ddtestcommentsdummy
Friday, September 08, 2006
Here are the long lost comments; they look like shit but I don't care
it is not as if anyone is going to read them anyway
Eric
I'm not sure that the blogpost that you link to deserves this level of response, since it was not animated by vindictiveness, but by the fact your argument was different from many other commentators, as well as tha fact you suggested the addition of a question mark for the name of the meeting. It seemed a good hook to propose another change.
The idea that you would have been collared and harangued by the Drink Soaked Trots at a meeting is a somewhat unlikely occurance. Let's not confuse blog-joshing with the fact that people are generally quite civil with each other. I most certainly would not have started a unedifying or nasty argument with you if I was going (I can't make it) - though I hope you change your mind and do go.
Still, in your related news I notice that you list three problems, although the last two may be the same one, that have led to the effective abandonment of Darfur by the international community:
1. The failure of the UN to pay the African Union.
2. Irresponsible commentators.
3.The pro-intervention lobby.
You don't mention the Khartoum government who I would hope you would accept have been at the very least a minor player in this crisis - even perhaps more so than commentators. It is not clear how you can totally dismiss reports like this, and give the impression that Khartoum was some sort of honest player who were pushed into a position they didn't want to take. What evidence is there that Khartoum had any interest in a stablising force in the region and were scared off it by commentators?
It is this aspect of your contrariness that perplexes me. When people get concerned about Darfur, you make the effort to post lots of interesting information about the nature of the other actors involved, but somehow one of the biggest players in the conflict sort of, well, gets lost. They don't have to, since the other points you bring out can exist at the same time, but all the same the Khartoum government becomes some sort of nervoud quivring rabbit that is frightened into refusing a UN force by the "fucking pre-intervention lobby".
Regards
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Monday 2006-09-04 21:18:59
tyronen
Eric, why are you trying to reason with Davies? The man is nothing but an apologist for the genocidal Khartoum regime. Hitler had his Chamberlain, Stalin had his Walter Duranty, and the Sudanese Islamofascists have their Daniel Davies.
You see his latest lie: that the AU peacekeepers were ordered out by the rebels. Actually they were ordered out by Khartoum, for the same reason peacekeepers are usually expelled from mass murder sites: so the regime can carry out its planned massacre of the civilian population.
And Davies will be sitting in his office, cheering them on.
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Monday 2006-09-04 22:36:36
Gar Lipow
Am I wrong, or was trying to play nice with the Decent Left always a dumb idea?
No you are not wrong.
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Monday 2006-09-04 23:40:30
rd
The presumption seems to be that squabbling among the British left is somehow driving events in Sudan. Perhaps Darfur rebel groups relentlessly scan fairly obscure Anglophone blogs? Another apparent premise is that disagreement with your position is tantamount to abuse.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 07:05:56
dsquared
Eric, I wrote in the original piece:
This reflected the state of affairs as I saw them at the time, and was based on a radio interview I'd heard with Jan Egeland. His view (as of last week - it is a fast developing situation, and at the time I wrote my piece we didn't know whether Khartoum had actually begun the attack or was just massing troops) was that Khartoum had signed the peace treaty and kept to their side of the bargain, and that although they are not good people, they had not been the specific problem in terms of violence on the ground.
The more general point that the Darfur intervention lobboy has made the negotiations much more difficult has been a staple of commentary on this subject since the beginning of the Abuja talks; I wrote something for the Guardian about it in March. Ingird Jones of Sudan Watch kept on making this point, as did Pronk and Egeland.
(readers should probably know that me and Eric have exchanged a few emails about this and are currently in a state of uneasy truce. I don't know whether I'm going to go or not; I'll certainly be looking up "Tyronen"'s IP address to see if he's located in London.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 07:12:15
dsquared
"Hitler had his Chamberlain"
I keep telling people that standards aren't slipping in modern education, but it gets more difficult.
