So it’s back to the depressing topic of Atlantic Monthly blogger and paid PR flak for defense contractors, Joshua Foust–something I’d rather avoid, but the scumbags won’t let me. Foust and his minions have managed the impossible–they’ve outdone themselves in vileness; who imagined such a feat was possible? Ever since I exposed Foust as a massacre-denier defending the interests of Kazakhstan’s dictator for life, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and covering for Chevron, the biggest US oil company doing business in Kazakhstan, Foust’s personal web site, Registan.net, has waged a rank smear campaign against an heroic Russian journalist, Elena Kostyuchenko.
Going after Elena Kostyuchenko is as low as it gets: She’s the only independent journalist to get a report out of Zhanaozen, where Kazakh riot police slaughtered up to 70-plus striking oil workers and locals. It was Kostyuchenko’s on-the-ground reporting, in a city cordoned off and under violent martial law in order to keep reporters like her out, that blew a hole in the regime’s official lowball death toll figure of 13-17 or so—the more “acceptable” death toll figure that Foust demanded others in the Western media abide by as well. Kostyuchenko’s eyewitnesses and sources reported a death toll closer to 100, while Kyrgyzstan’s opposition channel K-Plus reported up to 70 dead and 500 wounded, which the AFP ran on its wires.
It was when I contradicted the Kazakhstan dictator’s official death count that Foust first attacked me. So in order to protect Nazarbayev, Foust & Friends have taken on the sordid business of smearing one of Russia’s most daring, heroic independent journalists as a “rumor monger,” comparing her to a “hag” or “village bimbo” who spreads gossip and believes anything she’s told.
We’ve also learned (big hat-tip to reader Sam Knight) that Foust has good personal reasons to protect Chevron. First, recall that Foust attacked my article about the massacre by claiming that that Chevron had absolutely no connection whatsoever to Kazakhstan’s state oil company, KazMunaiGaz, whose subsidiary was behind the massacre of the striking oil workers. Foust has since backed down on his claim that Chevron is not connected with KazMunaiGaz—Chevron’s own promotional material boasts of its many multi-billion-dollar projects with KazMunaiGaz—but what Foust didn’t reveal is that one of his bosses at the American Security Project sits on the board of directors at Chevron. I’ll have more on that later in this article.
Before I get into Foust’s smear against Elena Kostyuchenko—and it’s really one of the most vile, disgusting things I’ve read in a long time, even by Foustian standards—let me first give you a little background on the reporter whom Foust & Friends smeared.
Elena Kostyuchenko is a correspondent for Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous muckraking newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper whose courage and daring can be measured in the sheer number of its journalists who have been murdered, beaten, or arrested—including one of my first and favorite sources when I started reporting in Russia in the mid-1990s, Yuri Shchekochikhin (who was probably poisoned with the same type of polonium that later was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko), and the more famous reporter and human rights crusader, Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in her apartment building entrance in 2006.
To some in the liberal intelligentsia world, Elena Kostyuchenko is considered one of the heirs to Anna Politkovskaya. A reporter who is also a human rights crusader, Kostuchenko is also openly gay in one of the most dangerous countries for out-of-the-closet homosexuals. In May of 2011, Kostyuchenko was one of the few homosexuals who marched in the Moscow gay parade—which is almost a suicide mission for Moscow’s gays—and she paid the price: Kostyuchenko was savagely beaten in the skull by fascist thugs, and hospitalized with a concussion.
Here is how the widely-publicized attack on Kostyuchenko was reported on the site Gay Russia:
A few hours before the banned Moscow Pride rally took place in Moscow, Elena Kostyuchenko, a journalist of Russian daily paper Novaya Gazeta, came out on her blog and explained while this year, she will be marching with Pride participants not as a journalist but as an open lesbian.
Kostyuchenko was then severely attacked on Manege Square while waiving a rainbow flag and trying to meet with other Pride participants.
