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oscopelabs · 4 years ago

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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

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surveys-at-your-service · 3 years ago

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Survey #479

“war sends our sons to slaughter / another failed attack; there is no turning back”

Have you ever boycotted something? Yes: Chick-fil-A. Homophobic, transphobic pieces of shit. Has anyone ever borrowed something from you, and not returned it? Yes, a video game when I was little. I was so mad, lol. Do you vent a lot on social media? No. I don't want people to get annoyed with me. What was your first bill you started paying on your own? I haven't been responsible for any bills yet. What is your favorite charitable cause to donate to or volunteer for? I can't/don't do either really, but if I could, I'd probably donate to uhhhh... suicide prevention organizations. As for volunteering, definitely something with animals. Have you ever dated someone who wasn’t at all your usual type? No. What is something you have no patience for? Waiting at the doctor's office. Have you ever received a misdiagnosis? Yes. What’s that you’re listening to? I'm watching Gab play The Evil Within 2. What kind of relationship do you have with the last person you kissed? We're a couple. What is your biggest accomplishment in life? Still being alive. What is one thing that you really wish you could understand, but don’t? Political stuff. Economics. Have you ever been tutored or tutored someone yourself? I had an Algebra tutor the last time I was in college, and I had to strangle an anxiety attack down because I wasn't understanding the material AT ALL and felt so dumb and annoying. I never did it again. What was the last thing you said out loud (singing doesn’t count)? "It's really embarrassing," to Mom. It really is fucking humiliating that my ankles are swollen from walking/standing more and pushing my desk chair back against the resistance of the carpet. That's pathetic. I'm trying to focus on the fact it's good my body is even reacting to moving more, though. Is everything you have on actually yours? Yep. Do you ever just randomly drive around when you’re upset about something? I don't drive, but if I did, that would NOT be my method of de-stressing. What was the last act of creativity you displayed? Writing an RP post. What’s your favorite department in Wal-Mart? Uh, I guess where you can go see the plants and flowers. Do you find kite flying boring? I LOVED it as a kid. I'd still probably find it kinda fun. Do you have any interest in visiting Japan? Yes, but it's not a massive interest. I've heard the humidity can kill a bitch, and I am NOT into that. Have you ever run a cash register? Yes. I sucked. Have you ever worked as a server? No. Have you ever done the Bratz challenge on YouTube? No, but I saw James Charles do it and it was v unnerving, holy shit. Would you rather paint or carve a pumpkin? Carve. What was your worst experience in high school? My depression as a whole. How much did your senior prom dress cost you? I don't remember. Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship? Three, if you include my current one. Which part of your body is the most muscular? Uh, nothing? What is the first site you check when you get online, generally? KM. Are you good at creative writing assignments? That's my forte. In elementary school, I actually won a I think county-wide creative writing short story assignment. Not to brag, but I've always been very proud of that, ha ha. Or would you rather just do an informative essay? That's easy for me too, but I prefer writing creatively. Are you more attracted to the badasses, or the goody-goody types? Definitely the goody-goodies. The "bad guys" have never appealed to me romantically. Do you raise your hand or participate in class? I did if I really wanted to ask something or was confident in an answer. What is something BIG you want to do with your life? Make a difference, somehow. What do you think of people who own wild animals? Do NOT just casually take in animals from the wild. That's selfish and just generally disgusting. If you're going to keep an animal generally described as wild and undomesticated, you'd better have a license and deserve that license. Know what you're doing and be certain that keeping the animal in captivity is in the animal's best interest for its unique case. Are you good at explaining things, in general? NOOOOOOOOO, I suck at that. Do you like visiting the mall? Why or why not? Not our mall, no. Its stores suck/are extremely limited, and SO much crime has happened there. Do you like window shopping? Why or why not? YESSSSSSS, mostly on Morph Market, a mostly reptile selling hub online. You can browse TONS of breeders and literally thousands of reptiles, especially ball pythons. They even have a tarantula section I like to look at sometimes. If you lost your job/home/etc., who would likely help you? If I'm losing my home, I'm assuming my mom is gone, so my dad. Why did you first kiss the last person you kissed? We were a couple and I felt like I was supposed to. At that time I didn't see him romantically, but I desperately wanted to. Funny how we're back together and I've no reservations against kissing him now. Feelings change, for sure. Plans for tonight? Girt and I will probably play some WoW Classic together. We've started playing that together, and it's lots of fun with him. :') Has anyone seen you kiss the last person you kissed? Actually, no. Have you ever been kissed in a car? Yeah. Do you think anyone has feelings for you? I know Girt does. Is there anyone in your life that knows right away something’s wrong with you? My mom. Who last made you smile? Girt, 'cuz he's a sweetheart. Where is your mother? She's in bed in her room. She feels like shit. Like, you would think she WASN'T vaccinated, though her long-time doctor has said she'd probably be dead without it while having Covid. Would you rather look at clouds or stars? Stars. Think about your biggest mistake, would you go back and change it? I absolutely would. Are you dating the person you last kissed? Yeup. What is the most immature item you own and actually use? Um. Idk. Do you always take a shower after you have sex? I... didn't know people did this? Like I know women are advised to pee after sex, but full-on showering? No. Do you like chocolate popsicles? Oh hell yeah. Are your parents proud of you? They claim to be. I don't see how. Are you interested in the ocean? Yeah; it's inarguably so fascinating. Hot dogs or hamburgers? I prefer burgers. Have you ever been to a Chinatown in any of the cities you’ve been to? No. Have you ever been to couple’s counseling? No. Do you have any dietary restrictions? No. Have you ever turned down a job offer? No. What’s the largest animal you’ve ever had as a pet? A dog named Cali that was a boxer mix. Do you ever pray, even if you don't believe in God? What exactly is the point if you don't believe in God...? Anyway, I don't. Have you ever been to Mexico? No. Have you ever gotten stuck in quicksand before? No. What's the shortest or longest length you've ever had your hair grow? To around the small of my back. The last nest you saw - was it a bird nest or a hornet's nest? I think a bird's? Do you enjoy Jeff Dunham? I don't know if I'd like him as a person, but I do think he's a funny comedian. Who is your favorite character from Frozen? I was never into the movies. I do think Elsa is kinda cool (no pun intended, lol), though. I like that she has her flaws. Did you finish high school? If not, do you plan on doing so? I did. Have you been in a simulator that mimicked a submarine or rollercoaster? A rollercoaster, yes. How often do you go out to eat instead of cooking for yourself? Mom and I try to avoid fast food for our health. We do a pretty good job at it, but sometimes for convenience's sake, we do eat it. What is the largest family of siblings that you know of? This is probably gonna come across as very judgmental, but... it really bothers me. I don't know how many kids she has now, but one of the dance moms from the studio has SO many children; I've completely lost count. Now if you want that many kids and can provide for them, that's cool. But that's not the case. She uses the "if God wants me to have a baby, then it will happen" mentality, and I'm just like... um, no hunny. Poor choices are leading to kids you're not adequately providing for. She uses no methods of protection and literally has twins whose room is a fucking closet. Ugh it just really bothers me. What foreign languages were offered to you at school? A whole lot. Only Spanish and I believe French were offered as in-school courses, but there were lots of online classes. If you were required to take a course right now, what would you choose? Photography. Team Biden or Team Trump? Over my dead body would I have voted for Trump. My vote went with Biden. What is an animal native to your country that may not exist in others? Bison are factually exclusive to North America. Note that bison and buffalo are different. What are some of your favorite autumn activities? Taking pictures of fall scenery. <3 What are some of your favorite winter activities? Going out in the snow. :') Especially with a camera. Do you eat a shit-ton the week before your period? uuugggghhHHHHHH yes Wendy's, McDonalds, or Burger King? Wendy's. What's the weirdest question you've ever asked Alexa? I've never asked Alexa anything. Do you prefer your apple cider to be warm or cold? I've actually never had it. Do you prefer your coffee hot or iced? Y'all know the story of me and coffee. Can you sing the alphabet backwards? I can't. Have you ever sent flowers or chocolates to yourself before? Ha ha, no. Is there any meat that you won't eat? Yeah, fish and ANYTHING that comes from a wild animal. Does your cat use anything other than it's scratching post as a scratcher? When we got him a scratcher WITH CATNIP, the lil butthead ignored it. -_- He scratches the carpet instead. Did you go through a vampire craze before? Are you still going through it? Nah. Have you ever forged your parents' signature on a poor test paper, etc? No. Has a bird ever pooped on you before? Omg, no. I'd die. Have you ever been sprayed by a skunk before? No. Are black jellybeans delicious or disgusting? I HATE them. Have you ever rolled down a grassy hill before? I have! I miss that.

#survey #surveys #random questions #lyrics: ''black rain'' by ozzy osbourne

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hello-delicious-tea · 9 months ago

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I also want to talk about the economy. Are you frustrated by high interest rates and high rents and high food costs? ME TOO. Does it make sense to look at the guy in office during the time this is happening and blame it on him? Sure does!