You are also (to interpret it charitably) confused about the difference between aid workers and African Union peacekeeping troops. The aid workers are leaving North Darfur because of the rebel troops (Khartoum does not control the territory there). The African Union troops are not leaving until Sept 30, and were not present on the ground in North Darfur in any strength (as I noted, Khartoum does not control the ground there)
RD: Darfurian rebel groups probably don't read D^2 Digest, and probably not Crooked Timber either, but they certainly are aware of Eric Reeves' editorials in the Washington Post and of the "Save Darfur" movement generally. They do get newspapers in Abuja you know.
On the question of the "premise that disagreement with your position is tantamount to abuse", well, you don't know the history between me, the DSTPW site and the Euston Manifesto group. I personally don't think I overreacted at all.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 09:30:34
dsquared
dammit, the square brackets I was using have swallowed the extract that ought to have been in the blank space in my last post but one:
"The Khartoum government have not actually been responsible for the majority of the violence. However, they also bear their share of responsibility for the current disaster. Most press coverage appears to be criticising them most severely for refusing to allow a UN peacekeeping force to be brought in. However, they have stubbornly required that every rebel group sign the DPA before they are prepared to negotiate with them, which has resulted in the effective disbanding of the Ceasefire Commission and made diplomacy far more difficult than it needed to be. Even worse, Khartoum has decided that by failing to sign the agreement, the holdout rebel factions have become "terrorists" and subsequently permitted the Sudanese national army to suppress them. Observers in north Darfur have been witnessing the amassing of troops and helicopters, suggesting a forthcoming attack on the NRF forces in support of SLA/Minnawi. Such a large attack would be bound to have significant civilian casualties, even if carried out with the best of intentions, and the world is right not to trust the Sudanese government"
I'll also note now something that I haven't wanted to say in any high-profile forum because it's a potentially serious allegation for which I don't have any good proof; one big reason why I've been emphasising the violence of the rebels is that I have become increasingly convinced over the last few weeks that the widespread allegations that JEM/NRF are financed by al-Qaeda or surrogates might have some basis in fact. I know that every tyrant in the world these days always likes to pretend that his enemies are linked to al-Qaeda, but with JEM the allegations seem a little more credible to me than most.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 09:43:52
Eric
I'll certainly be looking up "Tyronen"'s IP address to see if he's located in London.
Why? Do you think he is stalking you on the basis of that comment? If he has a London IP address, would that swing your decision to go to a Euston Manifesto meeting? Do you think everybody making a comment that disagrees with you is a member of the dark and mysterious "League of Euston"? Have you any evidence that if you attended, you would pushed into a corner and shouted at?
Presumably anybody who disagrees with you at Comment is Free is an abuser? I don't think you should consider the usual blog banter as personal abuse, or as part of some concerted attempt to harass you - frankly none of us are that important to warrant that. DSTFW probably gets less readers than a local Church magazine.
As for the history of Daniel and the DSTFW, I am unaware of any threats made towards him, but I freely admit that there has been a general piss-taking exercise. It most certainly isn't co-ordinated. I have in the past pointed out his comments about Mugabe's slum clearances and his claim to expertise on Vietnam. He claimed "I know quite a bit about guerilla wars, because 1) I was the research assistant for a book about Vietnam and was present at a large number of face-to-face interviews with senior commanders on both sides", It was a book about railways. Now, that sort of activity might be considered ungentlemenly, or even childish sixth form student politics, but I wouldn't characterise it as abuse. In particular I utterly fail to see what is offensive about the fairly innocuous post about Darfur that elicited this response.
Merely pointing to a Daniel Davies comment page is now abuse, is it?
Similar levels of "abuse" have been going the other way for months. The decent tag is an example. I try not to let it bother me.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 10:49:02
dsquared
If he has a London IP address, would that swing your decision to go to a Euston Manifesto meeting?
Yes it might, because it might mean he would be there. He's clearly a friend or fan of yours from his first sentence, and he appears to have quite a thing against me and not much common sense. Just the kind of chap I can live my whole life without meeting.
Do you think everybody making a comment that disagrees with you is a member of the dark and mysterious "League of Euston"?