“Yes, I understood that I could suffer. I attended previous Pride attempts as a journalist and saw what happened with the participants. Of course, it was scary and painful. But I did not expect such an explosive reaction. (..) Just today, I am out of the hospital and, I realize the power of the wave of information in the last day. I heartily thank everyone who supported me and my family in those days.”
Asked whether she feels that after this experience she became an activist, Kostyuchenko dismissed the title and said that:
“In the media I have several times been called a LGBT activist, but I am not. This would not be fair, especially in relation to these activists who have spent several years of fighting for our rights at banned demonstrations, in courts and on the Internet. I am just a correspondent of Novaya Gazeta and a lesbian. When I feel better, I will continue to pursue my job as a journalist but if there is an opportunity to publicly speak against a violation of the rights of LGBT, I will do it.”
A couple of years ago, Kostyuchenko was featured in a Guardian article about Novaya Gazeta:
Elena Kostyuchenko, aged 21, is one of the paper’s youngest reporters and recalls how Politkovskaya’s work – with her total devotion to exposing injustice – inspired her to join the paper. At the age of 16, and already working on her local paper in the provincial town of Yaroslav, not far from Moscow, Kostyuchenko read one of Politkovskaya’s articles on Chechnya: it was a moment of revelation. “I was shocked. I realised that everything I knew about this country, about what was happening, was wrong,” she says.
She moved to Moscow, enrolled as a journalism student and becameNovaya Gazeta’s youngest ever staff member, aged 17. “When Politkovskaya was killed I realised I had never told her she was my idol.” Now, she says, she praises colleagues to their face. Why? “You come to work, see your colleagues and think: ‘Who’s next?'” she says.
Elena Kostyuchenko holds a sign reading “Homophobia Kills/Stop the Pogroms” just before getting her skull bashed
This is the woman whom Foust’s stand-in on his website, registan.net, compared to a “baba” or “bimbo” in the modern slang meaning of the word. The attack on Kostyuckenko’s credibility came in a gigantic blog post by one of Foust’s pals, some creep named Michael Hancock-Parmer. I’ve never heard of this guy, but those two hyphened last names sure are impressive—much more impressive than his foreign language skills.
First, Hancock-Parmer sets up his Big Takedown by making some sort of jibe about my Russian language skills:
Mr. Ames’ own claims to authority on Russia have never, to my knowledge, derived solely from his linguistic abilities, so I’d rather not get into who knows what languages how well…
And then a couple of paragraphs later, Hancock-Parmer “proves” his own alleged Russian language skills by hilariously flubbing a simple three-word Russian aphorism:
In Russian there is an expression, perhaps not so common but one I’ve heard before – ОБС standing for Одна Баба Сказала, or “A grandmother said.” This is used to describe the spreading of rumors, whether on the street or in newspapers.
I couldn’t believe what I just read there—it was as though Foust & Friends were begging to be flayed all over again—how can you fuck up something this easy? In contemporary Russian, the word “Baba” [Баба] is a derogatory word for a woman with heavy class overtones meaning, in this context, “dumb hag,” “provincial hag,” “dumb peasant woman,” “dumb hick woman,” etc. In regular slang usage, the closest American equivalent to “Baba” would be somewhere between “broad” or “foolish girl” or “bimbo.” But in the context of framing his attack on Kostyuchenko’s reporting, using this Russian aphorism with the word “Baba” is extremely derogatory–sexist and classist–calling Kostyuchenko and her sources dumb, unreliable peasant hags.
Foust’s stand-in was supposed to rescue Foust’s shattered credibility after my article…but instead he screwed this up so badly, I almost wondered if he was setting me up for a softball smackdown. Could Michael Hancock-Parmer really be this stupid? Or was he some “evil genius” like Foust dreamed of becoming, setting me up in his “evil-genius” trap? Or did some Russian at the University of Indiana who hates him put him up to this?
Just to be sure, I double-checked it with some Russians I know, including eXiled editor Yasha Levine, who was born in Russia, and Yasha’s father, a professional translator who runs a translation business. If we were to be as forgiving of Foust & Friends as possible, then sure, there are a lot of ways you can translate the word “Baba”—it can also mean “witch” for example, in a certain context, or even “grandma” in some archaic context—but in contemporary usage, and “baba” is a word used often in conversational Russian and slang, “baba” means “bimbo”; and in this context, it means “dumb hag.”
