Comments by "John Roberts" (@view1st) on "Intelligence Squared" channel.

  1. Ah, the old bait and switch. I notice how you switch from a geographic term (western) to a religious one (Islamic). Why not eastern versus western, then we can include the entirety of Asia and its 4 millennia history. Instead, by switching to a religious term you limit it to just those parts of Asia that just happen to be Muslim (I presume you have the Middle or Near East in mind, together with Pakistan and Bangladesh, instead of the whole continental landmass from the Urals in the West, to Japan in the East, India to the South and Russia - a 'western', white Caucasian nation - to the North. Even then you limit it to a particular form of Islam that is grossly over-simplified to the point of grotesque caricature and that appears only at certain times in history and only in certain places rather than existing continuously everywhere.
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  2.  @gustofzephyr947  One word: colonialism. Colonialism = plunder and exploitation. Countries that suffered it have still not recovered and won't if the neo-colonising West continues getting its way.
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  3.    I think you meant, the Israelis .
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  4.  @richardjohnson1757  along with the mentally challenged and entirely innocent.
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  5. He's an apologist for the 'unipolar moment' of 1989. That moment has now ended.
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  6. A democracy with only two parties, both of which are basically hard right and capitalist.
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  7.  @Synthminator  Can we say Julian Assange ? Bradley/Chelsea Manning ?
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  8.  @Longtack55  I wonder if these Hindu fundamentalists and nationalists, of which Mohdi is one, are in some way being supported by the USA and its intelligence community.
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  9. The West uses technology from the East, microchips and such from Japan and the Republic of China, for example.
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  10. What gets me is that, in a country that prides itself in being progressive and anti- racist, that this debate took place at all and was given respectability. Imagine if they had had a debate on whether African, Asian and other people of colour were or were not racially inferior and the National Front and Nazi party were the hosts as well as comprising both the majority of the panellists and the audience. How obvious would its chauvanism, racism, ethnocentrism have been. Yet here we have it, albeit disguised as a wolf-whistling academic 'debate'. It's like something straight out of the 18th century when people debated whether Blacks were one-quarter white or not.
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  11. False flag. Probably carried out by Israelis and/or pro-Israeli Americans. What followed certainly seems to have been in Israel's medium term strategic interests (seen from a certain – zionist – point of view).
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  12. But sanctions were entirely unnecessary. The JCPOA was proof of that.. The success of diplomacy over sabre-rattling led to a mutually agreed upon modus vivendi which, if it hadn't been sabotaged by the pro-Israel faction, would have allowed both Iran and the United States to have had somewhat normalised relations and have settled any outstanding issues.
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  13. Western media isn't designed to inform; it's designed to indoctrinate, entertain and distract. Its world view is the world view of the capitalist corporations that own and control it along with the capitalist state The same with the education system. It's naive to think otherwise.
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  14. It is transforming.
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  15. How many of those likes and dislikes are authentic though?
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  16. Who needs to buy when you can rent? And who needs to rent anything you can get it for free, paid for by taxes that everyone pays?
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  17. War on Yugoslavia, war on terror, war on communism, war on socialism, war on Germany (twice), war in Ukraine, war on Libya, war on Syria, the whole of the Middle East.... Yeah, we sure have moved on. NOT!
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  18. What you say flies in the face of empirical evidence. I suppose you'll tell us next that the fascists in Ukraine are about do what Hitler's Germany could not and will be defeating Russia any day now. Cope. The world is changing and no system is perfect, certainly not capitalism and the military‐industrial complex corporatism it has turned in to in the USA.
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  19. You'll be telling us next that because the Native Americans didn't have a state that was officially recognised by the French and English that it was okay to displace them. 😖
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  20. The West? Talk honestly. You really mean the USA (its rentier state corporatist military‐industrial-financial complex to be precise) and its vassals in Europe (those comprador elites who have their own motivations for supporting this war against Russia).
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  21. ​ @Ludovicus-Wyndham  How so?
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  22. Rubbish!
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