No, or I would never have applied for tickets in the first place. On the other hand, there are a lot of people associated with your group who have a history of organised political boorishness, so it would have been stupid of me to overlook this fact.
Have you any evidence that if you attended, you would pushed into a corner and shouted at?
I do not feel any need to operate a forensic standard of burden of proof when deciding where to spend an evening out. A mere inkling that the place might be full of cunts was good enough reason for me not to go to a rugby club dinner the other week and the Euston Manifesto outing is on the same standard (I should make it clear that everyone actually involved with the organisation of this meeting has been perfectly polite and helpful).
Merely pointing to a Daniel Davies comment page is now abuse, is it?
I don't think I need to defend my own record in terms of being prepared to give it and take it out. However I think you're being really quite disingenuous here. I did, in fact, read the comment placed on that site by "SIAW", which appears to be a pseudonym for a political party and I thought it was quite creepy.
Your site also publishes "Will", who regularly makes quite extraordinary threats to people; I can't be bothered googling to see whether he's ever said he's going to punch my fucking head in but it would not exactly be out of character if he had. And your comments section is also a regular haunt of "Juan Golblado", who went through quite the period of following me around posting a "j'accuse" of my intellectual dishonesty and fascism.
While I'm sure it is possible that you, Will and SIAW are by a long way the three worst people in the whole Decent Left and all the rest of them are much nicer, I think this would be a poor basis upon which to plan my social life. Seeing the "heads up" go up on a site with a readership like yours is certainly something that worries me.
By the way I have no idea why you are "reminding" me about what I think about Zimbabwe or what books I have written. The very fact that you and your mates appear to be more or less incapable of having a conversation with me without dragging up blog fights from 2004, is kind of my whole point here.
Similar levels of "abuse" have been going the other way for months.
Bullshit. I am absolutely sure that I have never mentioned you in a weblog post, ever, and slightly less sure but still pretty sure that I have never mentioned your site, ever. I think that in the last twelve months, I have once mentioned DSTFW in a comments section, in a discussion about "creepy fan sites". If you don't like the term "Decent Left", you should have a word with Alan Johnson (not the minister) or perhaps submit an essay on the subject to "Social Democratic Futures", because it was him that started using it.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 18:21:10
Tyronen
Don't worry Davies, I won't stalk you. I live in Chicago. I have no interest in meeting Holocaust-denying scum like you anyways.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 20:36:38
dsquared
and that, in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, is why I didn't go.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 20:43:30
Kevin Donoghue
Pity. But I was hoping you would treat them to a burst of eloquence, which it seems you had decided not to do in any case. Can you confirm that Tyronen is indeed in Chicago? I'd hate to think I might be anywhere near, more especially downwind from, anything so odiferous.
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 00:02:31
[this is where the deleted comment was, although it doesn't really matter as nobody replied to it – DD]
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 05:15:37
siaw
Oh dear. No, "SIAW" doesn't represent any political party, but you knew that already. Get a grip.
FYI, we removed the comment you refer to precisely because we didn't want to risk reigniting the exchange of insults, which you started and kept going long after the rest of us had got bored with it and you. But you've reignited it anyway all by yourself. You really are just a little bit paranoid, aren't you?
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 07:48:10
dsquared
I see. You are right, of course, reigniting it over at my own blog is much more classy.
well, who am I to demur: SIAW, you are a bunch of cunts.
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 08:34:25
scaredy quote
Shouldn't that page title read "D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger *lies*?
People who insist on placing others' names in quotation marks are very strange indeed, don't you agree "Dan". Do you do the finger action when you speak to people? 'Oh hello "Chris", what are we writing about at Rickety Sticks?' 'I think that "Tony" "Blair" is a bit of a tosser.'
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 10:11:34
siaw
Ah diddums. Poor ickle Daniel.
Eric
I'm not sure that the blogpost that you link to deserves this level of response, since it was not animated by vindictiveness, but by the fact your argument was different from many other commentators, as well as tha fact you suggested the addition of a question mark for the name of the meeting. It seemed a good hook to propose another change.