To quote the inimitable Joshua Foust: “Classy!”
Foust’s comrade’s smear-job begins with bad slapstick, and from there it quickly devolves into the sort of rank, PR evil we’ve come to expect from Foust & Friends. He accuses Elena Kostyuchenko of the same sort of “rumor-mongering” that, for example, supporters of the pro-Kremlin regime in Chechnya used to hurl at Anna Politkovskaya before she was murdered: They used to argue that she was a rumor-monger, that she was an “advocate” rather than a reporter, and that Politkovskaya’s reporting could not be relied on since you really can’t trust victims of massacres to tell the truth. Here is the paragraph where Foust’s sleazeball pinch-hitter, Michael Hancock-Parmer, sets up this smear:
In Russian there is an expression, perhaps not so common but one I’ve heard before – ОБС standing for Одна Баба Сказала, or “A grandmother said.” This is used to describe the spreading of rumors, whether on the street or in newspapers. Rumor is important – it tells us a lot. But rumor is no more or less dependable than other sources of information – it comes with its own biases, its own spin, its own problems. The reporter that Ames is quoting saw none of the events herself. That’s a key element of this story – she is a foreign reporter asking, in many cases, incriminating and uncomfortable questions. Reading between the lines, one can see that she is having mixed results and causing more than a little discomfort. The people to whom she is speaking are unsure of her motives and nervous about the intrusion – because they rightly doubt whether this journalist actually cares about what happens to them. Journalists are not aid workers or doctors, and while it’s important to know what’s happening in the world, sending in a journalist to “find the story” will often produce more of a story than originally existed. At the risk of repeating myself, I again say: I do not doubt that horrible things happened to good people in Janaozen on December 16th. But I also know that Elena Kostiuchenko is not the best, or only, source of information for what happened that day.
If Joshua Foust’s friend is to be believed here, reporters cannot be trusted to tell audiences what happened unless they were actually primary witnesses to events–and even then, who knows. Moreover, the witnesses and sources that journalists rely on for their stories are even less trustworthy, according to this Michael Hancock guy, who is studying the Kazakh language at the University of Indiana in some program originally founded as a Defense Department language program. According to him, eyewitnesses also cannot be believed to tell you what happened in a massacre they survived because, after all, you know how bimbos are with their rumor-mongering. A journalist whose reporting relies on eyewitnesses as sources is, in the mind of this non-reporter Hancock-Parmer, merely a rumor-monger relying on other rumor-mongers; a bimbo relying on bimbos. (Note how he spells some of the foreign words like “Janaozen” differently from its usual American spelling, “Zhanaozen”—it’s an old rhetoric trick designed to establish his ethos as some sort of language-authority to readers not versed in Russian. He should first learn what the fuck “Baba” means before showing off his “Janaozen” like this.)
I’m not going say anything more about Michael Hancock-Parmer’s sleazy, vile, and (I assume unintentionally) sexist smear job against one of Russia’s most courageous reporters and gay rights/human rights activists. You can read it if you want to, but I warn you, keep a bottle of Tums and maybe some codeine cough syrup nearby, it’s so disgusting it’s like the PR industry’s equivalent of sheisse porn.
Which brings me to Chevron, and Joshua Foust. In my last piece, I wrote how surprised I was that Foust would claim something as easy to debunk as when he wrote:
“if Ames were honest he’d note that Chevron has nothing to do with KazMunaiGaz (which is wholly owned by the government of Kazakhstan), so tying the American oil company to workers employed by a Kazakh firm is actually pretty mendacious. And to repeat: dishonest.”
As I demonstrated in my response, Chevron has everything to do with KazMunaiGaz, something even Foust’s goons no longer deny. Here, just in case, is a brief run-down:
Fact #1: Tengizchevroil, which operates one of the world’s ten largest oil fields in Kazakhstan, is owned 50% by Chevron, 20% by KazMunaiGaz, and smaller shares owned by a handful of other oil firms.
