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things2mustdo · 4 years ago

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Emasculation mixed with extreme masochism is the best way to describe those men who opt for Democratic candidates in local, state, gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential elections. By basically every measure, Democrats regard the most trivial issues for women (such as Twitter “abuse”, manspreading, and mansplaining) as more important than the most significant issues for men (male suicide, homelessness, overrepresentation as victims of violence and many others).

In objective terms, voting Democrats only benefits those men who can publicly capitalize on defining themselves as a liberal, including authors, public commentators, Hollywood celebrities and others who need clear and incontrovertible self-promotion. And this itself depends on substituting one’s own self-interest for the health of the American nation.

This all said, cuckservatives exist in growing numbers. They and even proper conservatives are not blameless, far from it, for standing by and giving declared leftists significant room to eviscerate society. The engine rooms for stigmatizing men, however, are Democratic electoral and legislative offices, Democratic rallies and all manner of other breeding grounds for the Democrats’ pathological hatred of masculinity.

Lobbied by SJWs, whose demonstrations attract a minuscule number of people, the DNC and its representatives continue to make decisions that unabashedly demonize 50% of the population, most notably heterosexuals of Caucasian descent.

1. Democrats blame men for the state of American finances but court female and minority votes with welfare programs and privileges

There’s no point taking a current photograph of the National Debt Clock. It’s always rendered outdated less than a second later.

America is broke. End of story. With debt at over 100% relative to GDP, all that happens every time Congress avoids a debt crisis is that the proverbial can is kicked down the road. Democrats conveniently blame men, the male leadership class or (male) Wall Street bankers, forgetting that the biggest accelerant of the gargantuan US national debt has been the debilitating welfare programs initiated by liberals. The zealous faithful following the DNC Donkey have mollycoddled for years entire demographic groups with the promise of an ever flowing welfare tap.

The problem is not just that the Democrats have sucked in millions over decades to try and pursue their catastrophic policies. They have also tragically primed many in multiple generations to seek the instant gratification of welfare and spending via massive public deficits. Democrats win elections on the basis of training their targets to never care about the United States in 20 years’ time. Much or most of the population is unwilling to forgo rewards now to escape disaster or ruin in the future. The teat must keep on flowing, they scream, and much like Pavlov’s Dog, they salivate when Democrats ring the welfare bell.

While women of all races can play the (single) motherhood, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination cards to claw many more advantages, men of color are institutionalized into thinking that the old white capitalist and patriarchal society is against them and only the government, not their own drive and skills, can save them from abject poverty. The juxtaposition of “we believe in you, black men of America” and “but you need our support all the time” has the effect of the latter dominating and then totally eclipsing the former. Democrats need victims and they must continually create them or maintain them.

2. Democrats treat every white male as a beneficiary of immense privilege and a potential violent oppressor

Or so SJWs say…

Ignoring the vast socio-economic disparities between different Caucasians in America, Democrats play the perennial race card of white privilege, particularly for white men. Many white people, especially young students, even get a kick out of constantly emphasizing how they are unfairly privileged. This may bode well for people happy to participate in the further regression of society (or those pursuing lucrative political or SJW careers) but it speaks volumes about a growing bigotry against individuals just because they have a certain skin hue and biological sex.

If Democrats feel this way about what is a majority of men, it says enough already about why only emasculated men vote for them. According to this narrative, girls like Malia and Sasha Obama are bigger victims and non-beneficiaries of privilege than a Scots-Irish-descended trailer-park dweller in the Florida Panhandle. In less dramatic comparisons, the daughters of the American middle-class receive a cut-out pass to label themselves as eternal victims while the sons of white blue collar workers who didn’t finish high school supposedly gained a winning lottery ticket at birth.