The idea that you would have been collared and harangued by the Drink Soaked Trots at a meeting is a somewhat unlikely occurance. Let's not confuse blog-joshing with the fact that people are generally quite civil with each other. I most certainly would not have started a unedifying or nasty argument with you if I was going (I can't make it) - though I hope you change your mind and do go.
Still, in your related news I notice that you list three problems, although the last two may be the same one, that have led to the effective abandonment of Darfur by the international community:
1. The failure of the UN to pay the African Union.
2. Irresponsible commentators.
3.The pro-intervention lobby.
You don't mention the Khartoum government who I would hope you would accept have been at the very least a minor player in this crisis - even perhaps more so than commentators. It is not clear how you can totally dismiss reports like this, and give the impression that Khartoum was some sort of honest player who were pushed into a position they didn't want to take. What evidence is there that Khartoum had any interest in a stablising force in the region and were scared off it by commentators?
It is this aspect of your contrariness that perplexes me. When people get concerned about Darfur, you make the effort to post lots of interesting information about the nature of the other actors involved, but somehow one of the biggest players in the conflict sort of, well, gets lost. They don't have to, since the other points you bring out can exist at the same time, but all the same the Khartoum government becomes some sort of nervoud quivring rabbit that is frightened into refusing a UN force by the "fucking pre-intervention lobby".
Regards
-
Monday 2006-09-04 21:18:59
tyronen
Eric, why are you trying to reason with Davies? The man is nothing but an apologist for the genocidal Khartoum regime. Hitler had his Chamberlain, Stalin had his Walter Duranty, and the Sudanese Islamofascists have their Daniel Davies.
You see his latest lie: that the AU peacekeepers were ordered out by the rebels. Actually they were ordered out by Khartoum, for the same reason peacekeepers are usually expelled from mass murder sites: so the regime can carry out its planned massacre of the civilian population.
And Davies will be sitting in his office, cheering them on.
-
Monday 2006-09-04 22:36:36
Gar Lipow
Am I wrong, or was trying to play nice with the Decent Left always a dumb idea?
No you are not wrong.
-
Monday 2006-09-04 23:40:30
rd
The presumption seems to be that squabbling among the British left is somehow driving events in Sudan. Perhaps Darfur rebel groups relentlessly scan fairly obscure Anglophone blogs? Another apparent premise is that disagreement with your position is tantamount to abuse.
-
Tuesday 2006-09-05 07:05:56
dsquared
Eric, I wrote in the original piece:
This reflected the state of affairs as I saw them at the time, and was based on a radio interview I'd heard with Jan Egeland. His view (as of last week - it is a fast developing situation, and at the time I wrote my piece we didn't know whether Khartoum had actually begun the attack or was just massing troops) was that Khartoum had signed the peace treaty and kept to their side of the bargain, and that although they are not good people, they had not been the specific problem in terms of violence on the ground.
The more general point that the Darfur intervention lobboy has made the negotiations much more difficult has been a staple of commentary on this subject since the beginning of the Abuja talks; I wrote something for the Guardian about it in March. Ingird Jones of Sudan Watch kept on making this point, as did Pronk and Egeland.
(readers should probably know that me and Eric have exchanged a few emails about this and are currently in a state of uneasy truce. I don't know whether I'm going to go or not; I'll certainly be looking up "Tyronen"'s IP address to see if he's located in London.
-
Tuesday 2006-09-05 07:12:15
dsquared
"Hitler had his Chamberlain"
I keep telling people that standards aren't slipping in modern education, but it gets more difficult.
You are also (to interpret it charitably) confused about the difference between aid workers and African Union peacekeeping troops. The aid workers are leaving North Darfur because of the rebel troops (Khartoum does not control the territory there). The African Union troops are not leaving until Sept 30, and were not present on the ground in North Darfur in any strength (as I noted, Khartoum does not control the ground there)
RD: Darfurian rebel groups probably don't read D^2 Digest, and probably not Crooked Timber either, but they certainly are aware of Eric Reeves' editorials in the Washington Post and of the "Save Darfur" movement generally. They do get newspapers in Abuja you know.