But actually that’s not how it works. Economies are huge great creaky beasts. Each president and legislature plays the hand selected by their predecessor. Obama’s first four years were notably awful because of what Bush had set up. Things were looking better by the time 2016 rolled around, but we all blamed Obama for the recession and the shit we went through. Trump’s economy looked good up till the end because he was playing what Obama had set up for him, but we could already see it going downhill by the end. Biden’s economy feels like crap because Trump set it up for him. He’s done amazing work to combat the tax breaks and trade wars and other bullshit that set us up for this even BEFORE the pandemic screwed everything up further. As a nation, we keep looking where we’re at now without tracing the situation back to where it started, so every time we start seeing improvement ahead, we vote in someone who is going to be “different” - who screws it all up again.

So if your personal economic situation sucks, please for the love of eating and occasional small treats vote this fall—and not for Trump. I shudder to think what kind of economic cesspool we’ll be in after another four years of him.

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/743255237060689920/the-thing-that-confuses-me-about-the-dont-vote

The “don’t vote” left’s point is basically that, if Biden gets a second term, it’ll basically signal that “They’ll vote for us as long as we’re not Republicans, why don’t we do some REAL fucked up shit, if we can get away with it?” It takes the power out of the people’s hands and places it firmly in the party’s.

I can’t completely disagree with that, my caveat is that there’s no real alternative system or party in place, because top-down change is ineffective; a third party president has to contend with a two party congress.

Except no. This whole "Biden just wants to do as much fucked up shit as possible while not being a Republican, and if you give him a second term he'll do more fucked up shit deliberately to spite you" mindset is only possible as an interpretation if you a) deliberately and comprehensively ignore everything he has done to date, and b) you approach the situation with the maximum bad faith possible. Not to mention, the ultimate outcome of this Big Important Teaching Biden A Lesson is that Trump gets back into power and makes everything orders of magnitude worse, because he does in fact want to deliberately do evil shit to everyone and says so at every opportunity. There is not some magical happy alternative that springs into existence by not voting. If you choose this as a year to Teach Biden A Lesson, you are enabling Trump. Trump will be much, much worse. If you don't care about that, I still do not care what your Great Ideology is. You are not helping anyone and you are directly and irreversibly hurting everyone.

I made a post a few days ago wherein I mentioned that I want to assess Biden fairly, taking into account both strengths and weaknesses, but the rampant bad-faith, lying, misreading, misrepresentation, and open sabotage of him (especially by the online left; the GOP sometimes only wishes they were as good at turning Biden's voter pool against him) makes it really difficult to do that. My frustration with those people makes me just want to go "BIDEN IS GREAT THE END." I know he is a flawed old man (though by literally every account of a career spent in public service, he really does care about making the world a better place and any remotely good faith reading of his accomplishments thus far can see that). It is also very likely that he goes MORE left in a second term because he won't have to face the electorate again, he has always gone more left when pushed before, and he's not actually the scheming genocidal mastermind that leftist social media paints him as. Shocking, I know.

I know there are things in the world we don't like and don't want and want to stop, and therefore we blame our own president for not making it stop. But I have zero, no, none, absolutely none whatsoever sympathy for this pseudo-populist "WE NEED TO TEACH BIDEN A LESSON BY ELECTING TRUMP AGAIN, I AM VERY MORAL MUCH ACTIVIST" mindset. There's this funny thing about America wherein it is still (for now) a democracy. If Biden wins a second term, he can't run again. I would take literally anything these people said more seriously if they focused on developing their dream progressive successor for 2028 (and also figured out how to get that person elected and in a place to make real change) rather than cynically sabotaging Biden in the most consequential election year, again, of our lifetimes. If you don't like him now, find a way to make his successor a better option. Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY. I still don't know how many times I'm going to have to say that, but yeah.

#us politics #economics #I know this is an oversimplification but think of it this way #you write a policy debate a policy vote on a policy and if you’re lucky #it gets passed #with hopefully only minor changes #and then you wait till tax season for it to take effect #and then you wait till the end of July when most of the procrastinating and delaying on paying taxes ends #and the business impacts as a result of the tax thing #start getting put in place after that #so it’s a good two years before impacts start being felt #and probably four before we can track trends clearly

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things2mustdo · 4 years ago

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We are all too familiar with the SJWs’ “muh feelings” pose. We are also familiar with the Leftists’ manipulative stance, be it through their sanctimonious bullying, guilt-tripping, appeals to a pseudo-consensus, veiled threats, or constant emotional blackmailing. The maelstrom of emotions the Left plays with makes tempting to withdraw emotionally. We might be led to think that the higher good lies in “cold, hard facts” alone. But if we do so, we easily forget that cold facts do not prompt for any action, and if we merely describe while trying to get emotionally disconnected, we cut ourselves off the game.

Passions are part of the game

When the infamous Karl Marx wrote that modern capitalism “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation,” he had a point. The bourgeois world of classic modernity is emotionally lacking, and both the bohemian artistry and Communist radical politics stepped up to fulfill the void. This historical point is still relevant today. Conservatives fail to make stands because they are much more passionate about their personal interest than about defending anything they pretend to stand for. SJWs, on the other hand, went very far into shrieking and bullying because they are usually passionate for their points. Different motivations lead to different outcomes. And a strong motivation, not to say a deep or passionate commitment, greatly helps to build a strong character.

The far-left was able to pick up people’s passions because the bourgeois would not, and perhaps could not, do that. The bourgeois idea of progress was about people becoming farm animals, individuals reduced to the status of producers and consumers in a world where nothing really new or interesting could appear anymore. In such a world, there is no need for passions and no need for politics, isn’t it? Well, the individuals would not let themselves get boiled down to the status of mere economical agents, and many preferred embracing some ridiculous strand of new-age spirituality, worthless artistry or even becoming Communists than living through the bourgeois-conservative nothingness..

Rejecting the passions and emotions, or at the very least trying to put them aside as to ignore them, made men weak and unable to take a stance. It has also made women unhinged, shameless, and willing to do anything for short-term pleasure, as no men were able to give them a proper sense of boundaries. Plus, passions being powerful motivators, the far-left mastery when it comes to stirring some made it tremendously powerful as well.

We must face passions, not as an annoyance, but as a resource that has to be mastered. This is true for ourselves and others. First, when we are aware of our emotional states without being directly prompted (“triggered”) by them, we gain the ability to choose consciously what we do and want to do, and can follow our own intuitions instead of getting framed by an alien narrative. Second, when we are also aware of others’ emotional states, we can steer them in a specific direction.

The latter is especially true for women: today, they follow fashions and MSM approval, when not following their own sluttiness and attention-whoring… but if men were able to reward, shame, and inspire proper passions in them, they would follow us instead. If we want this to happen, we have to take over the empire of passions and stir up some emotions in the public’s hearts, be it through discourse, artwork, or daily conversations. Here are three emotions I think we should be keen to stir.

1. Empathy

According to Dr. Neel Burton,

Empathy can be defined as a person’s ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. It involves, first, seeing someone else’s situation from his perspective, and, second, sharing his emotions, including, if any, his distress. (Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.21, p.153)

As empathy fits well with maternal instinct and motivates nurturing tendencies, women are naturally prone to it. Up until a very recent time, they took care of babies and small children, participated to local charities, worked in shelters for the homeless or went through menial but important tasks as nurses. They did so because their natural empathy motivated them to act this way.

By contrast, a striking feature of feminism is that it destroys womanly empathy and nurturing tendencies. From a feminist point of view, men are enemies or at the very least potential oppressors and children are a burden. Feminism reverses the empathy, turns it into defiance or even hatred. Worse: after women have lost their ability to feel positively towards the men they should at least respect, cultural Marxism stirs their natural empathy towards “minority” identities. Thus we see grrls caring about thugs, invaders, or weirdos, who are all positively portrayed in the media, more than they care about what should be their community.

The lack of empathy is also a problem among white men. Though black men often exert violence against each other, the majority of them always bonds when it comes to attacking the depleted white majority. The same goes for any community out there: they empathize with each other more than they would ever empathize with us. We, white men, are the only ones who do the exact opposite by being hypercritical against each other when we should actually be supportive and look at the positive rather than the negative.

There should be a lot more empathy towards us than there currently is. Others should be more sensitive to our plight, suffer when we suffer, or at least feel compelled to suffer when we do. We are the proximate [prochain?], not the Big Other. We, too, should have more empathy among ourselves: nice guys, for example, should not be considered as “jerks” or “bastards,” as say some red-pilled guys who seem to have internalized a negative framing, but as misled victims who proved some nobility by trying to conciliate “respect” for women with the healthy desire to get a deeper relationship. Along the same lines, the working- or middle-class average Joe who got disenfranchised should be painted on a positive and humane light so that wealthy liberals cannot ignore or merely sneer at him.

2. Hope

Here is an emotion the Left has really abused from. Remember 2007-8, when the first “black” president was supposed to end the racial tensions in the US as well as the neocon foreign wars? Democrat activists at that time wrote without batting an eyelid about their hope for a world without losers, for an outcome where everyone would win. Then, the racial tensions have never been so high, the white majority is more dispossessed than ever, and the same liberals who were trumpeting about a world without losers have no shame calling us losers—from their choices and politics. Hope has been abused from, and we have to take it back. In fact, we have already started to.

