But here he is again, pretending to be yet another indignant patriot when in fact he is a middle aged stalker from Kansas with an unhealthy sexual focus (his posts are preserved at the Black Flag Cafe for the entertainment of various law enforcement agencies). Best to keep track of him and his various badly disguised names and IPs. We have sad people like that on my forum that we have to report to the police when they finally go off the edge. They usually approach people for sex, make threats and try to find friends using a basket full of aliases and ploys. I can give you a full brief on his children, family, income, location, employment history etc.

For now his themes are familiar and his obsessive need to feign anger so he can stalk says more about his lonely need for human contact than anything he types.

Sadly your new/old stalker friend forgets, well actually I am pretty sure he is too stupid to even stop and think, about Canada’s very early contribution to defeating the Nazis in World War II and that of course, Canada didn’t have to engage in violent ethnic cleansing or slavery on the path to peaceful independence. But see there he goes, getting me to point out he is a liar and a dimwit :))

And yes, Old Blue, Canadians are fighting, dying and getting killed in Afghanistan as well. But I am sure their deaths or even intelligent discourse are not as meaningful as your bizarre need to seek attention and male human companionship on the internet.

“it’s obvious that you despise the US military”

Well, thanks, because I do try to convey that very point. I’m sorry, was I required to love the U.S. military?

“You do an admirable job of trying to keep it on an even keel”

Uh-oh…that suggests I am being ambiguous, so I have to work on being clearer.

“but in the end, your motivations are pretty obvious”

Oh, OK then. Phew!

“Our team, as I imagine it pains you to think of, has done more good in the world”

Yes, it’s warfare that makes the world a better place. Indeed, did you see the improvement to NYC after 9/11? Those horrible eyesores were removed from what is…still a pretty grim skyline.

“Warfare by the US, as distasteful as it must be to you, has ended slavery, stopped the Nazis and Communism.”

Now did you get that shit in a “history” book written by Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter? The U.S. military did NONE of those three things.

“he’s involved in some type of intelligence business in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that you refuse to see this as a problem tells me what I need to know about your motivations.”

Your comment is out of date, and the debate has moved on. You missed my recent posts, and my direct debates with RYP himself. So you are just plain wrong. Again…what a surprise!

“in the end your inherent beliefs dictated where you would end up on the issue”

Indeed, we should be like you. We should arrive at everything like fresh, newborn babes, without a prior thought in our heads, open to all sides because they are all equally incomprehensible. Every time we turn a page in a book, we should pretend it’s the very first page. No connections must be made. We should have no predispositions, no ongoing thought process, and least of all, no critical thinking.

So tell me, is everyone in your neighbourhood also a mindless body plug, meat on shoes, or is that just you?

Cheerio, killer.

First, Max, it’s obvious that you despise the US military. You do an admirable job of trying to keep it on an even keel, but in the end, your motivations are pretty obvious. So your final indictment of Blue was far from surprising. I am one of the right wingers that I imagine you detest, but please understand that people who refer to our soldiers and the people that they are fighting as two sides, and not wanting to pick one over the other makes me sick to my stomach. Our team, as I imagine it pains you to think of, has done more good in the world and saved more people from horrible oppression than the whole of academia in the history of the world. Warfare by the US, as distasteful as it must be to you, has ended slavery, stopped the Nazis and Communism. How many hundreds of millions of lives have been ended by those three little gems?

Second, RYP has an obvious conflict of interest in that he’s involved in business that compete on some level with the Army program that he criticized. Call it what you want, but no where in his Men’s Journal article did he state that he’s involved in some type of intelligence business in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that you refuse to see this as a problem tells me what I need to know about your motivations.

As for the validity of RYP’s article that started all this, the one thing that he’s been proven right is that there was indeed a blackhawk with a skull on it. That’s it – one thing. The rest is he said/she said and I tend to believe the military people who spend years in the fight, not a business man who spent a few days.

I work in a business where we deal with clients who know nothing of what we do, how we do it, and why, yet many seem to believe themselves to be experts because they spend a day or a year on the periphery when we’ve spent a lifetime doing what we do. I find RYP to be of the same ilk, except he has skin in the game.

It was admirable that you donated so much of your time to this subject, but in the end your inherent beliefs dictated where you would end up on the issue.