Hitherto untouchable white SJW feminists are already finding themselves on the receiving end of the “Shut up, I’m a woman who’s a person of color” slingshot. To cover their bases and maintain SJW unity after an overextension that is now biting them in the ass, expect that white and other feminists will shake off many of their previous inhibitions about drawing in larger numbers of non-white male targets. And this means you if you or your recent ancestors were named Jose, DeMarcus, Ming or something similar.

3. Democrats support finding a man guilty of rape by SJW academics without a trial

It is shocking to think that Democrats like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have sons. They support the ability of universities to publicly find someone to be a rapist without a trial and have them kicked out of college, ruining their lives.

Was your neighbor accused of dodging his taxes last year? He had to face a court. Was his wife accused of shoplifting? She had to face a court. In countless American universities, however, self-congratulating academics and other officials have handed down rape “conviction” after rape “conviction,” fully supported by a vast majority of Democratic representatives in almost every state legislature and certainly in the US Congress. This legal anomaly, coincidentally, only affects men, at a time when responses to surveys are perceived as findings of fact about rape.

Despite men not being sent to jail over college “convictions,” the consequences for those caught in the web of Orwellian pseudo-jurisprudence are bleak. “Guilty” defendants are thrown out of their degrees and expelled for perpetuity, exposed to a lifetime of professional blacklisting, and constantly in fear about the next exclamation of “Rapist!” Time and time again, this reality is brushed aside by the Democratic Party.

The people who fill so-called college rape tribunals come from the same crowd of folks pumping out patently false theories that all women are oppressed by all men, that society itself oppresses all women and that all men are beneficiaries of rampant male privilege, from the Walmart cashier earning eight dollars an hour to the billionaire tycoon raised in poverty.

It is terribly unsurprising that Democrats would support this mob, as every faulty university craze from the wage gap myth to the idea of systemic police brutality against African-Americans is picked up by the DNC and used as a template for crafting their purported policies.

The modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to men and the United States

…or just avoid voting for them…

In their endless quest for an era of total dominance over the Republicans, Democrats have ignored any concept of national interest in favor of politics itself. Aside from a gated elite, men and male interests are regarding as pawns to be used in keeping their power.

When the race card is exhausted, guaranteeing the votes of black and Latino men and women, the DNC and its agents move to the gender card, knowing that their minority male voters and self-loathing white male voters have already been inculcated sufficiently and will not shift.

One of the easiest ways to practice using your masculinity is to not support the party constantly trying to emasculate you.

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punkrockpolitix · 4 years ago

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Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for.

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

#biden2020 #kamala harris #bernie or bust #aoc #nevertrump

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idairsauthor · 5 years ago

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This Fcking Impeachment: Episode One, The Fire of Union

PLAIDDER: Hello and welcome to This Fucking Emergency’s exciting new spinoff: This Fucking Impeachment. With me in the studio today is the happiest imaginary man in the world. Please welcome the unpublished-fictional man, the very little-known myth, the only-to-the-select-few legend, Conn mac Emer!

CONN: WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

PLAIDDER: I see Conn has already started celebrating...and for the first but probably not the last time, please welcome to the show another imaginary politician, the Nation’s own Gill Nileton.

GILL: I thought Ideirens couldn’t drink.

CONN: We can’t.

GILL: You kind of SEEM like you’ve been--

CONN: The exalted mood you observe in me, friend, is not the artificial product of poisonous libations, but the exhilaration of LINN SHANGHLAIM! YEEEE HAAAAAA!!

GILL: I know you told me what that means, but--

PLAIDDER: It’s an Old Tongue phrase that sort of translates as “the fire of union.”

GILL: I still don’t know what that means.

PLAIDDER: As I understand it, linn shanghlaim is used by members of the Seated Leaders to describe the experience of spontaneously and rapidly coming together to support a single piece of legislation or course of action.

GILL: Nothing’s spontaneous in politics.