Hope can be defined as the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. It is the anticipation of something desired… To hope for something is to desire that thing, and to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the probability of it happening, though less than 1, is greater than 0. (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.14, p.103)

Trump is a wild card who comes with no guarantee, for sure. He still gives us something no Obama could ever give us—hope. The Alt-Right, manosphere, and the whole flourishing of high-quality dissenting intellectual efforts give us hope as well. Someone wrote that “the Alt-Right represents the first new philosophical competitor to liberalism, broadly defined, since the fall of Communism.” Someone else, here on ROK, noticed that more and more women were fed up with misandric grievance-mongering and longed to become mothers. These trends are more than interesting: they seem to point towards a better future that we still have to conquer.

On the other side, the liberal status quo and Hillary in particular mean pure hopelessness. If Hillary gets elected, we will have even less jobs, anti-white and anti-male organized groups will attack even more, the wealthy globalists will get fatter at our expense, and so on. Interestingly, liberals today use arguments of a conservative kind: when they shriek something as “the 5 last US presidents tell you not to vote for Trump” or “the Alt-Right and deplorables are un-American,” they look more like McCarthyists than hippies. They are the establishment clinging to the status quo and worsening. We are the embodiment of hope for a positive change.

3. Love

While hope should be spread among any decent people and is pretty straightforward once we agree on the intrinsic value of its object, love appears a bit trickier. In a relationship, whoever loves the other most is dominated whereas who loves less has more room to take action. If a man falls in love, he falls in the sense that he gets dumbed down, pedestalizes the girl, who in turn will get bored and look for a more challenging partner. Thus, seduction must be used to stir love in women: they must love us as well as their children. Both as a mistress and a mother, both as sexual and nurturing, a woman exerts love.

In men, love must be exerted in a more distilled and thoughtful form: when we protect our dear ones, toil for them, care about their interests, these efforts are an expression of love as well—although this form of love must be more distant as to allow ampler room for action. In any case, the feminine element must love the most and more directly.

It should be added that masculine and feminine can be conceived, not only as absolute, but also as relative terms. Esotericists consider that we are all “feminine” when considered under a higher point of view: the most fierce, courageous and risk-taking warrior remains “feminine” relatively to a genuine spiritual authority, and any human is “feminine” relatively to God as the ultimate Father. The Bible compares the good ones to a bride that shall get married to God (Revelation, 19). Hinduism recommends bhakti or devotion, i.e. religious love, to those belonging to the warrior caste, whereas the spiritual authority is more “masculine” as it enjoys a higher and more direct knowledge of God. These considerations might seem a bit far-fetched, but they were already highly relevant before the tiniest stint of modern degeneracy was born. Just remember that being in love is acceptable for a man as long as it never equates to pedestalizing a woman.

Conclusion

Passions and emotions matter. If we set them aside as irrelevant, someone else will push our emotional buttons—and the girls’—and spin us in no time. The philosopher René Descartes wrote that “all the good and the bad in this life depend from the passions” and that we had better be able to use them wisely. Ironically, the word “Cartesian” now denotes a logical, rationalistic, supernatural-denying mindset. This is accurate for the young Descartes, who was among the top scientists of his time, but tosses aside an important twist: the philosopher eventually lost his only daughter, Francine, and the sadness he felt while mourning her made him aware of the power of emotions. Yet, instead of being dominated by said emotions, Descartes strove to gain cogency about them, and he wrote a very interesting little treatise to expand a whole theory of the “passions of the soul.”

Our case is the same. Most if not all of us have been blue-pilled since infancy. Cultural Marxism was shoveled down our throat by school teachers, media figures, movies, social pressure. At each step of this process, our emotions were stirred and directed by spinsters so that, for example, we would feel a high empathy for so-called minorities while ignoring the homeless “white males” dying of cold at winter.

Ride the tiger of your own emotions and of (some) others’ as well if you don’t want sinister globalists to.

https://www.returnofkings.com/11010/how-to-control-your-emotional-state

We all have our ups and downs. Some days you feel on top of the world, you ooze a sexy masculine confidence that women love whereas other days you couldn’t be bothered to shave — you scowl at the thought of doing anything interesting and avoid all outside contact. Many guys accept this with a “que sera, sera” mentality. They feel it is just the natural ebb and flow of things, that taming your emotional state would be too chaotic of a task.

Those who do wish to change usually use hokey terminology talking about “energy” and the “universe.” They’ll seek guidance from another source so that they do not have to take responsibility for letting their emotions get out of check. People also seek a quick cure for a continual state of happiness, but what they do not realize is that happiness is transient.

I do believe there is a way to wrangle your emotions that relies on you, your habits and the power you have to respond to various stimuli. Essentially you must minimize the negativity and maximize the positivity in your life by altering certain habits.

Minimize Habits That Lead To Negativity

Take a moment to think about any time you’ve lost control of your emotions. When did you last get angry, depressed, hateful, etc.? What do you do when you’re out talking to girls that hurts your success? Do you have unreasonable limiting beliefs? Do you believe you always need to be happy to be successful? Do you get frustrated when you have anxiety because of any of the above?

If you think about the above long enough and are mindful when such emotional states occur you will begin to notice a trend in what triggers them.

For me the biggest habits that lead to a negative state of mind, in which I lacked motivation, was depressed, and stayed inside all day, were my nutritional habits. I started to recognize a pattern: I’d go out drinking or eat highly processed foods, I’d wake up the next day tired and dehydrated, then I’d stay inside all day watching movies because I didn’t want to go to the gym or talk to people. The cycle would just endlessly repeat until the natural ebb and flow of things took me to a high point.

Maximize Habits That Lead To Positivity

Repeat the exercise above. When was the last time you felt on top of the world, when did you last feel invincible, when did you last have no anxieties? When were you on fire when talking to girls, what were you doing that made you so successful? What were the thoughts running through your head?

Again if you pay attention you will begin to see patterns. You’ll start to realize what habits lead to a great mood.

For me I felt the best when ‘rewarded’ with something. Whether it was having great sex, sharing something with a friend, new PRs in the gym, busting my ass in the library and getting a good grade, or learning a new skill.

The Keystone Habit

Roosh brought up keystone habits in a recent article titled “One Approach A Day.” Essentially it is an innocuous habit that has a much larger effect than planned.

For me I started a few keystone habits: I started the day off with a nice cold glass of lemon water and my vitamins. In doing this I started drinking more and more water leading me to be less dehydrated, more energetic and making better food choices.

I also made a rule that as soon as I start talking myself out of something reasonable I would force myself to do whatever it was I was trying to rationalize my way out of. Maybe I’d start thinking “I’m kind of sore and I still haven’t seen the new episode of Game of Thrones, I think I’ll go to the gym later.” I know I wouldn’t go to the gym later so I would immediately get up and put on my workout gear. Just by doing this I started getting in the mood for lifting — I’ve also heard of guys packing a gym bag every night and leaving it in their car.

The peaks and troughs of our emotional state should not define us. As a man, whether it be through eliminating negative triggers or forming positive habits, you should be fully in control of your emotions. Use the power of a keystone habit to enact much larger scale change so you can be in a perpetual state of positivity, or at the very least, neutrality.

Read Also: How To Change Your Bad Habits

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theliberaltony · 4 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by a mob of President Trump’s supporters, many of whom had very explicit and not so explicit ties to right-wing extremism in the U.S. There are reports now, too, that there could be subsequent attacks in state capitals this weekend. President Trump’s time in office has undoubtedly had a mainstreaming effect on right-wing extremism, too, with as many as 20 percent of Americans saying they supported the rioters. But as we also know, much of this predates Trump, too. Right-wing extremism has a long, sordid history in the U.S.

The big question I want to ask all of you today is twofold: First, how did we get here, and second, where do we go from here?

Let’s start by unpacking how right-wing extremism has changed in the Trump presidency. How has it?

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Well, the first and most obvious thing is that Trump has spoken directly to right-wing extremists. That is to say, using their language, condoning previous armed protests at government buildings and explicitly calling on them to support and protect him. And that, probably unsurprisingly, has emboldened right-wing extremists and made their extremism seem — well, less extreme.