When someone as incoherent and pregnant with righteous, patriotic anger (and paychecks from the US military) insists on constantly butchering an argument and casting insane aspersions, then kindness is wasted.

“Afghan Old Blue” borders on the clinically retarded. While others may be guilty of taking single sentences out of context, “Old Blue” takes a fragment of a sentence out of the context of the sentence, and then pretends that it is the whole sentence. You can make anyway say anything like that.

He is as dishonest as he is degenerate, and now that you mention he is engaged in full time personal attacks while in the employ of the US government, it tells me that you might consider outing this asshole. After all, why would you protect his identity otherwise?

Those that choose to maintain “angry blogs” seem to exhibit some interesting similarities.

1) They couch their motivations behind “patriotism” but earn a paycheck from the taxpayer

2) They clearly define bad and good and often consider those Americans who do not lockstep with their simplistic ideas as the “enemy”

3) They spend an inordinate amount of time being angry. Possible due to the natural loss of testosterone and hormones in middle age. Sometimes due to PTSD, need for money, family issues and more likely due to the sexual frustration, loneliness and frustration to the inherent systemic dysfunction of their govt designed and funded tasks.

4) They become tribal, forming links with other like-minded angry bloggers most of whom flourished during the Bush administration as “telling it like it is” even though now most admit their inherent motivation was based on falsehoods.

5) They deal in slander and propaganda, gaming the internet by inventing hollow bulk and fraudulent meaning by publishing falsehoods and then engaging their likeminded tribe to repeat those falsehoods or ideally expanding on them in vehemence and scope.

He had not been back to the area I visited and insisted that I invented certain elements of my story. He didn’t expect me to reach out and touch so he quickly scuttled backwards like most cowards do when called out. I offered to leave it at that after shown proof that his assertions were false and he wisely published a retraction.

Then he felt ashamed and emasculated and began inventing items and restating his assertions but without merit in his underlying case. He thought that he could go toe to toe with the diverse group of people (security contractors to ex-hippies) on my site and ran. Other mil bloggers chimed in and he felt emboldened. Now that he is back in theater and writing a blog that entertains at least his friends he is back to his vitriol. I encourage people to allow us into their world, whatever their viewpoint but inventing enemies does not seem to be a productive use of the internet (and our tax dollars)

My concern is there is an odd sexual slant to many of his rants. And I have asked him to cease and desist. He sends me personal emails that are quite bellicose, insulting and with these odd overtones. Since I work in Afghanistan, I know his identity and his location but I honestly feel sorry for a government paid fellow that has enough time on his hands to endlessly google an invented adversary and contact anyone who writes about me with spews about his hate.

I never had any reason to deal with him but originally I told him I enjoyed his previous personal blog about his work in the Kapisa area of Afghanistan. Now he is a ranting angry lonely man with a sexual fixation on someone he has never met.

Its important to remember that he chose to throw himself in front of the collective internet bus. He just needs to make sure that his paymaster doesn’t see what he does in his non-spare time.

My initial mistake was in treating him with respect and being civil, both here and on his trash blog. Then I realized: this is one of those moody temperamental hysterics who is nice with you for as long as he thinks he has a chance of convincing you. Once he realizes that he has failed, and you point out his errors, he goes from sullen to vicious. He is a serious disgrace to whichever sad sacks have ever made the mistake of wasting money by hiring him.

Instead of returning the civility, Old Boob was determined to be such an extremist nag that the poor cretin made an utter fool himself, rendering himself into a clown-like figure, the butt of jokes, the target of ridicule on Robert Young Pelton’s “Black Flag Cafe.” Oh why bother describe it, you can appreciate the full glory of Old Blue’s tenacious disregard for facts and logic, and watch him make an ass of himself on your own:

http://cafe.comebackalive.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42417&hilit=forte#p421135

With defenders of “the mission” such as Old Blue, and it’s pretty well only extremists such as him, demagogues and war profiteers left to defend the occupation of Afghanistan, the Taliban should pat themselves on the back with the knowledge that they have won the war.

Why bother writing, WOTN, if aside from disregard for the truth you also show such disregard for words and their meaning? I would have expected that you would at least hold yourself in higher esteem than that, but apparently not.