Fact #2: The Caspian Sea Pipeline consortium, the multibillion-dollar oil export pipeline, is led by Chevron, and has among its partners KazMunaiGaz. See here.
Fact #3: A few weeks ago, Chevron signed a new deal bringing in KazMunaiGaz as a partner on yet another major oil field project in Karachaganak.
In my article, I asked why Foust would bother defending Chevron with a lie so easy to debunk? One thing we know, Foust will be the last to disclose his conflicts of interest, as his entire blogging career is built on corruption and undisclosed conflicts-of-interest.
Welp, guess what folks: Turns out one of Foust’s bosses at the American Security Project, former US Senator Chuck Hagel, is a director at Chevron. According to Marketwatch, Chevron has awarded Hagel a total of 4,334 stock shares in Chevron at “0” dollars per share. Chevron stock trades at $106 dollars per share, making Chevron worth nearly $460,000 to Chuck Hagel, of which he’s already cashed in a cool $149,520. At the time Hagel joined Chevron’s board in March 2010, the stock was worth about $75 per share, meaning it’s risen over 33% since then. And as I wrote, Chevron itself attributes a good part of its foreign revenues to its operations in Kazakhstan.
Not only is Foust’s boss a board member of Chevron, but Hagel also helps fund Foust’s American Security Project through another outfit Hagel serves in, the Ploughshares Fund, which gave $344,500 to Foust’s employer in 2010.
Another one of Foust’s colleagues at the American Security Project, Andrew Holland, lists Chevron among his “groups and associations” on his Linked In page. Like Foust, Andrew Holland also writes about global oil and geopolitics for the Atlantic Monthly. I don’t know if Holland put Chevron down among his “groups and associations” merely because he loves pumping gas from Chevron stations, or if it’s because he’s taken money from Chevron. Whatever the case, you can be sure that the Atlantic Monthly, whose entire business model is built on conflicts-of-interest, won’t give a damn either way.
Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ article “Failing Up Joshua Foust: Meet the ‘Evil Genius’ Massacre-Denier Who Shills For War-Profiteers” and “Glenn Greenwald of the Libertarian Cato Institute Posts His Defense of Joshua Foust…The eXiled Responds to Greenwald”. Also read the original article about the massacre in Kazakhstan that sparked this controversy, “The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed in Kazakhstan By U.S.-Supported Dictator”.
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
Click the cover & buy the book!
Read more: andrew holland, atlantic monthly, bloggers, chevron, chuck hagel, conflict-of-interest, elena kostyuchenko, joshua foust, kazakhstan, kazmunaigaz, massacre, nursultan nazarbayev, ploughshares fund, zhanaozen, Mark Ames, Media Whores, Russia
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35 Comments
Add your own1. irish_c | January 16th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
When I first started reading the exile I found it a bit full-on but the more I read from the shills, the lackeys, those that felch the oligarchy, the more disgust I feel at them and have come to the conclusion that they cannot be reasoned with, they have zero tolerance for truth, no regard for facts, trying to engage with them is a waste of time and energy sapping which is probably what they want us to do, to get bogged down in the niceties of discourse which is just a diversionary tactic. In Gaelic Ireland the worst fate that could befall someone was to have a satirical verse composed about them. The shills must be ridiculed, the lackeys, the olicarchs – satire is one of the weapons available to the masses. I’ve started a site called irishcunts.wordpress.com where I hope to document every cunt in Ireland so their cuntishness is immortalized in cyberspace. If nothing else it is therapeutic and stops me doing a Jared.
THE AEC RESPONDS: “Do you really have to call them ‘cunts’ like some limey chav? What’s wrong with the taint?”
2. GG Allin | January 16th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
This Foust guy is a fucking moron and is starting to piss me off. I wrote a rather lengthy letter to the editor of Atlantic Monthly online after the last piece asking them to fire his ass for basic incompetence and mental retardation (not in those terms, though). And that goatee. And his name, which always makes me think of legendary Krautrock band Faust, who are awesome, while Foust is not, thus diminishing Faust’s awesomeness by vague association.