That goes for a wide array of extremists in the U.S., too. I’m thinking, of course, about Trump’s comment after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” But Trump has also encouraged white Christian nationalists, anti-government extremists and other groups and individuals that I certainly never thought I’d hear a president expressing sympathy or support for.

jennifer.chudy (Jennifer Chudy, political science professor at Wellesley College): Absolutely, Amelia. And while the actual extremists may represent a small group of the public, the share of Republicans who support their behavior, whether explicitly or implicitly, is not as small. This is, in part, due to mainstream political institutions — like the Republican Party, with Trump at its helm — helping make their mission and behavior seem legitimate.

maggie.koerth (Maggie Koerth, senior science writer): I’ve been talking to experts about this all week, and I think it’s really interesting how even the academics who study this stuff are kind of arguing over the role class plays in it. People like Christian Davenport at the University of Michigan have argued that we should understand that all of this is happening in the context of decades of growing income inequality and political stagnation. In other words, he contends that there are legitimate reasons to be angry at and mistrust the government. But it also seems like this crowd was not even close to being uniformly working class and probably contained people from a range of different backgrounds. And that’s why I liked one of the points Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami made: We might be seeing a coalescing of two groups: the people who have been actually hurt by that inequality and are angry about it AND the people who are doing pretty well but who feel like somebody might come and take that away. And, of course, both those positions can dovetail very easily into racial animus and white supremacy.

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Maggie. As you alluded to, though, it’s important to be clear that economic anxiety — which was used in the aftermath of Trump’s election to explain why so many Americans voted for a candidate who framed much of his candidacy around animus toward nonwhite people — doesn’t mean that racism or white supremacy isn’t a driving force here, too.

Part of what’s so complex about the mob that attacked the Capitol is that it was a bunch of different people, with somewhat disparate ideologies and goals, united under the “stop the steal” mantra. But underlying a lot of that, even people’s anger over economic inequality or mistrust in institutions, is the fundamental idea that white status and power are being threatened.

jennifer.chudy: There is also just a lot of evidence in political science that racial attitudes are associated with emotions like anger. Two great books, one by Antoine Banks of the University of Maryland and the other by Davin Phoenix of the University of California, Irvine, consider this point in depth. Insofar as right-wing extremists express anger at the system (in contrast to fear or disgust), their anger appears more likely to be motivated by racial grievances than by economic ones.

Additionally, the Republican Party’s base has, for years now, become more racially homogeneous, in part because of the party providing a welcome home to white grievances. But some have argued that this has also been exacerbated by the Democratic Party speaking more explicitly about racial inequality in the U.S., something that wasn’t the case in the 1990s. Regardless, a more racially homogeneous base can make a party’s members more receptive to this type of extremist behavior.

We also can’t underestimate the role that COVID-19 plays here. As Maggie and Amelia suggested in their article from this summer on militias and the coronavirus, many folks are at home and glued to their computers in ways that facilitate this type of organizing. They can burrow themselves into online communities of like-minded folks which may intensify their attitudes and lead to extreme behavior.

Kaleigh: (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): Polling has shown that ideas that previously had been considered extreme, like using violence if your party loses an election, or supporting authoritarian ideas, have definitely become more mainstream.

This is partly due to Trump’s own rhetoric, but also due to the effects of online communities where far-right extremists and white nationalists mingle with more moderate Trump supporters, effectively radicalizing some of them over time.

What’s interesting to me about all of these different factions, though, is there is actually a lot of division among these groups: Many members of the Proud Boys aren’t fans of the QAnon conspiracy, for instance. And a lot of white nationalists don’t like Trump, but they still end up uniting against a perceived common enemy. That’s why you saw people in the mob at the Capitol waving MAGA flags alongside people with clear Nazi symbolism. They are not all white nationalists, but they’re willing to march beside them because they think they’re on the same side.

But in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, those divisions are becoming more stark in these online communities. I’m seeing a lot of infighting over whether planned marches are a good idea, whether they are “false flag” events or traps or whether they should be armed. There just seems to be this heightened anxiety as they draw closer to an inevitable line that they can’t come back from: Biden’s inauguration.

sarahf: That’s a super important point, Kaleigh, on how different extremist groups have rallied behind this. But given how much Trump has directly spoken to right-wing extremists, as Amelia mentioned up top, can we drill in on the violence, as well? It’s not just that different factions have united or that these views have mainstreamed under Trump, but also that there’s been an actual uptick in violence, too, right?

ameliatd: One thing Maggie and I heard from experts on the modern militia movement is that these groups’ activity levels depend on the political context. The uptick in violence under Trump is real, but it’s not something that’s only happened under Trump. There was a surge in militia activity early in Obama’s presidency, too, for example.

maggie.koerth: Very much so, Amelia. The reality is that the right-wing extremism we’re seeing now is a symptom of long-running trends in American society, including white resentment and racial animus. And on top of that, you have these trends interacting with partisan polarization, which means the political left and right (which used to have fairly similar levels of white racial resentment) began to diverge on measures of racial resentment in the late 1980s and now differ greatly.

Kaleigh: Exactly, Maggie. That’s also why the FBI and other experts are particularly concerned about planned militia marches ahead of the inauguration. These groups tend to be much more organized and deliberate in their actions than the mob we saw last week. And because of that, they’re even more dangerous.

ameliatd: Right, so this violence isn’t new. But I do think it’s fair to say that Trump has raised the stakes so dramatically for right-wing extremists that we’d see a throng of them storming the Capitol. A lot of them see him as their guy in the White House!

So when he says, look, this election is being stolen from me, and you’ve got to do something about it, they listen.

jennifer.chudy: That’s true, Amelia, but work in political science shows just how much of this change was afoot prior to Trump’s election. Some tie it to Hillary Clinton talking too much about race during the 2016 election — they argue that this drove away some white voters who had previously voted Democratic (and could do so in 2008 and ‘12 because Obama, despite being Black, did not mention race much during his candidacy). But Clare Malone’s article for FiveThirtyEight on how Republicans have spent decades prioritizing white people’s interests does a great job of tracing these roots even further back.

maggie.koerth: Yeah, I’m really leery of the tendency I’ve seen in the media to act like this is something that started with Trump, or even that started post-Obama. Most of the experts I’ve spoken with have framed this more like … Trump’s escalation of these dangerous trends is a symptom of the trends. We’re talking about a lot of indicators that have been going in this direction since at least the 1980s.

jennifer.chudy: True, Maggie, from the beginning of the Republic, I might argue! But one reason the tie to Trump and Obama is so interesting is that Trump’s baseless claims around Obama’s birth certificate correspond with his debut on the national political stage. So even as there is a long thread of white supremacy throughout American history that has facilitated Trump’s ascension, there may also be a more proximate connection to recent elections, too.

ameliatd: Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke University, has done some really compelling research on white identity politics — specifically how the country’s diversification has created a kind of “white awareness” among white Americans who are essentially afraid of losing their cultural status and power.

This is a complicated force — she’s clear that it’s not exactly the same thing as racial prejudice — but the result is that many white people have a sense that the hierarchy in which they’ve been privileged is being upset, and they want things to return to the old status quo, which of course was racist. And the Republican Party has been tapping into that sense of fear for a while. Trump’s departure was that he started doing it much more explicitly than previous Republican politicians had mostly done.

So yes, Maggie, you’re absolutely right that it’s not like Trump came on the scene and suddenly right-wing extremism or white supremacist violence became a part of our mjui78 political landscape. Or partisan hatred, for that matter! FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman has written about the effect of political polarization and how it’s created intense loathing of the other party, and he’s clear that it’s been a long time coming. It didn’t just emerge out of nowhere in 2016, as you can see in the chart below.

On the other hand, though, it’s hard to imagine the events of last week without four years of Trump fanning the flames.

maggie.koerth: Right, Amelia. Trump is a symptom AND he’s making it worse. At the same time.

Kaleigh: What you said, Amelia, also speaks to just how many Trump supporters don’t consider themselves racist and find it insulting to be called so. A lot of Trump supporters think Democrats are obsessed with race and identity politics, and think racism isn’t as systemic of a problem as it is. There are also, of course, nonwhite Trump supporters, which complicates the image that only white working-class Americans feel threatened by efforts to create racial equality.

ameliatd: That’s right, Kaleigh. We haven’t talked about the protests against police brutality and misconduct this summer, but I think that’s a big factor here as well — politicians like Biden saying that we have to deal with systemic racism is itself threatening to a lot of people.

sarahf: It does seem as if we’re in this gray zone, where so much of this predates Trump, and yet Trump has activated underlying sentiments that were perhaps dormant for at least a little while. Any child of the 1990s remembers, for instance, the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh, who held a number of extreme, anti-government views, or the deadly standoff between federal law enforcement officials and right-wing fundamentalists at Ruby Ridge.

And as Jennifer pointed out with Malone’s piece, the thread runs even further back. It’s almost as if it’s always been part of the U.S. but maybe not as omnipresent. That’s also possibly naive, but I’m curious to hear where you all think we go from here — in how does President Biden start to move the U.S. forward?

maggie.koerth: Honestly, that’s the scary part for me, Sarah. Because I don’t really think he can. Everything we know about how you change deeply held beliefs that have to do with identity suggests that the appeals of outsiders doesn’t work.

jennifer.chudy: Yes — one would think that a common formidable challenge, like COVID-19, would help unite different political factions. But if you look at the last few months, that’s not what we see.

maggie.koerth: Even Republican elites who they push back on this stuff get branded as apostates.

ameliatd: And there’s evidence that when Republican elites are perceived as apostates, they may also become targets for violence.

