Fetzer On Dieugenio

Albert Rossi wrote:Precisely my thoughts.

Stan Dane wrote:If he keeps pressing, Cliff Varnell may soon become another non-person over at ED:
 
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20918

James DiEugenio wrote:

Stan Dane wrote:If he keeps pressing, Cliff Varnell may soon become another non-person over at ED:
 
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20918

That is really something isn't it?

Jon Simkin rules the roost with an iron fist.

James DiEugenio wrote:

The guy who once said Eladio Del Valle was killed in a drug deal.

And the deal just happened to go down, within a stone's throw of Bernardo De Torres' apartment.

Lifton started complaining to him that he needed it for research purposes. That is why he reopened it.

Cliff Varnell wrote:"There is a peculiar strain of thinking which mistakes the right to free speech for a license to abuse one's host with inflammatory language.

"This is John Simkin's joint.  A man of the Left, our John...."

JFK Student wrote:Could Fetzer be a disinfo guy working for the other side?

dwdunn(akaDan) wrote:Looks like Cliff Varnell and John Dolva are making sure to placate the Master before he gets his axe out again.

Cliff Varnell wrote:"There is a peculiar strain of thinking which mistakes the right to free speech for a license to abuse one's host with inflammatory language.

"This is John Simkin's joint.  A man of the Left, our John...."

Bwaaaahahahahahahaha       (there's no Emoticon for a mouth agape and eyes blinking, stunned)

Nice removal of context.  I was referring to Dave Reitzes comparing John Simkin's policy of removing the posts and threads to the Winston Smith Experience, which I find a shrill over-reaction.

99% of everything written on-line about the JFK assassination could be shit-canned and the world wouldn't be worse off for it.

If the Ed Forum goes down tomorrow, oh well...I kick it at Deep Politics nowadays, anyway.



"Of the Left" in the sense that an old Soviet Commissar for Political Education is "of the Left"??

Sure.  There are authoritarian/totalitarian types of all ideological stripes.

I can't put a guy who runs a forum on the internet in the same league as those at the levers of real power.


Hostage taker. Killer of hostages taken. Every single post and thread there is and will remain hostage to the arbitrary whims of a sad fellow who continues to constantly show that sycophancy is the highest value in his moral universe.


Killer?  Wow.  I'm not as impressed with the significance of these posts and threads or with the outrage over Simkin's villainy.

Hyper-dramatic over-reaction, seems to me...

But then you'd have to excuse Varnell, since he's American and consequently hasn't the slightest fucking idea what "the Left" could possibly mean.

You have no idea of the ideological battles that raged in the American hardcore punk rock scene in the 80's.

Andrea Skolnik wrote:Over the last 5 years I have learned to ignore Fetzer though I was not vocal about my opinions beyond the occasional stray post in a Facebook forum if his name was brought up .
I did not in any way start a grass roots movement to discredit him or gather the horde of sycophants that I am constantly accused of having and insist that they all remove him from their Facebook walls.
In fact he is still on my personal wall so that I can stay informed as to his more ridiculous posts in the event that accurate information is required to be posted in response.
When I removed 600 from my Facebook I left authors so that they could be contacted once the JFK Annie library was built and if I owned their books and posted links to their work  I wanted to give them the opportunity for feedback with readers.
Over the years I have always felt that the furious fight to prove that the Z film was faked and the insistence that this and this alone proves a cover up was not only absurd but also a smokescreen and a ploy to diminish the film as evidence.
After the Stone film resulted in so much attention on the records and led to the ARRB , Stone had a spotlight on him.
One of the main points he repeated in every interview was the value of the Z Film as EVIDENCE.
It was not until THEN did I start to see the vicious struggle within discussion forums to diminish the film as evidence by questioning its authenticity.
It was in these forums as the Fetzer brigade grew that you could see a pattern and trace it back to its roots.
Those that disagreed with Fetzer were attacked violently in forums , pushed out and silenced if they could not first be discredited.
The other side of the Fetzer coin plays in to the psyche memo to paint critics as illogical, gullible , believing any stray theory no matter how absurd , financially motivated , disagreeable and argumentative for no reason . 
I have questioned for the past few years why Black Op Radio still advertised for his books.
Now we have come full circle with Fetzer biting one of the hands that has fed him.
If as he claims he truly believes that Black Op is handled why has he allowed his book to be sold and advertised there all these years?

All right, please bear with me here (I'm a noob).

What is Black Op?

Block Op Radio 
http://blackopradio.com/

What is JFK Annie?

An online name used on FB by Andrea.

Hello, Cliff, and welcome to this forum. It's a good place to be if you're interested in intelligent discussion that might amount to something instead of going around in the usual circles. I will say at the outset that I'm sorry for any insults. I had a cold. wrote:

dwdunn(akaDan) wrote:Looks like Cliff Varnell and John Dolva are making sure to placate the Master before he gets his axe out again.

Cliff Varnell wrote:"There is a peculiar strain of thinking which mistakes the right to free speech for a license to abuse one's host with inflammatory language.

"This is John Simkin's joint.  A man of the Left, our John...."

Bwaaaahahahahahahaha       (there's no Emoticon for a mouth agape and eyes blinking, stunned)

Nice removal of context.  I was referring to Dave Reitzes comparing John Simkin's policy of removing the posts and threads to the Winston Smith Experience, which I find a shrill over-reaction.

