Well I'll take your advice about the beard. π
In that photo I actually have one still, but it's trimmed very short.
The memoir is already published, and this book is it. The e-book is already available and the paperback should be available by the end of next week. That's what's kept me away from Peakd for so long: I've been busy writing.
As for valued-customer, your teacher of American history, 'take his words with a grain of salt' (do you know that expression?). He sees conspiracies lurking in every corner, and he gets so busy telling everyone to "question everything" that he forgets to question the ones who pose the questions (for they too have an agenda). He views the world as a philosophical exercise to be debated over Starbucks frappuccinos from comfortable chairs in coffee shops across the world, and builds his view of the world not on what is right or wrong but on what makes him seem the edgiest, and this makes him virtually indistinguishable from the Leninist and Stalinist collegiates who were so prolific in America in the '30's and '40's. I've personally seen him try to answer me with a meme that quoted demonstrably false statements made by a Polish eugenicist who supported Hitler, and then after having said statements debunked (by me, with fourteen citations of historically verified examples), he attempted to rehash the same meme a year later as if it was fact.
Personally, I consider him a quack who has no independent views of his own except "if majority say sky am blue, me say it am green."
Dear Rob,
I think it will be difficult for me to read your memoir because I am awkward at reading English! I hope your publication is a success!π
Yeah, All living things need salt to survive, but if you eat too much, you will die!π
Do you think he is a leftist?π³
Do you think he's a sophist into conspiracy theories?
I think he's a frontier man! I thought he was a genius because he used English sentences that even East Asians like me could understand!π
No, he has as little tolerance for leftists as I do. I think he's basically what I described above: a man so accustomed to being lied to by the majority, that he presupposes everything he hears is a lie, even if the evidence says it's true. As I said, if the mainstream (be it Left or Right) told him "water is wet," he'd insist "no, it's dry." I'm aware that the establishment is fully capable of spinning lies but when the establishment narrative and my own five senses agree, I go with my senses while he insists "no, your senses lie to you."
As to his sentence structure, I'll admit there is something to be said for the ability to make oneself understood. π
Dear Rob!
I have a hard time understanding the nuances of your English!π
I felt more familiar with @valued-customer's political and diplomatic English than yours!π
I am more likely to be found in ditches with shovel in hand than coffee shops, and this incapacity to grasp that such earthen reality is potential underlies your inability to perceive, or even conceive, that such inquisition of particulars as has informed my perspective is possible. Your cognitive dissonance is well bulwarked by simply dismissing such fundament as contrarian.
It is rather droll to be relegated to such company as would surely lynch me on sight as Stalinists. Thanks for the hearty belly laugh.
This is the most laughable attempt to make an acid-trip sound philosophical that I've ever seen. "Inquisition of particulars?" You've never "inquired" about a single thing. You unquestioningly believe whatever is put forth by your own echo-chamber, and when confronted with first-hand testimony that refutes it you ignore it. Fact. In the entire sad history that I have spent wasting my time attempting to educate you, you have routinely asserted that your "knowledge" gained from conspiracy theorist websites was more accurate than my own first-hand experience (and that of some 13 million others." I've encountered people who believe what they're told to believe rather than what they see, but you're the first who has tried to parade that tendency as some form of profundity.
You do make an amusing patsy though. Every time I want to show how ignorant the average Conspiracy theorist is, all I have to do is screen cap a conversation where you've tried to argue with an eyewitness to genocide saying you know better than they do what is happening in their own country and that the genocide they speak of is not happening. You remind me of a MAS*H episode where Radar O'Reilly calls in to I-Corps to report the 4077th is being shelled and an officer who clearly has never worn BDU's in his life puts down his cup of tea and says "impossible. My latest intelligence report says there are no enemy units in your area. You are not being shelled, young man." And the best part is that while doing this, you unabashedly and unashamedly accuse me of "cognitive dissonance." Borrow a dictionary from someone who lives in a state where books aren't outlawed and look up what that phrase means, and then reflect on your own tendency that I just described (provided self-reflection is even within your capabilities).
I used to spend a lot of time responding to your posts and trying to show, from my own eyewitness accounts, that what you've been told to believe is in fact false. When it got to the point that your own blog was openly and unabashedly echoing demonstrable falsehoods that originated from the same monsters who are responsible for the murder of 174 of my students, that's when it clicked: "this guy's not just uninformed. He knows what is being done by the Russians he cheerleads for and he supports it."
Oh and I didn't "characterize" you as a God-damned thing. You're a Stalinist. Period. Your blog is a montage of Stalinic talking points, from the "Nazis in Ukraine" myth he invented in 1939 to the "Russia must save the world from Western Decadence" refrain that he used to keep morale up in the bread-lines, to your laughable audacity in putting "I think kindness is overrated" into your signature line while you habitually cheer for the ongoing genocide of Ukrainians and frame the Ukrainians themselves as "warmongers" for daring to fight back, and then rave for days when your government dares extend a helping hand to refugees who have faced ACTUAL hardship (a concept that a parlor-raised pipsqueak such as yourself can scarcely fathom).
You hate truth. But what's more damning is that you are a knowing, willful and frequent cheerleader for mass murder.