Kaleigh: But we also know that deplatforming agitators helps reduce the spread of their ideas and how much people are exposed to/talk about them. Losing the presidency is kind of the ultimate deplatforming, no?

jennifer.chudy: Is it deplatforming, though? Or is it just moving the platform to a different setting? I don’t know the ins and outs of the technology, but it seems like the message has become dispersed but maybe not extinguished.

sarahf: That’s a good point, Jennifer, and something I think Kaleigh hits on in her article — that is, this question of … was it too little, too late?

maggie.koerth: I think it has been a deplatforming, Jennifer. If for no other reason than it’s removed Trump’s ability to viscerally respond to millions of people immediately. And you see some really big differences between the things he said on Twitter about these extremists last week and the statements he’s made this week, which have had to go through other people.

It’s not so much taken away from his ability to speak, but it does seem to have affected his ability to speak without somebody thinking about the consequences first.

ameliatd: There is an argument that Trump’s presidency and the violence he’s spurred is making the underlying problems impossible to ignore. I’m not sure whether that makes it easier for Biden to deal with them, but it does make it harder for him to just say, ‘Okay, let’s move past this.’

Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who’s written extensively about partisan discord and political violence, told me in a recent interview that while someone like Biden shouldn’t be afraid to push back against Trump or his followers because it will lead to more violence (an argument against impeachment that’s circulated in the past week), she does think pushing back against Trump and his followers probably will result in more violence.

So that leaves us, and Biden, in a pretty scary place.

Republicans are in a bind, too. Electorally, many of them depend on a system where certain voters — white voters, rural voters, etc. — do have more power. So yeah, Sarah, that doesn’t make me especially optimistic about a big Republican elite turnaround on Trumpism, separate from the question of whether that would actually diffuse some of these tensions.

sarahf: One silver lining in all this is we don’t yet know the full extent to which Trump and Trumpism has taken a hit. That is, plenty of Republicans still support him, but his approval rating has taken a pretty big hit, the biggest since his first few months in office in 2017 — that’s atypical for a president on his way out the door. More Republicans also support impeachment of Trump this time around.

There is a radicalized element here in American politics — and as you’ve all said — it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but I do wonder if we still don’t fully understand where this goes next.

Kaleigh: What gives me some peace in this time is looking back at history. America has dealt with far-right extremists before. It has dealt with violent insurrectionists before. We have continued, however slowly, to make progress. Sometimes the only way out is through.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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problematicwelshman · 5 years ago

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Michael Sheen on Good Omens, sex scenes, and why Brexit led to his break-up

28 NOVEMBER 2018 • 4:18PM

Michael Sheen may be 49, and sporting a grey beard these days, but mention Martians and the actor reverts to a breathless, giddy teenager.

It all stems back to one evening when Sheen was about 12 years old. “It was a significant moment in my life,” he tells me over coffee in a London hotel. “My cousin Hugh was babysitting, and he put on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

“I remember us lying there, listening in bed in the dark. It absolutely terrified me, but I got obsessed with it. I’m worryingly into it. I know every single note, every word.”

Wayne’s 1978 rock opera has had a similar effect on countless fans, even if it prompts a bemused shrug from non-converts. Without ever topping the charts, it has slowly become one of the best-selling British albums of all time, and this Friday begins a stadium tour featuring a 35-foot fire-breathing Martian and a 3D hologram of Liam Neeson. It’s a geeky novelty, but one of epic proportions.

When Wayne asked Sheen if he would star in a new radio drama-style version for the album’s 40th anniversary, alongside Taron Egerton and Ade Edmondson, the Welsh actor “bit his hand off”. It had always been his dream. For decades, whether doing serious political dramas such as Frost/Nixon or the great roles of classical theatre – Hamlet, Henry V – the one part Sheen really wanted involved Martians saying “ulla-ulla”.

“When I was doing Caligula at the Donmar [in 2003], I was filming The Deal during the day – which was the first time I’d played Tony Blair,” he says. “I’d be so tired, to wake myself up [before the play] I would do whole sections of War of the Worlds.” He can even beatbox the sound effects, he adds proudly. “The other guys in the dressing room would all be really pissed off with me - but I was playing Caligula, so they had to put up with it.”

Enthusing about an outtake on a collectors version of the album where you can hear Richard Burton coughing, Sheen briefly slips into an impression of the late actor. It’s eerily spot-on. Burton played the role he takes in the new version, which feels apt; growing up in Port Talbot, Sheen was aware of following in his footsteps.

“Coming from the same town as him really helped,” he says. “It’s place you wouldn’t necessarily think would be very sympathetic to acting – it’s an old steel town, very working class, quite a macho place – but because of Richard Burton, and then Anthony Hopkins, there’s the sense that it’s possible [to be an actor], and people have a respect for it.

“Ultimately, though, we’re very different actors - Burton was very much a charismatic leading man, and I’m probably more of a character actor. He wasn’t known for his versatility.” Sheen, by contrast, is a chameleon, as he proved with a remarkable run of biopics from 2006-9, playing Tony Blair, David Frost, Brian Clough, Kenneth Williams and the Roman emperor Nero on screen in the space of just four years.

He concedes that he may have made a “partly conscious” decision to avoid biopics since then. “I’ve been offered quite a few I didn’t do. I did feel, for a bit, it was probably good for me to move away from it – certainly from playing Blair at least, because that’s the one I became synonymous with. I’d quite happily play real people again, but it’s hard to find good scripts and it takes a lot of homework. With some parts I’ve been offered, you might only have a few weeks to prepare for it - and you can’t do that with Clough or Kenneth Williams.”

Despite his best intentions, Sheen is playing another Blair in his next film – The Voyage of Doctor Doolittle, where he’s the nemesis of Robert Downey Jr’s animal-loving hero. “I don’t know if they did that as a joke or not,” he says. “He’s Blair Müdfly – there’s an umlaut that he is very specific about. He was at college with Doolittle, and hates him, and becomes the antagonist because of his jealousy of Doolittle. Müdfly is employed to try and stop him from finding... what he wants to find.” As the film isn’t out for 13 months, Sheen is tight-lipped about further plot details – but he hints that Müdfly is “a villain in the tradition of Terry-Thomas villains.”

It’s the latest in a series of quirky, eyebrow-raising roles. After playing a vampire in the Twilight films and a werewolf in the Underworld franchise, Sheen says he would often be asked in interviews why a “serious classical actor” was wasting his time on fantasy films.

“There’s a lot of snobbishness about genre,” he says. “I think some of the greatest writing of the 20th and 21st centuries has happened in science fiction and fantasy.” While promoting the films, he would back up that point by citing his favourite authors – Stephen King, Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman. “Time went on, and then one day my doorbell rang and there was a big box being delivered. I opened the box up and there was a card from Neil saying ‘From one fan to another’, and all these first editions of his books.”

It was the beginning an enduring friendship, which recently became a professional partnership: Sheen stars in Gaiman’s forthcoming TV series Good Omens, based on a 1990 novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett. Set in the days before a biblical apocalypse, its sprawling list of characters includes an angel called Aziraphale (Sheen) and a demon called Crowley (David Tennant) who have known each other since the days of Adam and Eve.

“I wanted to play Aziraphel being sort of in love with Crowley,” says Sheen. “They’re both very bonded and connected anyway, because of the two of them having this relationship through history - but also because angels are beings of love, so it’s inevitable that he would love Crowley. It helped that loving David is very easy to do.”

What kind of love - platonic, romantic, erotic? “Oh, those are human, mortal labels!” Sheen laughs. “But that was what I thought would be interesting to play with. There’s a lot of fan fiction where Aziraphale and Crowley get a bit hot and heavy towards each other, so it’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to what we’ve done in bringing that to the screen.”

Steamy fan fiction aside, it’s unlikely Good Omens will match the raunch levels of his last major TV series, Masters of Sex (2013-16), a drama about the pioneering sexologists Masters and Johnson. In the wake of the last year’s #MeToo revelations, HBO has introduced “intimacy co-ordinators” for its shows - but, Sheen tells me, Masters of Sex was ahead of the curve in handling sex scenes with caution.

“It was a lot easier for myself and Lizzy [Caplan, his co-star], as we were comfortable in that set-up, because we had status in it. But for people in the background, or doing just one scene, it’s different,” he says. “It became clear very quickly that there needed to be guidelines for people who didn’t have that kind of status, who would probably not speak up. We started talking about that, and decided there need to be clear rules.”

Sex scenes, he continues, “should absolutely be treated the same way as other things where there’s a danger. If you’re doing stage-fighting, or pyrotechnics, there are rules and everyone just sticks to them. Whether it’s physical danger, or emotional, or psychological, it’s just as important.”

Despite having several film and TV parts on the horizon, Sheen says he is still in semi-retirement from acting. In 2016 he hinted that he might be quit for good to campaign against populism. “In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped," he said at the time. But now things are less cut. “I have two jobs now, essentially,” he says. "Acting takes second place."

While many celebrity activists limit their politics to save-the-dolphins posturing, Sheen has been working with a range of unfashionable grassroots groups aiming to combat inequality, support small communities and fight fake news. As well as supporting Welsh credit unions, and sponsoring a women’s football team in the tiny village of Goytre, he tells me that he's been “commissioning research into alternative funding models for local journalism”.