Note how this young woman journalist bravely stands up to the bullies in her society, while Foust, after taking it like a bitch from bullies all through high school,emerged into “adulthood” only to be an even bigger bitch for even bigger bullies. The contrast between this woman and Foust is astonishing in terms of character.
3. G.A. | January 16th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Interestingly enough there’s an identical phrase in czech – “Jedna bába povídala” (one grandma said) which is indeed commonly used to negatively label rumours or hearsay.
I hugely appreciate the article, because where I live there’s a billion such sleazebag trolls like Foust, and it’s especially rampant in reporting from other countries. “How can you tell there’s been a massacre? Why should we believe weeping families instead of well known dic…I mean authoritarians who have their own exotic systems of governance which we can not possibly fathom? We must admit that we may perhaps never find out the truth among all the deeply biased sources so it’s best we just forget about the whole thing.”
Makes me pretty angry. I wish there was a way to just vaporise all these people. Or expose them. Either way works.
Thanks ExileD.
4. Dr. Faust and the devil's bargain | January 16th, 2012 at 3:55 pm
The corporatist toady-for-hire gets owned again. Great article.
Unfortunately, Joshua Foust has put himself in a situation where he can’t admit that he’s wrong. As your previous article demonstrated, he has no marketable talents or career aside from his willingness to be an American stooge for dictatorships, so he pretty much has to double down on his own bullshit and hope you go away.
5. Nazidethpig | January 16th, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Don’t hold back. Pol Pot has yet to be made proud.
6. Down and Out of Sài Gòn | January 16th, 2012 at 4:47 pm
“THE AEC RESPONDS” at 1: yes, o’ Almighty eXiled Censor! You speaketh the truth! We’re not living in a Guy Ritchie film. Why slag off the particular human organ that made us all possible?
There are enough proper but derogatory terms for Foust and Hancock-Parmer and their ilk in the English language. Use them, because dropping c-bombs is just lazy. I like “equivocating” and “waffling” myself, but no word is as good to describe them as good, old-fashioned, “prig“.
Elena Kostyuchenko is no prig. Anyone who’s willing to come out openly in Russia deserves respect.
7. Runninge A. Fowle | January 16th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
>>Do you really have to call them ‘cunts’
I prefer “santorum-spewer”.
Rhymes nicely with “sewer”. From whence, and to whence, etc.
8. mirroring | January 16th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Reading this just motivated me to send in another donation to your new media project…keep fighting these scum.
I mean, dear Lord, how long must we suffer from the dissembling cowardice of sycophants like Foust and this Michael Hancock-Parmer. The gall of him lecturing a brave and decent reporter like Elena Kostyuchenko on who and what constitutes a credible source. Jesus, man, she does this shit for a living, she’s damn good…works for an internationally recognized newspaper. He’s a fucking grad student in a second-tier linguistics program. Which person would you trust to get to the bottom of a story? Any story…and particularly one that requires courage and resourcefulness in a country led by a brutal and repressive dictatorship.
My God, the gall of these fuckers. And to defend the party line of a murderous thug like Nazarbaev? So that what, you still keep ties to a few scummy groups that might help your shitty academic career? Where is the conscience? Where is the decency, the humanity?
I mean, really, who takes the side of greedy thugs like Nazarbaev and soulless transnationals like Chevron against poor striking Kazakh oil workers? Since when is the word of paid liars like the PR shills in the Kazakhstan government to be taken over brave reporters like Ms. Kostyuchenko…or even the ordinary citizens of Zhanaozen?
There should be stocks and bastinado for these quisling scum. A public beating as a lesson to the others…
9. Knob Gobbler | January 16th, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Hilarious!
To counter claims by European election monitors that the Kazakh elections were not “fair and free” Foust has tweeted a link to a Chinese business group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
http://twitter.com/#!/joshuafoust/status/158981706358079488
http://en.trend.az/regions/casia/kazakhstan/1980568.html
This guy is really hunkering down.
