhaps this will guide you toward self-awakening?)
Admin 11:51 am on May 13, 2011 Permalink
now, now – no fitnat, k?