But if you want to have one more laugh, check his uber-patriotic war drool at:

http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/2009/03/what-is-a-milblogger-and-what-is-their-role-in-the-debate.html

“steadfastly establish their preconceived notions of politics and/or profits and then move towards an attempt to justify those notions. Seems to me that is called “inductive reasoning” and is highly disdained by critical thinkers”

No, sorry. First, what you identified is not “inductive reasoning,” though I am sure some milblogger somewhere told you that it was an evil thing that only communists do. As a matter of fact, using logic to arrive at conclusions from a general pattern is deductive reasoning. So you are way off base once again, as you have been each time you have tried to argue about “science” in those most cartoonish terms. Whether inductive reasoning is to be dismissed out of hand is any case an argument made by some, but hardly made and accepted by all. However, again, let’s be clear (because you can’t be): if I highlight imperialism, and patterns of historical imperialist practice and discourse in general terms, and from that make certain logical and specific deductions, that is, DEDUCTIVE reasoning. So you not only do not understand what you say, you get the wrong target, and you strengthen my hand in the process. Thanks, but I don’t need your support.

Old Blue is mired in allegation and circumstantial, suggestive evidence to the point of drowning. He was never able to make a successful argument, and when in a larger audience — other than some angry old milbloggers with hardened arteries — it has been painful to watch him being laughed at and ridiculed for his each and every utterance.

In broader terms, where do the general patterns used for deductive reasoning come from? Do they create themselves, or are they instead the product of multiple and repeated observations of a wide variety of specific, detailed observations? The dichotomy between deductive and inductive is what is discredited, because there is an obvious continuum and constant connection between the two. In actual practice, as opposed to manuals, the two are in constant dialogue.

You seem to object to rigid ideological formations. And yet: the very title of your blog begins with WAR ON TERROR, a rigid, right wing, neo-con, ideological construct borrowed straight from the mouths of the Bush administration. Now how do you explain such patent nonsense like what you wrote above? You just can’t stand that there are different opinions, and opinions you don’t like. So with the same intellectual integrity of a pathological liar, you claim your opponents are all ideological, and you alone have the facts, veiled in some immature and outmoded conceptions of science that you borrowed from some manual.

Then you have the temerity to state: “But this does not appear to be a site where mature debate is welcome. It does not appear to be a place where dissenting opinion and particularly not evidence to the contrary is welcomed.” ANYONE looking at this site, and the discussions that have been raging here for ideas, across hundreds of comments, will see your remark for what it is: obvious bullshit.

You should be ashamed when lying openly in front of an audience.

Speaking of facts, GWOThead, have you found those WMDs yet?

But given that this seems to be a place where politics drives allegations and hence the exploration of evidence, it is unsurprising that the allegation of a lack of evidence on the part of Old Blue is preceded by articles of strong allegations and a lack of evidence and assumptions of a false identity without substantiation.

As I contiinue to state in various circles: mature debate is healthy, particularly when the participants disagree. But this does not appear to be a site where mature debate is welcome. It does not appear to be a place where dissenting opinion and particularly not evidence to the contrary is welcomed. It appears to be a place where backslapping over the greatest personal attacks on ideological opponents is the order of the day. It appears to be a place where a rigid political ideology is enforced in a call for anarchy and rebellion to the established definitions of science, learning, and etiquette of professionals.

It has been interesting but not informative other than into the thought processes of the most rigid of political ideologues.

I point out that milbloggers run the gamut from academic, though provoking sites to ranting morons.

milbloggin has been problematic mostly due to restrictive military access and dog whistle resonance issues amongst left leaning readers. It also disturbs me that information and disinformation are often bundled together and presented as “fact” or news.

It bothers me that some milbloggers consider themselves psywarriors and defenders of freedom when they are in fact propagandists and unpaid mouthpieces.

Blogging is new media? Not quite. Its homemade moonshine compared to MSM cognac.

I don’t even know who Old Blue and he is terrified to reveal who he is… so how can I fear someone like that?

I will keep on working in the real world, on the ground and you are more than welcome to call my work crap…and should you ever work up the courage to actually invest in yourself, spend the time on the ground gathering facts, write a book, film a documentary, start a company, form an opinion and stand in front of an audience and state your opinions I will be there cheering you on. You have great life experience and strength of conviction now get in the ring. :)