99% of everything written on-line about the JFK assassination could be shit-canned and the world wouldn't be worse off for it.

If the Ed Forum goes down tomorrow, oh well...I kick it at Deep Politics nowadays, anyway.
=============================

I quoted 2 and a half sentences you wrote. I made the explicit point that I felt it is absurd to think of "our John" being "a man of the Left." I left unsaid the implicit point that you were sucking up to "our John." The context had no bearing on the main point I made: a couple of people were "making sure to placate the Master before he gets his axe out again."

You can disagree with my take on it, and you can and should feel insulted by my phrasing of it, but it's not like the "removal of context" is what made you look bad, or that the addition of the context would have improved things. I think it would have actually made it worse, since you were/are defending Simkin's arbitrary ego-driven censorship.

And unfortunately you've now provided still more information about your attitude towards what some of us are trying to do in these endeavors. I guess as long as you, yourself and you have a place to hang out, everything else can go to hell.

"Of the Left" in the sense that an old Soviet Commissar for Political Education is "of the Left"??

Sure.  There are authoritarian/totalitarian types of all ideological stripes.

I can't put a guy who runs a forum on the internet in the same league as those at the levers of real power.
=========================

My comparison might be a little exaggerated, but an old Soviet Commissar would have been a bureaucratic functionary, not someone "at the levers of real power." But then again, anyone who runs a forum geared to "conspiracy research" (particularly President Kennedy's assassination) certainly does hold a position of some authority within the community of "conspiracy researchers." It would be a different story if it were a comic book forum or a fishin'-an'-huntin' forum. In any event, the questionable attitude was to the idea that ANY person of an authoritarian mindset can or should be considered as "of the Left."
===================


Hostage taker. Killer of hostages taken. Every single post and thread there is and will remain hostage to the arbitrary whims of a sad fellow who continues to constantly show that sycophancy is the highest value in his moral universe.


Killer?  Wow.  I'm not as impressed with the significance of these posts and threads or with the outrage over Simkin's villainy.

Hyper-dramatic over-reaction, seems to me...
=======================

Yes, I've already gathered that you don't think much of this project you're involved in. But as some are aware, the Simkin Forum began as an actual Education Forum and has a lot more to it than just the JFK section; while the JFK section itself has an enormous amount of important historical information beyond this whole issue of a bunched-up collar on a suit-jacket, or the great T1 vs. T3 vertebrae debate. I will re-post what I said a couple months ago to Traveller11, as a summary of what the whole mess was about (at least from my perspective, and if anyone here strongly disagrees with my take on it, they haven't as yet made it known):


I became a member of the Simkin Forum on April 4, 2006. I subsequently made about 520 posts there. This included taking the time and trouble to type out long passages from books by authors like Fedor Dostoevski, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, William Shirer, Michael Moorcock, among many others. (In the interests of "education," you see) I also confronted issues like antisemitism and bigotry in general as well as taking the trouble to defend Mr. Simkin himself (from public detractors like Don Bohning) and his Forum (from members who seemed intent on being completely disruptive, like those who went on to form the Deep Politics Forum). I also had the chance to debate and question people like Mel Ayton and Dan Moldea. And I've encountered just about every kind of person possible there, including a few that I regard as complete loons. (Doesn't make them bad people necessarily; their minds are just in a different place than most)

About 7 months ago there was a bit of controversy as Mr. Simkin decided to turn Jim DiEugenio and Tom Scully (one of the EF moderators) into "guests" because of their questioning of one of Simkin's friends. Some of us wrote posts very critical of this decision. Martin Hay, for instance, subsequently asked for his membership to be deleted (Simkin responded, "Will do."). Robert Charles-Dunne, after making a typically thorough and fair-minded critique, advised that it would be his last post unless the decision was reversed. And I made a fairly challenging 2nd post on the subject and then removed my avatar (as I intended for it to be my last word at that forum).

Unfortunately, Ray Carroll responded to my post, closing with a quote from a Mafia figure about how "shedding a little blood helps clear the air"; since my own post had closed with mention of the massacre of schoolchildren at Newtown, Connecticut, the implications of Ray's concluding statement seemed just horrible and I wanted to plead with him to clarify that he was not thinking of the Newtown events in making the Mafia quote. When I went to log in, I found I was unable to reply and after checking my profile found I was under a "restriction from posting." Since I was still able to send PMs, I sent one to Gary Loughran, then an Admin, to advise of my new status and to ask him to make the overture to Carroll that I had wanted to make myself (he did so, and Carroll came to his right mind long enough to clarify that Newtown had been the last thing on his mind in making the quote, particularly as he lived only 80 miles from there).

A couple nights later I went back to the forum and found that my posts in the critical thread had disappeared. I looked around a bit and found that I didn't appear to have ANY posts anywhere. Then I checked my profile and found that I had 0 posts. No warning given, no advisement, just summary deletion of all 520 or so posts. Then I came here, in order to advise that people should move quickly if they wanted to retrieve their own posts there (in light of the promised shutdown of EF), and also to brighten Greg's days.

But then you'd have to excuse Varnell, since he's American and consequently hasn't the slightest fucking idea what "the Left" could possibly mean.

You have no idea of the ideological battles that raged in the American hardcore punk rock scene in the 80's.