On the question of the "premise that disagreement with your position is tantamount to abuse", well, you don't know the history between me, the DSTPW site and the Euston Manifesto group. I personally don't think I overreacted at all.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 09:30:34
dsquared
dammit, the square brackets I was using have swallowed the extract that ought to have been in the blank space in my last post but one:
"The Khartoum government have not actually been responsible for the majority of the violence. However, they also bear their share of responsibility for the current disaster. Most press coverage appears to be criticising them most severely for refusing to allow a UN peacekeeping force to be brought in. However, they have stubbornly required that every rebel group sign the DPA before they are prepared to negotiate with them, which has resulted in the effective disbanding of the Ceasefire Commission and made diplomacy far more difficult than it needed to be. Even worse, Khartoum has decided that by failing to sign the agreement, the holdout rebel factions have become "terrorists" and subsequently permitted the Sudanese national army to suppress them. Observers in north Darfur have been witnessing the amassing of troops and helicopters, suggesting a forthcoming attack on the NRF forces in support of SLA/Minnawi. Such a large attack would be bound to have significant civilian casualties, even if carried out with the best of intentions, and the world is right not to trust the Sudanese government"
I'll also note now something that I haven't wanted to say in any high-profile forum because it's a potentially serious allegation for which I don't have any good proof; one big reason why I've been emphasising the violence of the rebels is that I have become increasingly convinced over the last few weeks that the widespread allegations that JEM/NRF are financed by al-Qaeda or surrogates might have some basis in fact. I know that every tyrant in the world these days always likes to pretend that his enemies are linked to al-Qaeda, but with JEM the allegations seem a little more credible to me than most.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 09:43:52
Eric
I'll certainly be looking up "Tyronen"'s IP address to see if he's located in London.
Why? Do you think he is stalking you on the basis of that comment? If he has a London IP address, would that swing your decision to go to a Euston Manifesto meeting? Do you think everybody making a comment that disagrees with you is a member of the dark and mysterious "League of Euston"? Have you any evidence that if you attended, you would pushed into a corner and shouted at?
Presumably anybody who disagrees with you at Comment is Free is an abuser? I don't think you should consider the usual blog banter as personal abuse, or as part of some concerted attempt to harass you - frankly none of us are that important to warrant that. DSTFW probably gets less readers than a local Church magazine.
As for the history of Daniel and the DSTFW, I am unaware of any threats made towards him, but I freely admit that there has been a general piss-taking exercise. It most certainly isn't co-ordinated. I have in the past pointed out his comments about Mugabe's slum clearances and his claim to expertise on Vietnam. He claimed "I know quite a bit about guerilla wars, because 1) I was the research assistant for a book about Vietnam and was present at a large number of face-to-face interviews with senior commanders on both sides", It was a book about railways. Now, that sort of activity might be considered ungentlemenly, or even childish sixth form student politics, but I wouldn't characterise it as abuse. In particular I utterly fail to see what is offensive about the fairly innocuous post about Darfur that elicited this response.
Merely pointing to a Daniel Davies comment page is now abuse, is it?
Similar levels of "abuse" have been going the other way for months. The decent tag is an example. I try not to let it bother me.
-
Tuesday 2006-09-05 10:49:02
dsquared
If he has a London IP address, would that swing your decision to go to a Euston Manifesto meeting?
Yes it might, because it might mean he would be there. He's clearly a friend or fan of yours from his first sentence, and he appears to have quite a thing against me and not much common sense. Just the kind of chap I can live my whole life without meeting.
Do you think everybody making a comment that disagrees with you is a member of the dark and mysterious "League of Euston"?
No, or I would never have applied for tickets in the first place. On the other hand, there are a lot of people associated with your group who have a history of organised political boorishness, so it would have been stupid of me to overlook this fact.