CONN: Spoken like a man who’s lived all his life under a two-party system. The Seat doesn’t have parties. We have a bunch of people who each only care about what happens in their home district. BUT. Once in a while, something happens that’s so important, for reasons either venal or noble, that everyone puts that petty local tarbfnaa aside and comes together to deal with it. And that’s linn shanghlaim, and it is the reason I get up in the thurking morning. WOOOOOO!!!

GILL: I have literally never seen you this happy.

PLAIDDER: Well you have to understand, Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday that they’ve launched an impeachment inquiry.

GILL: Impeachment. This is the thing that happened to this “Bill Clinton” that I’m supposed to have been based on.

PLAIDDER: Yes. But you see, it’s also a thing that ALMOST happened to a guy named Richard Nixon that neither of you have ever heard of.

GILL: I still don’t understand.

PLAIDDER: Our...president...has just admitted that he abused the power of his office to force a third party to dig up dirt on someone who was quite possibly going to be running against him for president.

GILL: And?

PLAIDDER: And that’s Watergate. For 40 years now every political scandal has had “gate” attached to it, in honor of the Watergate scandal. But this is actually the only scandal since Watergate that actually deserves that suffix. Because this...president...has just done EXACTLY what the House was prepared to impeach Nixon for back in 1974, only in a MUCH WORSE way. All this time everyone’s known that this jackass should be impeached but they’ve been afraid to do it because so much of this stuff is unprecedented and because this...asshole...has been using his power to gaslight everyone into thinking well, maybe this ISN’T really an impeachable offense. But here is something that everyone knows, from history, actually IS an impeachable offense and furthermore is serious enough that the prospect of getting impeached for it forced that son of a bitch to resign.

CONN: And so as soon as that became clear...WHOOSH! The fire of union!

PLAIDDER: Because now, by impeaching him, they’re not repeating the Clinton impeachment, they’re repeating the Nixon one. That’s what Pelosi and friends have been worried about all this time. When the Republicans impeached...let’s say, your namesake...

GILL: This Clinton.

PLAIDDER: Yes. When they impeached him, it was over a single instance of perjury, in which he lied about the fact that he had drawn a 22 year old intern into a sexual relationship with him.

GILL: I thought they impeached him over the sex.

PLAIDDER: No. Technically, the High Crime and Misdemeanor at stake there was his lying about it under oath.

GILL: But your president lies--

PLAIDDER: Exactly. Exactly. But, you see, the Clinton impeachment was clearly politically motivated. The Republicans wouldn’t accept the fact that they’d lost the White House, so they investigated Clinton until they turned up something they could use. This, by the way, is exactly what Buttercup’s defenders are always saying the Democrats are doing now.

GILL: Which they actually are.

PLAIDDER: The difference, Gill, is that Buttercup actually is unfit to hold this office in every measurable way. He’s constantly abusing his power--not just in this phone call, but in every action he takes as President. He lies like he breathes. He upended the FBI and the Department of Justice to try to stop the Mueller investigation. He fires everyone who displays a shred of integrity or an ounce of loyalty to anything other than himself. He encourages foreign governments to bribe him by using his hotel properties. He embezzles taxpayer money by directing government entities to use his hotel properties. I cannot even list all the ways in which he has proved that he acts always and only in his own interests, even when that goes against the interests of the country he supposedly governs. He illegally blocks money that Congress has appropriated for things he doesn’t want to do or redirects money that Congress appropriated for some other purpose. He refuses to obey the law whenever it contravenes his needs, desires, or even whims. He has corrupted the entire Department of Justice and turned the Attorney General of the United States into his personal defense lawyer. He accepted help from fucking Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election and NOW--as a fucking SITTING PRESIDENT--he is actively soliciting help from Zelensky in the upcoming 2020 election. And that’s just the illegal stuff. Do not get me STARTED on the profoundly immoral things he has done with this office and to this country. He is not a president. He is a mob boss. He richly deserves to be impeached, and now at last he will be.

CONN: Look at you, drawing up the articles of impeachment already!