If he returns to the stage any time soon, he says it’s likely to be in a show about “political historical socio-economic stuff, a one-man show with very low production values”. It’s clear he’s not in it for the glamour.

Sheen was inspired to become more politically active by the Brexit referendum – which also indirectly led him to break up with his partner of four years, the comedian Sarah Silverman. At the time, they were living together in the US. “We both had very similar drives, and yet to act on those drives pulled us in different directions – because she is American and I’m Welsh,” he explains.

“After the Brexit vote, and the election where Trump became president, we both felt in different ways we wanted to get more involved. That led to her doing her show I Love You America [in which Silverman interviewed people from across the political spectrum], and it led to me wanting to address the issues that I thought led some people to vote the way they did about Brexit, in the area I come from and others like it.”

They still speak lovingly of each other, which makes their decision to end a happy relationship for the sake of politics look painfully quixotic. Talking about it, Sheen sounds a little wistful, but he’s utterly certain they made the right choice. “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it did mean coming back here – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.”

#michael sheen #dolittle #the voyage of doctor dolittle #he got so irrationally mad at this article on twitter #but hey bringing it back because people wanted to read it #and it had info about dolittle #but it's locked behind a paywall #so here u go fam

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100percentshipper · 5 years ago

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Oh dear fucking lord New Zealand now has a fascist Trump supporter as the leader of the National Party

This will be a long one, ranty but I gotta lay the land for non Kiwis. You ready?

So New Zealand seems to be doing pretty darn well in international news due to the absolute bae we have as a prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. Through not just covid (and through her actions that have almost eliminated the virus from NZ) but through a mass shooting at the Mosque in Christchurch last year (which saw sweeping gun control laws instituted within 2 weeks), an earthquake in Wellington and having a baby while in power, Jacinda has proven herself to be a fearless, clear headed, compassionate leader that has, quite honestly, been a revelation. Finally a person in power who actually cares and it isn’t just a political stance. Finally someone who can take action and take it in the best interest of the people and not just in the interest of deep pockets . Finally someone who represents my values of kindness and caring and getting shit done. While having a baby. Okay. So I love Jacinda and I’m actually proud to be a kiwi with someone like her at the helm.

Talking to my mum (I don’t live in NZ) and she casually mentions that the leader of the National party changed 3 days ago on May 21st. Jacinda is Labour (Democrate) and now we have Todd Muller for National (Republican). He replaced former leader Simon Bridges who became unpopular due - well many things but the final nail in the coffin was due to being unable to read the room - and by that I mean he decided, during Jacinda’s exemplary work with Covid, to nitpick at her leadership when in fact she’s super popular right now because she’s amazing. I’m biased, sue me, but so is most of NZ. So a few days ago they replaced him because you can’t win with that tactic against the queen that Jacinda is. In enters Todd Muller. At first he seems a possible improvement but the red flags are flying high right now.

I’d like to preface this by saying his background is in PR (or ‘Relations Manager if you will) which means nothing he is doing in his first days is unplanned or random. He understands manipulation. I’d also like to preface this by saying you may have already heard of this guy when, last year he heckled a young Green party member in NZ parliament to which she responded ‘Okay, boomer.’ Oh yeah, he’s the okay boomer guy.

So here are the red flags

First; he makes a point to mention his religion (catholic) saying it won’t impact his politics as it regrads to lgbtq+ (aparently he’s ‘relaxed’ on that point because he’s not a perfect catholic). Hmmm. Jacinda is a former Mormon and never felt the need to mention that (it was only ever mentioned by others) so that certainly doesn’t bode well. He’s obviously pretty darn religious to feel the need to address that issue and upon research ... he is. That then raises all manners of questions around his belief in human rights especially for queer, non-white and women. As if I needed further confirmation, he believes in ‘family values’. A scan of his wikipedia shows he holds a ‘conservative position’ on abortion, voting no on pro-choice policies in parliment. Oh boy.

Second; he passes a few compliments to Jacinda but the goes on to say that coming out of covid, New Zealand needs to support small businesses that have been affected and then shit on their financial response to covid when an independent reviewer gave them a tripe A rating. Apparently he disagrees although National has yet to offer an alternative approach. This might seem like an inocuous point - obvs as the oposition he’ll look to shit on something and sure, of course we should support small business, but he subtly positions it in such a way as to suggest that Jacinda isn’t making that a priority which... um dude, she’s labour. Meaning she cares more about it than a national govt typically would. But notice how he’s trying to sow little seeds there? The next years are going to be a bitch economically, not just for New Zealand but the world. No one will come out unscathed but he’s lining up his ducks to capitalize on the shortfalls that will undoubtedly happen - not because the government (but lets be honest Jacinda will prob do a better job than anyone else could) but because we exist within a system that is maimed and broken and limping along.

Third; now perhaps neither of these points seem that much of a deal, I mean don’t most conservative, old, rich, white male politicians have ‘family values’ and so what about wanting to support small business and sowing seeds of malcontent, it’s kinda his job. Well, well, well, let me tell you...

So he is interviewed in his office back in September 2019. He has some political ‘paraphernalia’ on his shelf. There is a cap in the photo taken, on his shelf. This cap comes from America. It has a certain set of words that sends shivers down my spine. Can you see it?

“Make America Great Again.”

Oh dear fucking lord. Are you serious? He’s asked about it and he claims that he also has paraphenalia from Hillary Clinton, a badge which is probably also in the shot but it’s hard to tell. Asked if the cap will go into his new office he says yes. He even doubles down, saying that he is comfortable with that decision... he says that he’s long been a fan of the American system (I’m sorry Americans but honestly that is not something I want to hear out of a party leader from NZ where we have MMP which has been a boon to our country) and that’s fine but to display a MAGA cap and then say he will keep it in his office given what that cap represents and what ideologies that represents is not tone deaf, it is dangerous. It says something about who he is and what he believes. It is a sign to all the facists of New Zealand to rise up. When asked if he supports Bernie or Trump ... he hesitates, lightfoots around the question and says that in a debate he watched between Bernie and Trump ‘Bernie gave the better speech’. That wasn’t the question. Who do you support? Reminds me of the tactics my all American boss who carries around guns at all times and I’m 99% sure is a Trump supporter talks.

Now I don’t think he stands a chance to win the elections coming up in October because it’s Jacinda with 60% approval rating and his party has 30%. But it’s also worrying because hate and fear mixed with covid is a potent brew and the signal he sends out will be seen and received by all the sleeper fascist agents across NZ and the world and like the covid virus itself, will awake and spread like wildfire. And even if he back tracks and decides not to display it, it’s too late. You’ve shown where you stand and where you stand is fascist. I hope to god he doesn’t stay the leader long and by the next election may he be a forgotten blip on the political landscape of New Zealand, but man. I knew the other shoe had to drop in some way with regards to NZ politics and it wasn’t Jacinda dropping the shoe as might be expected because how is this woman even real, it was this Trump inspired alt-right dude.

#Am I over reacting?#maybe #but I think the US under reacted when Trump came a long and now look at where we are at #Is it over reacting to call him fascist and alt-right?#possibly #but then he is insisting on keeping a symbol of fascism and the alt-right on prominent display #jacinda ardern #todd muller #okay boomer #new zealand politics

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rimalaw · 4 years ago

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Why this Non-Trump Voter Thinks Trump Could Win 2020

I am a registered independent and both parties have ideals I agree with, and sadly those I don’t. Therefore, I am always left out and just looking for who will better support some of the more important values that I believe in. I did not vote for Trump, and because I need healthcare (among other things), I cannot support a man who wants to destroy the healthcare plan that I am on, without a real plan in place that will protect people with pre-existing conditions. Trump says ObamaCare is a horrible program! But what the heck has he offered??? Nothing! I can't take small talk to the doctor or hospital if and when you take away my health plan, and have to wait for small business enrollment in Florida (1x a year) to kick in and charge me tons of money to cover my pre-existing condition!

When Bush was President, health insurance was costing me over $1,200/month, and now under the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obama Care which is really why Trump hates it... it doesn’t have his NAME!!), I am paying approximately $600.00 a month for a really good plan. Make no mistake, by now my plan would cost AT LEAST $1400.00-$1500.00, since I am 16-20 years older than when Bush was President. Let me not forget how Obamacare saved the life of my best friend, who would otherwise NOT have gone to the doctor, and not have discovered a life threatening illness, which but for the Grace of God, she did. Because of her health plan, she received the best care and treatment, and thank God survived one of the worst diagnosis one could get. She got the plan two (2) weeks before she went to the doctor! This is what Trump wants to take away! Trump wants to take away lifesaving care without a REAL PLAN in place to help millions of Americans.

And make no mistake; sadly, I think people who are on that plan, who rely on this plan, who have family or friends who need that plan, etc. etc. will still NAIVELY and IGNORANTLY vote for Trump.

