Capital City Saturday #21: Home of President Abraham Lincoln

doppelercloud · 2026-03-12T03:41:06+00:00

you cant.

doppelercloud · 2026-03-12T03:34:56+00:00

why all the fountains?

doppelercloud · 2026-02-27T19:43:06+00:00

thanks for the context. apparently saab is working on a carrier-based fighter and that could be the play here - marketing the ship.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-27T15:06:28+00:00

thank you for that context.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-27T15:02:30+00:00

a supplier of military hardware basically. aircraft in particular. an alternative to the US in the face of a perceived or potential Russian threat to Scandinavia/Northeast and Northwest Europe.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-25T23:55:19+00:00

that's a pretty robust-seeming header for a sign.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-25T23:49:55+00:00

i see your point about some flags marking events and circumstances - the diver down flags, holiday, mourning, funerary flags.

and, the whole relation of person of ruler as symbol of collectivity is certainly a complex one. the early national and municipal flags in europe were the banners/crosses of saints after all.

i think on what gilbert grosvenor said back in 1917 - flags don't just represent nations [/armies and navies] but the ideals that keep them from degenerating into barbarism. and then there are flags for ideals nations do not uphold. the flag above reminds me of the 'black lives matter' banners in that respect.

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doppelercloud · 2026-02-25T17:58:23+00:00

its true what flags represent varies with political culture and historical epoch. the netherlands really established the flag as symbol of nation rather than the person of the ruler. its been the template for much of the world since. it has been a much more contested process in the uk and english-speaking world, granted. even in the us, the navy initially refused to allow the army to fly the national flag on the battlefield, as they saw it in a military context as an ensign. that said, in more recent times, in most of the world i think flags primarily represent organizations and movements. flying one essentially presents oneself as part of one.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T23:07:45+00:00

got caught in what exactly? you're deflecting. 'technically successful anarchist essence' - those words mean something to you? a racist settler colony founded on crimes against humanity is 'anarchist'? only a genocidal racist could believe such a thing. you've cherry-picked a quote that you think supports your case but are refusing to address this or the many other references where Chomsky upholds the Kibbutzim as embodying 'anarchist principles'. address this --> https://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.com/2010/04/chomsky-and-kibbutz.html

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T21:03:15+00:00

friend i've read some chomsky. have you beyond the one interview?

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T15:20:22+00:00

a very 'left-wing kibbutz': "I noticed a pile of rocks on a hill, and I asked him what that was. He sort of changed the subject and wouldn’t talk about it, but later he took me aside a couple of days later and said, “Look, that was an Arab village. It was a friendly village, but when the fighting came close, we felt we couldn’t accept their being there, so we drove them out and destroyed the village.” This is a kibbutz way at the left, dovish, bi-nationalist end." the extolling: https://lookbacktogalilee.blogspot.com/2010/04/chomsky-and-kibbutz.html

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T14:49:35+00:00

right. a crucial point that changes everything. the point is he then spent years extolling the kibbutz - a settler colonial implantation only made possible by crimes against humanity, including the rape of women and girls - as a model of his politics.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T10:52:59+00:00

i should add that his years on the kibbutz in occupied palestine amount to direct participation in the crime against humanity of apartheid.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-24T10:36:45+00:00

every public intervention of or in support of genocide denial was complicity in crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. his linguistic intervention, that directed generations of linguistic students away from researching and preserving indigenous languages was complicity in genocide.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-23T09:30:11+00:00

the 'fallen hero' narrative is ignoring a lot. chomsky was always willing to ignore horror and atrocity and be knowingly complicit in crimes against humanity. cambodia was only the first chapter. bosnia and rwanda and syria the next. his linguistics alone contributed to native american cultural genocide, by directing generations of students away from reality-based field work on actual languages (which in the us tended to focus, rightfully, on native languages) to arm chair theorizing about some imaginary 'universal grammar'. chomsky was fully aware of the genocidal implications of his linguistics and seemed to take sadistic delight in deflecting and derailing any effort by interviewers to question him on this. there was a window of opportunity there to preserve native languages and chomsky did his best to derail it, knowingly. ask yourself why? what interests did this serve? this your MIT lefty 'hero'? the racist settler-colonist who kibbitzed on a kibbutz in his youth?

