http://unspeak.net/forum The Unspeakâ„¢ Forumâ„¢ en http://backend.userland.com/rss http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=212#212 212@http://unspeak.net/forum Apparently, I earned Unspeak a click-through with my blog yesterday, so I feel less guilty about this self-promotion business now.↑lift plow↓ →platesâ†is the name of the blog. The blog which you will visit every day. & will continue to patronize in this manner until I TELL YOU TO STOP. Even -- no, especially -- if you should find yourself chained to someone's radiator for an expansive period.Remit is pretty, general; I dunno... Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:31:39 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=205#205 205@http://unspeak.net/forum Seems like Us goverment is more worried about their reputation than poor Palestinians. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8566992.stm Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:25:57 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=204#204 204@http://unspeak.net/forum Sad but true. Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:15:14 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=203#203 203@http://unspeak.net/forum Apparently not? SADFACE. Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:45:56 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=202#202 202@http://unspeak.net/forum One thing is for sure that US goverment screwed up... As usual. Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:09:48 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=201#201 201@http://unspeak.net/forum No one? :-( Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:44:50 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=200#200 200@http://unspeak.net/forum Who is Kelly Jones? Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:00:02 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=199#199 199@http://unspeak.net/forum It's interesting, this use of "claim"; compare how in the early hours following some bombing, you often see various groups "claiming responsibility", ie jockeying for the kudos. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:32:38 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=198#198 198@http://unspeak.net/forum On Friday night whilst watching BBC3 I saw a small news item about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in which the news presenter stated that KSM claimed to have been the mastermind behind 9/11.Now I understand that KSM has admitted to plotting the attack, but only after being waterboarded 183 times. My dictionary defines claim (verb) as "to state to be true, especially when open to question".  So did KSM really claim responsibility for 9/11 or did he have it thrust upon him by his interrogators?What does the forum think? Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:46:51 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=197#197 197@http://unspeak.net/forum For clarification, I'm not suggesting that the company called itself PTTEP merely in order to avoid the ramifications of bad publicity. I'm just saying that that may be the effect. However, it can be intentional. Flying training is a highly competitive industry and businesses in high-competition industries do like to brand themselves. I asked the MD of a flying school why his company name and logo were not anywhere on the training aircraft. His answer was, "When a plane crashes, what is the first thing the TV news points its cameras at? The tailplane with the company name. The last thing you want is your name and logo being flashed around the country. It's commercial suicide." So even though crashes are very rare this was still a consideration. In other news, I was amused to see on the PTTEP website the claim that they were dedicated to providing "a sustainable petroleum supply." Sustainable" is a weasel word rather than Unspeak in this context, isn't it? Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:26:29 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=196#196 196@http://unspeak.net/forum Well, "PTT" = Petroleum Authority of Thailand; and "EP" = Exploration and Production, so while the name PTTEP might be rather a mouthful, I'm not sure it's deliberately trying to hide something. I do like the idea of a company called Bastard Oil, though.Also, Don Watson is a dude. Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:29:22 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=195#195 195@http://unspeak.net/forum Recently there has been a big oil leak from a drilling rig in the Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of Australia. The delay in plugging the leak, or doing anything meaningful about it in the meantime, has been several weeks. Usually you would be able to blame EXXON or Shell or someone but in this case the perpetrators are a company called "PTTEP". This is a wonderful name. It provides absolutely no information. The best you could do would be to imagine that Petroleum might be in there. Perhaps Exploration. But you can't be sure. It's not memorable in any way. It has no antecedents, no linguistic, cultural or corporate tradition. It doesn't even include any meaningful segments. Is it TPPTE? Or ETPPE?  Who can remember. It's just a long string of random letters.The company turns out to be Thailand's national oil exploration company. But who would know? The name is so absent, so teflon-coated, that it slips out of consciousness before you can think to be angry. It is already too hard to grasp before an announcer has even finished saying it. I mean, if it were called Bastard Oil or something you could think of writing to your local member or ringing a radio station.Is this, as I think, a new or different species of Unspeak? Usually Unspeak will be an acceptable or even positive word or phrase that hides a slimy monster but in this case while the monster is there, it is invisible, cloaked behind a term that itself is invisible to the conscious mind.P.S. In an interview on Aussie TV tonight, Don Watson, author of a number of books about the misuse of language, including Weasel Words, (and erstwhile prime ministerial speech writer) talked about the anaesthetising effect of corporate and political language. That numbness is a good description of the effect I'm trying to describe. [ You can see the interview at http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200910/r448592_2178911.asx  Watson reports that Sydney's Cardinal Pell signed off a fairly recent Advent letter, "May the Lord be with you, going forward." Me? I'm walking backwards for Christmas.] Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:54:53 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=194#194 194@http://unspeak.net/forum Seumas Milne has written in the Guardian this,"Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war." ( This Rewriting of History is Spreading Europe's Poison , Wednesday 9 september 2009 )http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … oviet-pactMilne, a lifelong admirer of the former Soviet Union, uses the popularity of revisionist historians in some Eastern European states who 'equate' Hitler and Stalin to conflate them with Western historians who stress the similarities of the USSR and Nazi Germany as regards their totalitarian nature.To stress the similarities that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is actually very different from 'equating' them or blaming Stalin for the Holocaust. Milne presumes that the historian Orlando Figes has actually done this when he quotes Figes claiming the Pact was a "Licence for the Holocaust", as if he was somehow giving firepower to far-right nationalists in Eastonia or Moldova to go right ahead and join Hitler when he broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.What Figes had actually written on the BBC World service did no such thing,"For the Jews of all these lands [those of the Baltic and Eastern Europe invaded by the German and Soviet armies in 1939-41], the pact was the licence for the Holocaust." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8214391.stmWhat Figes means here is that, without the Pact, Hitler could not have invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and proceeded to begin the extermination of the Jews in East Central Europe. Milne has misrepresented Figes by quoting him completely out of context.More than that, which Figes has already pointed out, Milne is trying to have it that anyone who does not accept his historically correct line that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany cannot be compared is somehow, in the old Comintern jargon, 'objectively' pro-Fascist.As Milne later writes in his defence on the Comment is Free blog,"I quoted him in the context of current attempts to equate communism and Nazism and claims that the Soviet Union shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact".Milne has clearly attempted to smear Figes in suggesting he has equated  Nazism with Communism because he is not happy with any historical evidence which clearly points to both Hitler and Stalin's dual aggression in the lands they invaded.It's true that Hitler targeted Jews alone for extermination as a race whereas Stalin only tried to liquidate entire sections of Polish society in Eastern Poland on the basis of their dual threat as an ethnic and class enemy.This is quite different from the position of far-right nationalists who still do exist in the Baltic states and Moldova i.e those who try to equate Hitler and Stalin in order rationalise support for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils.However, Milne makes no distinction between far right nationalist 'revisionists' and Western historians who he himself terms 'revisionists' and 'neoconservatives' for drawing attention to the scale of Soviet Union's crimes e.g Robert Service.The nationalist kind of 'revisionism' is refers to those who wanted the Treaty of Versailles destroyed or their regional territorial ambitions fulfilled in an alliance against the Western democracies and the USSR.That tradition still exists today with those in Moldova who think Antonescu was a national hero and martyr or those in the Baltics who describe their own Waffen SS units as 'freedom fighters'But it has nothing at all to do with historians hostile to both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and their territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe in 1939 ( as opposed to the collaboration in the Baltic states with Hitler after 1941 )Milne continues attempt to smear Figes by stating,..it is simply bizarre to justify his Holocaust statement by saying the Germans "began their mass killings of the Jews in the eastern territories they occupied with Stalin's aid".Figes, of course, does not mean the territories occupied by Hitler after the invasion of 1941 and which had already been gobbled up by Stalin as the direct consequence of the secret protocols attached to the 'non-aggression pact'.'As Figes quite rightly insists, he means the Jews exterminated between September 1939 and June 1941 in the Western part of Poland which were eastern territories to the Nazi regime After all, the 'eastern terriroties' of the Reich is where the extermination 'began' and they became the laboratory for the further export of extermination Eastwards when Hitler subsequently invaded the Soviet Union.Milne still does not get that point, claiming that Figes has said what he simply has not said."In the case of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Poland east of the Curzon line (the "lands" referred to in his BBC article), the opposite is of course the case: they were occupied by the Soviet Union as a result of the pact and the Nazis were only able to begin their mass killings of Jews there after the pact was broken by the invasion of the USSR in June 1941".Milne is falsifying history. The killing of Jews from the western part of Poland easily qualify as 'mass killings' before the invasion of Soviet territory In any case, Milne ignores or simply does not think the 'mass killings' of Poles in German occupied PolandHow many people have to be killed before Milne accepts it as 'mass killing' as opposed to just killing a few hundred thousand shows some indication of his view of the value of human life.As does his view later in his piece that the pretext for killing off millions people can be euphemised by calling it 'repression' because deporting some 1.4 million Poles to the Gulag ( 400,000 who were Jewish ), many of whom never came back, is not as somehow direct as having camps that intend to exterminate.."..the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial".Yes, that's right. Any attempt to draw comparisons between the scale of the killing practiced by both the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union by drawing attention to the concentration camp system in the latter is a latent Holocaust denier. Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:50:16 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=193#193 193@http://unspeak.net/forum More rubbish from The Guardian: ‘Vladimir Putin’s undersized protégé did his masters bidding again’.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interac … dev-jintao Is that a fact? Could it be that he was acting on the will of the Russian people, or even the Ossetians who did not want to be bombed and attacked with tanks?But why waste time thinking when you can recycle neocon drivel in a ‘left wing’ newspaper? Of course not one of the twelve comments is positive, but the strange paradox is that the more The Guardian moves to the neo-liberal right, the less it appeals to its marketed audience. Fri, 08 May 2009 13:19:43 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=192#192 192@http://unspeak.net/forum After a few false starts, I have established a blog. Those who have read and remembered my posts (was that a tumbleweed I heard?) will notice that I am a real weirdo. My political ideology is an odd combination of Tsarist Libertarianism, Gallic social democracy, Periclean idealism, liberal consumerism, Vulcan logic and isolationist scepticism: http://deformablemirror.blogspot.com/My blog will not just focus on politics but will also include literature, pop-culture, philosophy, photography, Orthodox Christianity, technology, art and history. I love unspeak because as a political website it is pretty unique in its strong adherence to logic and reasoned argument. It is not like most websites where people scream that they are the most humane, sensitive, generally-wonderful person in the world for supporting policy X and opposing policy Y. Or that they are the most sceptical, logical person on earth because they’ve read a book saying that God does not exist, even if they think Tony Blair is honest.Anyway, I would be very grateful for any visitors. Sat, 25 Apr 2009 07:29:31 -0400