10. Soj | January 16th, 2012 at 8:00 pm
At least Kostyuchenko had the courage to step foot in the city, unlike the keyboard “warrior” Foust. That fact, I note, is not in dispute.
11. Trevor | January 16th, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Since you guys already established Foust is some bitter little fascist dweeb, this makes perfect sense. I’ve known more of that type than I care to and they get really nasty towards women, mostly out of revenge for no chick ever touching their wiener.
12. Adam | January 16th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
The wisdom of St. Dolan is everlasting! A quick scan of Foust’s Registan.net brings up this article:
http://www.registan.net/index.php/2012/01/16/the-reverse-orientalism-of-the-arab-spring/
Here Sarah Kendzior does a good job marking her territory in typical IR fashion – just the way Dolan documents in his amazing essay right here:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6903&IBLOCK_ID=35
Thank you John Dolan!
13. E | January 16th, 2012 at 8:46 pm
The Armchair types always condemn those who are on the ground and reporting against their interest. They are The Atlantic, you are Exiled. You are better, but they are still The Atlantic so kudos on your tenacity. You will win this.
I did some research on Registan.net and though it may appear to be Foust’s own site, it has been owned since 2/24/2004 by Nathan Hamm. From 2000 until 2001 it was owned by a place called Namezero which apparently held domain names during the Dot Com boom.
On 9/1/2006 Nathan Hamm’s name first appears in a whois cache as the owner when he lived in Seattle and that was where the registration was held until 2/24/2008 When Hamm seemed to have moved to Kansas City. Then in 10/29/2008 the registration remains under Hamm but the address moves to Leavenworth with the same phone number as before.
Then for a real knee-slapper on 3/5/2011 the address was changed to:
Registrant:
Nathan Hamm
4624 Legacy Park Drive
Tampa, Federated States of Micronesia 33611
United States
Yep, Federated States of Micronesia. Tampa. USA. I don’t get it but it is still that address today with the technical contact still in Leavenworth.
So you are “right” in saying it is his personal website but not entirely accurate.
If you ever need someone to dig and dig deep I am your man and I work pro-bono for the right cause.
14. feeble mind | January 16th, 2012 at 8:50 pm
@2: Let’s not forget the obvious Faust here, the one who made a pact with the devil and terrorized the poor.
15. Woofy | January 16th, 2012 at 9:36 pm
OH GREAT MONITOR!!! You should put this link up on your “what you should know”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/economic-regime-change-can-stop-iran-commentary-by-gerecht-and-dubowitz.html
16. Jie Ke | January 16th, 2012 at 11:07 pm
This Foust guy is a fucking moron and is starting to piss me off.
Seconded.
17. John Figler | January 17th, 2012 at 12:26 am
Jesus Mark, the gal is hot and I’ll bang her anyday too, and she’s daring and the rest… but being lesbo you won’t get her laid by pretending you buy her stuff.
Use vodka, raise reasonable doubts.
18. Zhu Bajie | January 17th, 2012 at 4:32 am
For what it’s worth, the Ural-Altaic Studies Program, at Indiana University – Bloomington, used to be the center of organized crime in Bloomington! They supplied frat parties, etc., with whores.
19. Michael | January 17th, 2012 at 5:18 am
@13
Well, the registan’s nathan hamm has a profile on http://eui.academia.edu/NathanHamm
where he states he’s a member of the faculty of the “european university institute”:thing is he doesn’t show up anywhere on their site, not among the staff or alumni…me thinks he did a summer course there and claims to be part of the faculty…Personal note:I’m a political sciences student based in Italy and can tell you that while this european university institute does indeed exist and is mostly funded by EU public funds, it’s known to be a place where euro-politicians/bureaucrats park friends and family as staff, has low standards and pretty much useless.
For those who read italian see article from this magazine:http://www.loccidentale.it/node/103573
20. Dtd | January 17th, 2012 at 6:57 am
@7
New insult! Thanks dude.