PLAIDDER: Every right-minded citizen of this country has had their own personal articles of impeachment drawn up for at least a year now.

GILL: I feel your pain--

PLAIDDER: Please let me never hear you say that again--

GILL: --but this seems very risky to me. They’ve already released the transcript of the phone call; and they’re right, there’s no explicit quid pro quo.

CONN: Oh friend. Do you think a man as practiced in extortion and bullying as this gleachinai is would be stupid enough to use the if-then formula? He blocks their aid, then calls--

PLAIDDER: REGARDLESS! Holding up the aid that Congress had voted to the Ukraine--for ANY reason--was ILLEGAL! He doesn’t get to DECIDE whether he disburses that aid or not! He is supposed to EXECUTE the laws that Congress passes, that is why they call it the fucking EXECUTIVE branch. He is not supposed to LEGISLATE. That’s not how this works. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS.

GILL: I think you should maybe go to commercial, stranger, you’re getting very excited.

CONN: Clearly, you’ve never watched a single episode of this show.

PLAIDDER: Fucking with that aid money is IN ITSELF an impeachable offense! We don’t even need to GET to the question of whether he did it as a quid pro quo.

CONN: Right. Just like the fact that he asked a foreign head of state to go after his political opponent is impeachable in itself, whether or not he ALSO bribed or extorted him to do it.

PLAIDDER: Thank you. I only wish we’d done this sooner.

CONN: I don’t.

PLAIDDER: And now we come to it. You’re about to tell me that Pelosi has been playing seven-dimensional Dubh Solus all this time, aren’t you?

CONN: Yes I am.

PLAIDDER: Oh Lord.

CONN: I kept saying, not yet, not yet. And would you listen to me?

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: No, you would not. Look. Your people don’t exactly have the concept of linn shanghlaim, but your Nancy Pelosi has been in politics all her life. She knows the fire of union when she sees it. And she also knows when she doesn’t see it. The Mueller investigation did not light that fire. Even if there hadn’t been all the chicanery around releasing the report, the fact that it was so inconclusive just threw water on everything. But she let him think he was winning. Because she knew that if he did, he’d do something worse and more dramatic. And now he has.

PLAIDDER: But Conn...linn shanghlaim is supposed to include everybody. It’s supposed to cut across existing...well, you don’t have formal political parties, but let’s say factional divisions. But there are no Republicans on fire right now. It’s 199 Democrats and Justin Amash.

CONN: I know. We cannot expect miracles.

PLAIDDER: But Pelosi did! She kept saying she wouldn’t do this until she had bipartisan--

CONN: Friend, do you seriously believe that she ever thought for a moment that impeachment would have bipartisan support? She works with those people EVERY. DAY.

PLAIDDER: Well then why--

CONN: Because waiting for this “bipartisan support” which was never going to appear allowed her to delay impeachment indefinitely UNTIL the right moment came along. Which is this one.

PLAIDDER: You can’t prove any of this.

CONN: Look at the results. Instead of dragging a bunch of reluctant, scared, misgiving-filled people behind her into an impeachment half of them don’t want, she’s barely one step ahead of a charging horde, all lit up with the fire of union. This is going to be unstoppable.

GILL: But isn’t thing going to play into your president’s hands? He’s supposed to love conflict, and drama, and his people are always saying impeachment is a political winner for them, and--

CONN: Gill. Friend. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.

GILL: I beg your--

CONN: LOOK AT THE RESULTS. For months now, Congress has been demanding documents and testimony and what have you and this administration’s response has been, sue me for it. Word gets out that impeachment is actually in motion and what’s the first thing that happens? The transcript of that call has been released. The whistleblower complaint is maybe going to come out tomorrow. What does that tell you?

GILL: That they’re scared.

CONN: Yes. It tells you that impeachment was the ONLY thing this crew ever took seriously. It’s the ONLY thing that was ever capable of forcing them to obey the law. They never wanted this. They feared it. That “it helps us politically” stuff was pure tarbhfnaa put out by his minions to stave it off.

