Kyle Anzalone, Connor Freeman, Patrick MacFarlane, and Joanne Leon give their takes on the Soho Forum debate featuring Bill Kristol and Scott Horton discuss US foreign policy. The panel breaks down the arguments and questions asked to the debaters. The result of the debate was a resounding victory for Scott Horton and the antiwar movement.
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How does Scott keep all those facts so straight?
Kristol looked like an utter fool.
Thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for making me aware of it.
I’m glad the debate was postponed until the withdrawal from Afghanistan, if only because everything that Kristol stood for was proven false, in reality, prior to the debate. Of course, we knew it was false from the beginning, but some people are harder to teach.
Still why give a platform to a rascal who can be called a murderer ? Yes, he enjoys the visibility of many other well adorned ramparts to the hell. But so did a lot of Nazi Fascist ideologues and psychopaths .
Why give a platform? Your reductionist view is typical of the censorship crowd. This “platform” gave everyone to see with their own eyes and hear with their ears how deceptive and destructive interventionism has been. Were it not for this opportunity, those who promote war would continue to pretend that they are above reproach and cannot be refuted.
No and Yes .Person like him can have an interview as long as person like him retreat to the jail after the event following the question and answer just like the death row inmates do . When signaled to vacate the chair they go back to the solitary cell ,after the interview with an extra warm meal.
He’s not entitled to a platform. Not giving him one is not censorship.
Kristol remains a big enough name that it wasn’t so much “giving him a platform” as using him to give Scott one. And Scott made good use of it.
I agree completely. I just find that prick so loathsome that I had to speak out against him in any way I could find.
That’s a good question. Kristol already has many platforms–his own magazine and think tanks and mainstream media appearances–but none of them call him and his past errors in judgment to account. This is the first I’m aware of. Horton also has several platforms, but this was a grand opportunity to confront one of the prime neoconservative media manipulators in a way that mattered.
Thinking about this debate some more, I was struck by Kristol’s willful ignorance of the consequences of the wars he was a major cheerleader for. You can tell he was aware that not everything went well, in fact he clearly had trouble choosing something that he thought went well (Scott properly eviscerated him for his choice of what used to be Yugoslavia and NATO’s intervention there). He talked in terms of intentions and the platitudes that led to those intentions, but he didn’t talk about consequences, which was most of Horton’s presentation.
One opportunity I think Horton missed was to acknowledge that Kristol seemed to have good intentions about freeing people from tyranny and granting opportunities to women, but that such aspirations cannot be separated from actual consequences of murdered innocents and destroyed infrastructures and widespread displacement of populations and peoples.
Absolutely not .Kristol is an agent provocateur. An arsonist and that is by design and by DNA . He is a moral thug and powerful one . His good intentions can be construed and imagined as the worst of that of Al Quiada . That is not an overstatement .
Congrats to Scott Horton; I just watched all 90 minutes of it and if this were a football game, Scott beat Kristol 38-0. Endless stream of facts, versus Kristol’s rambling bloviating platitudes and straw-men fallacies.
I thought Scott did great, and wiped the floor with Bill Kristol.
But there were two small mistruths in what Scott said, that I hope he’ll correct in the future, to avoid giving ammo to any pro-war types:
1) It was the Bosnian Muslims, through their representative Alija Izetbegovic, who reneged on the 1993 Lisbon Plan after the urging of the US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann (may he continue to rot in hell), and not the Bosnian Croats.
2) The 1993 Lisbon Plan did not intend to create two entities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with one Muslim-Croat and the other Serb. That was a feature of later plans, including the Dayton Agreement that ended the war. The Lisbon Plan envisioned a number of cantons, with a setup like in Switzerland.