Why do I think that enough people would vote for Trump and that he can win? Well... Let’s think about it:

1-He is campaigning like a high energy Super Bowl Team in all the swing states, bringing with him his own type of electrifying energy, electrifying his base, and those who are still on the fence and can feel some of that electricity as the attendees and media blare their excitement of his visit. Make no mistake, these visits matter. When I ran for Judge 14 years ago, I was an unknown an the youngest in my race. I didn’t have the type of ethnic or Anglo name needed to win in my County. However, every area that I was able to heavily campaign in, make speeches, meet people, I WON. I didn’t win that election, but I won those areas. So I realized that meeting people matters, and in this race, make no mistake, these super spreader events excite people. They don’t care about COVID while they are there, and for the most part have learned to live with it. They just care that the biggest Super Bowl team came to their town and made them feel GOOD! I know Biden has toured, but I’m sorry it doesn’t come close. I know he was doing social distancing etc, but the car thing isn’t exciting nor generating the amount of crowds and energy that it needs.

2-COVID- yes believe it or not, without COVID, Trump might have been up in the polls without issue. Then COVID happened which threw him down in the polls, and then his apparent lack of handling it, threw him even further down. Then he got COVID, and believe it or not, even though he didn’t seize the opportunity to come out more contrite, which would have assured him a win, he still earned a lot of points. How: A) because America saw him as human and actually felt scared for their President (even some of the ones that didn’t vote for him); B) America got to see that he BEAT IT! Yes, he has the best doctors and treatment etc, but America saw that this 74 year old overweight man, who got sick enough to need treatment, still BEAT IT! So now America sees COVID (foolishly or not) not to be so feared, which deep down everyone wants to believe. These two results of Trump getting COVID actually earned him voters as people felt scared for him and then happy at his beating COVID, signaling the Country and they could too could slay this dragon; and finally C) people are seeing the country economically recover and attributing this to his lack of fear of COVID, and the desire to keep the country out of lockdown which most Americans are fed up with.

3-Fracking- For the love of God Joe, you don’t denounce fracking like that when you need the swing states in the way that you do. Instead you CONFIDENTLY say, “don’t worry, our plan is to slowly bring in safe alternate sources of energy while we freely train current workers and so many more (as we will have so many jobs created) to transition into great and even BETTER paying safer jobs. NO ONE WILL LOSE ONE JOB, and I can guarantee even BETTER Jobs for you all.” But instead, you have Trump in Pennsylvania, and other swing states scaring people that they will lose their jobs.

4-Law and Order-Make no mistake, I believe the police have systemic racism and needs serious training and overhauling. But Biden and Democrats need to COMPLETELY distance themselves from the anarchist propaganda of defunding the police. That was NEVER a train to ride. From the first use of those words, BIDEN should have never bitten, not even a nibble. Now with the visual of businesses boarding up, Trump is touting about these rioters and giving the illusion to those voters less capable to comprehend the difference, that this is what the Democrats, i.e. Joe are doing and allowing. From the get go, Dems and Joe should have aggressively, I mean hot tooting crazy like attacked and distances themselves from it.

5-COVID AGAIN-I wear masks (2), I barely go out, etc, but like most Americans, we are tired of hearing about COVID. When that is all that you hear, gloom and doom, and Biden talks about dark days, it just doesn’t sit so well. Strangely enough, to people on the fence now, Trump seems like the guy that wants to give you freedom and a cheery positive outlook of life, while the Democrats, CNN, MSNBC, etc., are painting this bleak picture and more lockdowns, that no one wants to keep hearing about.

6-The Darn Polls- So many polls tooting a Biden victory whether true or not, are only making on the fence people, the lazy, the unmotivated, the unenergized Democratic voters say, “they don’t need me, ... I’m not so excited.. or Biden will win anyway.” Meanwhile, the Trump supporters are freaking out and making sure they show up in massive droves to help their Super Bowl Team, I mean their guy. Plus, any poll should really discount a lot of points away from Biden, because really, there are a lot of paranoid secretive, conspiracy believing, or seemingly ashamed Trump voters who will not participate. Remember, a bleeding hard liberal is more likely to be kind to a pollster and answer a poll; and a right winger will say, “I have nothing to say, leave me alone,” hang up, etc...

7-Socialism-Kill this socialism crap- The Dems should have killed this idea long ago, and Biden should have been VERY ASSERTIVE and vocal about how he is for middle of the road values (yes I know this might alienate the Bernie people, but that’s what Bernie is for. And if this party is so crazy to sit out and let Trump win because Biden isn’t left enough, well then the party has bigger issues which no amount of therapy can fix).

8-The last Debate- Trump basically showed people he is not so crazy, he can have restraint, he wasn’t rude. People who were running away from him after the first debate or on the fence, came back after he showed America and the world that he isn’t so bad.

9-Strength and POWER- Basically, aside from the fact that Trump often appears to be a bully, lately, more than anything he has shown stamina and strength. People like that, and want to join the stronger looking team, and the man that never ever seems to stop, and confidently never takes NO for an answer. People, like to support the one that appears to never back down, never accept defeat, never look weak, and never quit!

10-Too many people believe his lies, those of the crazies on Facebook, and the alt right that disseminate the worst of the fake news. Sadly THE DEMS DON'T STRONGLY and DEFINITIVELY ATTACK THEM!! Every talking point should have been hit with a barrage of targeted commercials and aggressive stump speeches. People need to be told for example, “TRUMP brags about the economy, he hopes you have amnesia and forget that OBAMA left him with a booming economy, and only an untrained monkey could ruin it. All Trump did was NOT destroy it YET, but his tax cuts to the MILLIONAIRES (not you AMERICA making under 400k) will cause us a depression if he is in office four more years because you can only pay so much to help the country without having income we used to rely on coming in.”

Well, that’s all folks. I hope I am wrong, but if it doesn’t go as the untrustworthy polls show, these are some of the main reasons why. These points are for that small percentage that pick the winner in most Presidential elections, not for the firmly committed of either party. Also, if Biden doesn’t win, then those who protested this summer did not all come out to vote, and that’s shameful!

#trump2020 #election2020 #2020 presidential election #stoptrump #Trumpcanwin

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maswartz · 5 years ago

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IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave.

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

#bernie sanders

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all).

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

#politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

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foreverlogical · 5 years ago

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The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

VISIT WEBSITE

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go-diane-winchester · 6 years ago

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Why I detest Misha's stance as a liberal thinker

I have edited out this person's name for their own safety because they said something positive about me. And the hellers are not going to be happy about that. If Jensen can get threats from these people, then so can this individual.

I can understand you resistance. You probably spent ten years loving the man. People cant just switch that off, especially when the guy champions something that the fan might find meaningful. Women of color still remember Jensen's co-star Megalyn with fondness, as well as the eyebrow-raising sex scene between them. Jared spoke favorably about Muslims, with Jensen nodding vigorously in agreement and Muslim fans found that meaningful. When a trans fan takes pictures with a beaming Jensen or Jared, other trans fans feel happy about it. Everyone looks for something to love about an actor. Then are also actors whom we might hate because of something they did that made them fall in our eyes.

Maybe you are LGBT and Misha considers himself an LGBT champion. You feel welcomed and included in his circle in a way that you don't, with J2. I get it. Maybe you are a woman, and feel like he is a feminist champion. There are many reasons why anyone would like the guy. If you have loved him for some many years, for those very reasons, some yahoo yelling her head off on Tumblr, is not going to change your mind. I get it. So if Misha is a nice guy, how come I still don't like him? It is because I don't feel that man is genuine, that is why?

There are two kinds of problematic liberals: The posers, and the bullies. Misha is both of them. I think there are nice liberals out there. And once upon a time, liberalism was obviously a nice thing. The idea sounds nice. You want to not exclude people. You want people to love as they wish. You don't want hate governing your existence. That is how liberals thought. Now that has changed. Misha, and people like him, are liberal bullies. It seems to be the norm. Liberal bullies don't work for change. They want to enforce it aggressively. And the worst thing is, they speak for everyone else. There are LGBT fans that hate Misha and wish he would keep quiet. There are women like me who think America has too many nasty women. Why does it need more? What hypocrisy though. America needs nasty women, but destiel shippers are perverts. So women aren't allowed to sexually express themselves without being seen as perverts and their art being reduced to porn. That is Misha being a poser. He is a champion for the LGBT but made a trans joke about Jensen's picture from his younger days. Posers are hypocrites.

Compared to him, Jensen is a proper liberal. Jensen doesn't overtalk about ''how inclusive'' he is. He doesn't brag, in other words. Jensen considers inclusiveness about including everyone. This includes the Christians. He is friends with the Ducks, but his aunt is LGBT. That is how to be a liberal. You don't exclude people and then say you are including. The first time Misha was asked about his role as an angel and about Christianity, he bashed the Bible. I am a Muslim, but I was well and truly offended on behalf of the Christians in the audience. I feel sorry for any Christian who paid to sit in that audience and get treated so horribly. What a let down that must have been. Jared did something similar once, regarding Christianity, on Twitter, but later amended his ways. You make mistakes. You learn. It is what makes you human. Misha, as far as I know, hasn't done that. But I would love to be corrected.