21. Alice Worst | January 17th, 2012 at 10:07 am
http://mypage.iu.edu/~miflhanc/about.shtml
Michael Hancock-Parmer is a PhD student at IU. Readers here might wanna look for his faculty advisor to let them know that they have fascist shills representing their university in public places, and/or notify the university newspaper, local media, etc. At least some of the Slavic, East Euro and Central Asian Studies department and associated programs will not appreciate such associations.
@”My God, the gall of these fuckers. And to defend the party line of a murderous thug like Nazarbaev? So that what, you still keep ties to a few scummy groups that might help your shitty academic career? Where is the conscience? Where is the decency, the humanity?”
Taking the time to perform actual academic research, or participate in society in a non-malevolent capacity is too much time and effort for these shitheels. Unfortunately a lot of the old school academics who are ‘impolite’ enough to call them out for being entitled sociopaths are retiring or being forced out by new American universities working to eliminate tenure. The ship is sinking fast and hard in US education, from K-12 through to PhD programs.
Baby Boomers destroyed the system and the destroyed system created kids like this. Decency means nothing to them, they are perverse stoics who insulate themselves from reality by following a personal moral code built around me-me-me and fueled by spite. Any humanity is extinguished by some lingering post-memory of spite that aims at keeping former USSR nations under the heel of dictators as punishment for being red during the half-forgotten Cold War. See: Russians/Kazakhs/Uzbeks need to be led by a dictator of some kind. Slavs/Central Asians crave it.
These cynical Gen Y shits would rather “rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven” by exploiting academic connections to suck off oligarchs for pocket change. Their basic cost-benefit critical thinking skills are broken by a need for instant gratification and post-modern/late-liberal education in America that has taught them that ‘truth’ is relative so nothing that they say or repeat is necessarily false, just a different shade of real. They honestly think that this shit is clever and defensible, and academia is too busy killing itself to bother correcting them.
22. atlas_lied | January 17th, 2012 at 10:35 am
Just wait until Joshua Foust starts trolling on this site. He has no talent, and his editorials are prosaic and transparently tailored to his suitors’ perspectives, but that won’t stop him.
For a while, I got Foust and the Russophobe confused. They’re both the same ill-informed “pundits” who resort to personal attacks to overcome their lack of knowledge or logic.
23. Bradford C. | January 17th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
some animals are only good for a #ing
24. Miguel | January 17th, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Well it is the behaviour of a (shitty) super villain.
25. Mason C | January 17th, 2012 at 1:50 pm
Between the continuation with Foust and Yves Smith’s gutting of Megan Carpentier, the eXileD’s new project looks even better. And thanks to E for #13. Nice.
After some years learning the hard way about the American Left’s insider games, I can’t wait for these outings to get rolling. Hell, we know what the fascist right wants, but the careerist leftie fucks who enable mediocrity and retreat have long been held harmless.
Fair Warning: I should pay attention to the signs here that read “ERROR HAS NO RIGHTS”
26. Marcus McSpartacus | January 17th, 2012 at 1:55 pm
If there’s something Ames
In your neighborhood,
Who ya gonna call?
MICKY HANDCOCK-PALMER.
AED Comments: Go back to NMS troll school; you’re an embarrassment to your troll masters.
27. Caveat Emptor | January 18th, 2012 at 5:42 am
Great article. Thanks for your service.
Elena Kostyuchenko … ever notice
how some russians make the best Americans.
What happened to this place?