Have you any evidence that if you attended, you would pushed into a corner and shouted at?
I do not feel any need to operate a forensic standard of burden of proof when deciding where to spend an evening out. A mere inkling that the place might be full of cunts was good enough reason for me not to go to a rugby club dinner the other week and the Euston Manifesto outing is on the same standard (I should make it clear that everyone actually involved with the organisation of this meeting has been perfectly polite and helpful).
Merely pointing to a Daniel Davies comment page is now abuse, is it?
I don't think I need to defend my own record in terms of being prepared to give it and take it out. However I think you're being really quite disingenuous here. I did, in fact, read the comment placed on that site by "SIAW", which appears to be a pseudonym for a political party and I thought it was quite creepy.
Your site also publishes "Will", who regularly makes quite extraordinary threats to people; I can't be bothered googling to see whether he's ever said he's going to punch my fucking head in but it would not exactly be out of character if he had. And your comments section is also a regular haunt of "Juan Golblado", who went through quite the period of following me around posting a "j'accuse" of my intellectual dishonesty and fascism.
While I'm sure it is possible that you, Will and SIAW are by a long way the three worst people in the whole Decent Left and all the rest of them are much nicer, I think this would be a poor basis upon which to plan my social life. Seeing the "heads up" go up on a site with a readership like yours is certainly something that worries me.
By the way I have no idea why you are "reminding" me about what I think about Zimbabwe or what books I have written. The very fact that you and your mates appear to be more or less incapable of having a conversation with me without dragging up blog fights from 2004, is kind of my whole point here.
Similar levels of "abuse" have been going the other way for months.
Bullshit. I am absolutely sure that I have never mentioned you in a weblog post, ever, and slightly less sure but still pretty sure that I have never mentioned your site, ever. I think that in the last twelve months, I have once mentioned DSTFW in a comments section, in a discussion about "creepy fan sites". If you don't like the term "Decent Left", you should have a word with Alan Johnson (not the minister) or perhaps submit an essay on the subject to "Social Democratic Futures", because it was him that started using it.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 18:21:10
Tyronen
Don't worry Davies, I won't stalk you. I live in Chicago. I have no interest in meeting Holocaust-denying scum like you anyways.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 20:36:38
dsquared
and that, in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, is why I didn't go.
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Tuesday 2006-09-05 20:43:30
Kevin Donoghue
Pity. But I was hoping you would treat them to a burst of eloquence, which it seems you had decided not to do in any case. Can you confirm that Tyronen is indeed in Chicago? I'd hate to think I might be anywhere near, more especially downwind from, anything so odiferous.
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 00:02:31
[this is where the deleted comment was, although it doesn't really matter as nobody replied to it – DD]
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 05:15:37
siaw
Oh dear. No, "SIAW" doesn't represent any political party, but you knew that already. Get a grip.
FYI, we removed the comment you refer to precisely because we didn't want to risk reigniting the exchange of insults, which you started and kept going long after the rest of us had got bored with it and you. But you've reignited it anyway all by yourself. You really are just a little bit paranoid, aren't you?
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 07:48:10
dsquared
I see. You are right, of course, reigniting it over at my own blog is much more classy.
well, who am I to demur: SIAW, you are a bunch of cunts.
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 08:34:25
scaredy quote
Shouldn't that page title read "D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger *lies*?
People who insist on placing others' names in quotation marks are very strange indeed, don't you agree "Dan". Do you do the finger action when you speak to people? 'Oh hello "Chris", what are we writing about at Rickety Sticks?' 'I think that "Tony" "Blair" is a bit of a tosser.'
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Wednesday 2006-09-06 10:11:34
siaw
Ah diddums. Poor ickle Daniel.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
welcome my small but select band of commenters
By the way, the problem with the Enetations comments is that someone decided to try and "out" another blogger (not me, rather obviously, as I am as out as Graham Norton). If you are thinking of doing it again here, please don't. I have (I think) banned the "Guardster" anonymizing proxy because it was used by the outer; apologies to all my Albanian and UAE readers.
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