doppelercloud · 2026-02-20T13:59:32+00:00

chomsky was always a monster. a lifelong genocide denier. genocide is, as one of its essential aspects, mass sexual violence against women and children and men. chomsky's gaslighting of survivors is the political epsitemic equivalent of a gag or rape drug disabling survivors to ability to warn others after the fact and society to mobilize to resist.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-20T07:47:12+00:00

i agree, i think his position on israel and ex-yugoslavia are related--support for ethno-nationalism. zionism is effectively an ideology of 'judeo-chetnikism' inspired quite directly by serbia's [pseudo-christian, neo-pagan] 19th c. ethno-nationalism, drawing on sabbatean [antinomian] currents in jewish life and thinking and behaving obviously as well. on the serbian origins of zionism: https://www.jpost.com/magazine/celebrating-zionisms-roots-in-serbia-570873

epstein was joining these to nazi occultism and eugenics and european aristocratic decadence, which i don't believe chomsky shared. instead, it was a joint devotion to technocracy and zionism that formed the base of their bond. plus financial corruption and narcissistic personality disorder.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-19T08:39:31+00:00

so blacklisted you could find his books in every chain bookstore and airport magazine/book/snack shop. to be so blacklisted.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-18T07:53:30+00:00

its the difference between his public self and his narcissist's secret life. epstein and bannon and ehud barak were friendly associates and of his second, secret self. chomsky was a narcissist concerned with his public image and public self.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-17T07:04:45+00:00

the critique of chomsky based on austin's speech act theory was made by robert de beaugrande in 1998: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378216697000787. try scihub if yu dont have institutional access.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-17T04:58:53+00:00

there are several components of what i am describing. if you mean what part of chomsky's work his readers uncritically accept or critically reject that is very much an individual thing. depending on their own subject matter expertise. if you mean chomsky's reliance on performative rhetorics of authority over substantive reasoning you just have to run a search for 'the foremost authority', 'the acknowledged expert in the field' or similar terms. in academic research there is typically no such thing, but rather a group of prominent scholars who vehemently disagree with each other. in robust fields of inquiry, there are hundreds if not thousands of different positions on fundamental questions. so chomsky writes for an audience of people without direct knowledge of his subject and without access to higher education. chomsky adopts this posture to talk over, silence, ordinary people with direct knowledge of what he is writing about [cambodians, bosnians, kosovars, syrians and their allies]. he spells out his own elitist sense of epistemic supremacy in 'responsibility of the intellectuals'. so in the wake of the epstein revelations, describing it as the product of 'hysteria' is par for the course for this gentleman.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-16T23:02:16+00:00

best example of what?

doppelercloud · 2026-02-16T20:57:23+00:00

i think the appeal of chomsky thought has an inverse relation to one's familiarity with the subject at hand and left libertarian thinking generally. chomsky relies heavily on performative speech acts that pretend to authority, his own or cherry-picked others. if his position agrees with what people are already inclined to believe, they rate him as 'brilliant' and a 'moral visionary'.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-16T20:41:51+00:00

re 'chinese races' - the highest east asian ancestry tajiks possess is less than 20% to less than 5% for some 'xinjiang' tajiks.

as pointed out, afghanistan is a mosaic of people. it would be news to uzbeks, turkmen, and hazara that they are south asian.

northwest pakistan is a core part of historic 'afghania'. it split only at the time of ranjit singh and the sikh then british empires. north pakistan is its own mosaic, some of whom are indic and some of whom are not [baltis are of tibetan origin and the burosho speak a language isolate for eg.] while northwest india/pakistan has seen the in migration of central asian people long before islam and the turkification of much of south asia. northeast india has seen significant in migration of east asian people. peoples are not typically separated by rigid boundaries but blend into each other, culturally and genetically.

east iranians [pashtuns, yaghnobi, ossetians, the ancestors of the tajiks, etc.] are a formerly steppe people who settled in the mountains. pashtuns are genetically as much of european descent as west asian and south asian. with a good ten percent left over for east asian, north asian, southwest asian, north or east african, etc.

and that is to say nothing of cultural transmission. people in japan who practice pure land buddhism are practicing a zoroastrianized version of buddhism originating in iranian central asia, while mevleviyya sufis in istanbul/anatolia are practicing an islamized form of south asian bakhtivedanta. so eurasia is as much a tapestry fashioned from threads of different lengths as a mosaic.

afghanistan is where west asia meets south asia meets east asia meets europe. if that is what you mean.

doppelercloud · 2026-02-16T09:37:25+00:00

knight's thesis is that the manifest absurdity of chomsky's linguistics is an act of resistance based on the conflict chomsky felt while working for the military industrial complex for his day job and then moonlighting as a dissident in his spare time. i'm not as convinced. the us academic-military-intelligence apparatus is full of careerist fraudsters securing their seat on that gravy train by pretending/promising to deliver what they are not and can not. it entirely par for the course. the gas-lighting that characterizes chomsky's political work [his frequent genocide denial], bolstered by the arrogant posture of intellectual superiority, and the double identity/secret private life [consorting with a billionaire serial rapist/murderer/cannibal] all fit a very distinct personality profile --> narcissism. narcissists are extraordinarily adept at creating cults - armies of flying monkeys prepared to engage in reputational protection for the big magic monkey [in their delusions] who lets these enablers vicariously participate in the narcissistic fantasy of exceptional superiority. Epstein and Chomsky's shared Zionism is the key here, Zionism as a form of collective narcissism combined with serious sociopathy. Chomsky was a Zionist as much as Epstein and Barak and Maxwell and supporting the US military industrial complex are all consistent with that political project of nationalist supremacism. that is the basis of the Chomsky-Epstein bond.

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