Yes, Juan Cole is a kind of Strange Attractor in all this. My first introduction to Cole was via a Finnish chat room called 'Kinky Bar' which at that time was full of soft-intellectual malcontents, rather than the genuinely kinky (although an engineering Professor from the Tech University was into both). So it was more Chomsky than Choke-collars. I still have RW friends from that period.

You can't be me, I'm taken