Jensen is a liberal where it counts. He is not an activist, 24/7. Jensen had a heart to heart with a trans fan once, and urged her to get out of the closet. She promised that she would. But if the same guy says no to destiel, he gets a death threat for being a bigot. Why is that happening? Because Misha has spent ten years, educating his younger fan base. The millennials of today were teens back then. And he has completely conditioned their thinking. They have mini-Misha tendencies and feign offense at some really silly things, because they think it will benefit him. Getting mock offended at everything that comes out of Jared's mouth is one such example. Like him, they mock a situation or go straight into campaigning and activism. His entire behavior with regards to Trump is faulty.

Trump was the reason, I actually liked Misha. Because Misha was vocally against Trump, I respected that. I cant like a man who misplaces about a 1000 children at the border. But then Misha didn't stop. His tweets seemed to be more for attention than for the greater good. That is liberal bully mode. Liberal bullies tend to mock. How is that going to help the children at the border? How is it going to stop America from economic collapse? He is not helping the situation. He is not educating anyone. There are gay men who hate the couple that sued the Christian bakery. The couple were liberal bullies. They said that they could find a liberal bakery but were ''making an example'' out of the bakery. In other words, they were destroying the livelihood of an entire family to make a point. The gay guys who were against them, were proper liberals. They recognized that what this couple was doing, was unethical. Of course, I lost respect for Misha's anti-Trump stance, when I realized he was in girl power mode and pushing for Hillary. If somebody cant see anything wrong with Hillary, then they are blind. Misha was urging people to vote for a vagina. As a woman, I say, NO. Affirmative action has no place in government...or anywhere else for that matter. Vote for character and integrity, not girl power.

I am not young. Maybe that is why my perspective of the world is different from yours. Maybe you don't see what I see. For now. But one day you will grow a little older, and might see the world with some wisdom in your eyes, and then you might realize what I am saying. Misha is a troublemaker and an influencer. It took me eight years to realize this. It might take you longer. But I hope you see the light some day. I once said I wouldn't speak about Misha's politics. But since, I realized he is a hypocrite, I have changed my stance. I am South African. There are no liberals amongst us, but American politics is in tatters because of loud mouths like Misha, and its baffling to foreigners like myself to watch. You don't even see the division.

Please excuse the typos and thanks for reading.

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kalesandfails · 6 years ago

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shit collection

Early on in Trump’s campaign, lo these many interminable months ago, I stopped listening to the man talk. Among the good, hard changes I am white-knuckling it through is the bumpy transition from actively seeking out those beliefs that are most offensive and hurtful — to prove I’m tough? to “see both sides”? — and hoarding them, close to my chest, in a tight clammy fist, in my pocket: my own little shit collection.

Everything from the decades-old shade thrown at my J.C. Penny’s outfits to the low-key belief of the most important men in my life that while it’s not exactly my fault, these unpleasant sexual encounters I didn’t want, I kind of consented, didn’t I, insofar as I didn’t fight hard enough to stop them: all of it was thoughtfully curated in my growing collection of shit, until about age twenty -five, when I put up a big sign like that at my local library: We are no longer accepting donations. Thank you.

Up til then, however, I heard these things and didn’t like how it felt to hear them, so naturally I defended myself by meditating on them, like a samurai meditating on his own death. This is what being strong meant to me as a child and a young adult: training yourself to live with intolerable feelings. If something feels bad, that’s a sign you’re weak, so why try to make them stop when you could just tough it out and become stronger?

This is not (just) material for my therapist’s to-do list: this belief system is also critical to maintaining the current political status quo. No one wants to be the pussy who says, this is a hurtful belief, this belief that children should go hungry or drug addicts be humiliated or disabled people see their lives eroded as programs like Medicare and Medicaid are cut. The salient point that both the words Trump says, such as belittling someone’s recently dead father, and the things he does, such as cutting health care and food and education in order to build a unasked-for wall, are cruel, is recast as a bunch of millennial whining that that’s not nice, because we can shame his critics then. And in doing so, we can reinforce a belief that the expectation that human beings care about one another, rather than hurt others and then justify it - which is to say, that human beings resist abuse rather than enact it — is a sign of weakness, that this “outrage culture” is the problem, and that the systemic and violent oppression of vulnerable populations that generates outrage is not.

So, historically, I’ve just paid attention to other things. I attend to my mind the way a more effectively socialized woman might attend to her skin, but with fewer “must-have” products, and a key step in the process is the one where I flat-out refuse to invite in any additional shit. We are no longer accepting shit donations. Thank you.

While this is happening, though, the person peddling shit is an increasingly vocal and powerful determinant of public policy and national discourse. What he says “doesn’t matter” insofar as it is most often either untrue, irrelevant, or incoherent; but it does matter in the sense that people’s lives are being hurt in concrete ways by his petty bullshit. And so my efforts to sidestep the “hard truth” he proposes with every shitspray he opens his mouth or his Twitter feed to spew — the belief that human beings, the things we believe in, and the people we love, are all meaningless shit and so it doesn’t matter what we do — may be an understandable effort to preserve my mind castle from a nonstop bullshit invasion, but it is also an act of fear.

I have been protecting myself at the expense of people whose material existence depends on the rejection of this “truth”: that we are all shit and nothing matters, or its fundamentalist iteration, which was more successfully instilled in me than anything else I believe: we are all shit and nothing matters (except Jesus).

That belief, I think, explains Trump’s deep appeal to Christians. Fundamentalism Christianity, in my experience, is almost entirely about the worthlessness of humanity and the inherently suspect nature of the things humans love, and really not at all about the Jesus corollary. A faith that insistently bludgeons children with stories upholding a dad willing to kill his son as an exemplar of its values is entirely in keeping with a leader who hears about fifty one people, including a three-year-old child, gunned down in their place of worship, and turns his attention to sketch comedians who made fun of him.

It’s not enough to ignore Trump. You have to be willing to say — lovingly, because asserting the value of human beings is a loving act: the president may be saying x, but I believe y.

As in, he may believe that human beings establish their value through their proximity to wealth, or power, but I believe the intrinsic value of every human being.

As in, he may think that violence and hate are effective strategies to get what you want, but I think that there’s nothing worth attaining that requires them.

As in, he may think that he’s won, that the things that I’ve built my life around — service, working hard, trying my best to love others and to be fair — are all jokes, but I believe that these things matter, even when we seem bent on institutionalizing their opposites.

I think millennials react so strongly to Trump because Trump highlights how the values that we were taught mattered actually were not so important to the people who taught them to us. We were taught that racism is evil, but then our parents and pastors elected a racist who incites violence against brown people, takes our money for a White Guy Wall, took out a full page ad aimed at putting innocent teenagers in jail because their skin color spoke louder to him than the fact that they were exonerated. Because we we told that girls and boys were equal, but our parents listened to him gleefully recall sexually humiliating a woman attempting to do her job, celebrating that fact that his money lets him hurt women, and then refusing to apologize for it. Because we were told being honest and working hard matters, but then our third grade teacher voted for someone who lies so often that his critics are chastised for being petty and “beating a dead horse”, since “that’s just Trump” and why are we still talking about this?

But here’s the thing. Your mom and dad and paster and aunt, they can think whatever they want. Maybe they told you that you shouldn’t hurt people, and they didn’t really care about it; maybe they kind of think lying is okay and here you wasted all this time and stayed in so many recesses internalizing that it wasn’t. Maybe you looked up to them for teaching you it wasn’t. And here we are.

But you’re not obligated to resolve that cognitive dissonance.

Racism is wrong, and white people don’t get to decide whether or not something is racism.

Rape is wrong, and there is no justification for it.

Cruelty is wrong, no matter who embodies it, what nice thing they said about you, or how much money you owe them.

We don’t always have to watch Trump; he’s doing us all the favor of spewing hateful and gratuitous bullshit about dead senators right now, and I imagine whatever your agenda today, you ain’t got time for that. I don’t think we’re obligated to “know our enemy”. And Trump’s not the enemy anyway. What we’re fighting against is the belief in the inherent worthlessness of humanity and the use of that belief to maintain economic and political power, and you don’t have to listen to the president to become intimately acquainted with that belief. Innumerable school principals, churchgoers, and bullies stand eager to acquaint you with it.

But when it’s your dad, your boss, your patient, listen to these horrible things, even if they are unpleasant to hear. Then you can say: this person thinks x, but I think y. They will try to engage you in discussion, because if they are good people, they probably know that being a child being “illegal” doesn’t mean it’s okay to hurt them, that Islam is no more a violent religion than is Christianity, that kids should get lunch and sick people should get to see doctors.

You don’t owe it to them to entertain this. They think x, you think y. They have their own mind castle, questionable as its foundation may be. You get yours.And you don’t owe it to other people to come in and track their shit all over it; but you may owe it to the people outside, and to yourself, to venture outside and offer an alternative.

#fucktrump #resistance #selfcare

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