28. Dimitri Ratz | January 18th, 2012 at 11:45 am
At California where I work we have “protected characteristics”. People are mandated to remove birthday cards from their cubicals that are readily found at regular stores, because being over 40 years is a protected characteristic. So even thou the person who got the card has it inside their cubicle, and everyone in the office, especially the older generation likes it, it’s an actual crime (and in addtion to termination you are liable at civil court as an individual), all because you left a birthday card at your desk that is related to the protected characteristics “40 years old+” and even if found offensive by a snot nosed 22 year old. The comments on Elena seem to be an extention of this policy spilling over onto journalism, where common sense is debunked, interviewing witnesses questioned as a process, and people using whatever leavers of power or outlet they have to intimidate Elena who just stands up for her personal rights to exist as she is without being subject to violence, although she’s not having much success with that. She’s another Iraqi girl from his class… However, you are wrong Ames to assosiate bulling in his earlier years to his present conduct even if he himself was referencing it. Nor is lack of sex an underlining problem which was suggested. This type
of conduct is most often rooted at lack of a father figure, and cannot be redemied by a trip to Nevada. There is a lack of deeper understanding for existance, that most of us take for granted as a feel good mood. People who lack it seek out groups, often times attracting like minded individuals as is common practice with other fields, but this leads to being stuck, almost in an illusion that keeps elusive that missing part in one’s life, because lacking approval and joy we take for granted they try to reconstruct the whole world, and assign the daunting task of managing it all when it is so much easier to let go. Without making lightis of one’sthe situation it is… very muchimportant like a raccoon that grabs a shiny object in a hole only to chew of it’s second hand and left worse for it.
29. mirroring | January 18th, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Good rebuttal to that disgusting Hancock-Parmer article…and to the repugnant Foust in general…although she is far too polite in her treatment of these creeps:
httttp://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e54fce13cf883401676023ced9970b
30. Catherine Fitzpatrick | January 19th, 2012 at 10:22 am
The link to my rebuttal of Hancock-Parmer:
and more about how Foust and the Registanis worked to get me fired from my job:
31. A-Lex | January 20th, 2012 at 12:20 am
In fact, Mr. Hand-Cock-Warmer’s lameness goes even deeper than misinterpreting the word “baba”. The original Russian expression is not ОБС, but ББС, or BBC – originally devised as a parody name after the British news network – which stands for “One Hag Told Another” (Баба бабе сказала).
32. Robert Ingersoll | January 20th, 2012 at 7:10 pm
After reading through this post and the subsequent comments, I am appalled that there exists a commentard who would pretend to profess moral outrage over the lack of dialogue here about the massacre in Kazakhstan, then proceed to write 10 paragraphs about the sufferings of poor Michael Hancock-Parmer–I mean, you even made fun of his name! Now while it’s true that Ames’ original pieces were all about the massacre, whereas Foust and Hancock-Parmer spent all their energies trying to debunk accounts of the massacre written by Ames and by Russian investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, nevertheless, I, morally-outraged-commentard, am outraged over the lack of concern over the massacre victims, and I express my outrage by way of concern for poor poor Michael Hancock-Parmer.
By the way, this comment totally wasn’t written by Michael Hancock-Parmer.
Oh, and we’re totally not planning to attack Ames over his satirical work at The eXile, totally not making us about the 10,000th dumbfucks who will go down this road. Totally.
33. Yam Digger | January 22nd, 2012 at 2:08 am
It seems that Mr. Foust has a bad case of Foot-in-Mouth disease.
34. Cum | January 22nd, 2012 at 2:27 pm
@28: maybe a lack of a father figure plays a role in why faust acts a certain way but that also sounds like Freudian speculative storytelling and we have at least an actual self reported history of bullying victimization and violent revenge fantasies that offers far more insight into Faust’s behavior than attachment issues.
And suggesting that Faust doesn’t get laid enough is a cheap shot but you can’t tell me that getting regular sex won’t improve health and disposition :p
And I would encouage commenters who think Faust’s conduct retroactively justifies his school victimization to pick up a copy of Going Postal. Bullying begets bullying.
35. Odna Babka | March 9th, 2012 at 8:08 pm
ОБС stands for Одна Бабка (or Бабушка) сказала. Not Баба.
Бабка or Бабшука – means a grandmother.
This refers to grannies who sit on a bench near their houses and talking rumours all day long.
Баба is a bimbo but this word never belonged to ОБС.
ДА? ПРАВДА-ЛИ МУДАК-БЛЯ? СМОТРИ ЗДЕСЬ
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