PLAIDDER: Pelosi also said that’s what he--

CONN: Because she was ALSO trying to stave it off. It was convenient for her to pretend to believe their tarbhfnaa as long as she didn’t think the time was right. But she never did.

PLAIDDER: So she lied to us.

CONN: Friend, not all good women are shriias.

GILL: Now THAT’S the truth.

PLAIDDER: Oh boy.

CONN: Watch her and learn, Gill. Watch and learn.

PLAIDDER: Well, we’ll all be watching. It’s time to wrap up this episode of This Fucking Impeachment...but there will be more!

CONN: WOOOOHOOO! HYA GLEACH! HYA GLEACH! HYA GLEACH!!

GILL: Where in this studio can a man get a DRINK?

#this fcking emergency #this fcking impeachment #conn mac emer

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margridarnauds · 5 years ago

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4 & 5

Mandatory disclaimer: I'm not a trained historian and I'm an anglophone researcher, which means that my access to materials is HEAVILY restricted. As a result, I can't in good conscience stand behind EVERYTHING I say because, simply put, there might be another source out there.

But! Let's talk Arch-Thot Louis-Philippe Joseph d'Orléans, aka Philippe Égalité

4. In your eyes, what is their biggest strength?

He was a very brave man. We have accounts of him, say, going DEEP into coal pits to see for himself what conditions were like. He was THERE with the Montgolfier brothers with one of their experiments with balloon flights, taking off from Saint Cloud on the 14 August, 1784, and actually having to poke holes in the balloon itself when they rose too high. He jumped into a stream in order to save a groom of his who’d fallen in. You get this idea that he was very much a hands on type of guy who was constantly trying to be IN the action.

On top of the physical bravery, this was also a man who was willing to openly defy the royal family, which sometimes came back to bite him in the ass. During the séance royal in November 1788, he said “That’s illegal” to Louis XVI in 1788, causing him to be exiled to one of his chateaus for 5 months sans visitors (Louis’ response was, naturally, “It is legal because I want it”). He was an openly liberal member of the royal family who supported the Revolution and, when the time came, took off his old surname and replaced it with “Philippe Égalite.” I won’t say that he did well with EVERYTHING, he was, fundamentally, a ROYAL trying to be a Good Revolutionary and sometimes I think he fell back on his 18th century patriarchal BS, but he had some really, really solid moments. You’ve got to respect the ATTEMPT at least.

5. What is the most ridiculous statement on them you have ever read?

Like. Pretty much 90% of the currently existing secondary material on him. I have many Thinky Thoughts on why this is and why people still...never seem to have made their peace with him, but suffice it to say, I think that we’re still a long way from it as far as the historiography’s concerned, especially in terms of pop culture. The Royalists, I don’t think, have ever really forgiven him for not walking in line with them, and the Anglo-American take on the French Revolution is, historically, heavily pro-Royalist.

But, let’s start with this page. Now, SOME things here are technically true. So yay. But it ALSO GAVE US.

His son was so disgusted over his vote for King Louis' execution (for treason) that he abandoned him and defected from France, taking his brother (who was imprisoned with Philippe) and sister (who Philippe sent off with her governess, Madame de Genlis, and tried to take back before her name was added to the list of émigrés, though he was too late and so ended up ordering her to remain abroad for her own safety) with him. (Which is funny given that Louis-Philippe would devote considerable page time in his memoirs to trying to demonstrate his father’s innocence.)

He is strongly believed to have instigated the October march on Versailles by deliberately withholding grain from the starving peasants (because that’s in-character for the man who sheltered the poor from the cold in the winter of 1788), and by paying people to march on the Palace at Versailles.

He claimed to have been in Paris at the time of the march (Because he was), although (Biased) witnesses claimed to have seen him lead the angry mob chanting 'long live our King d'Orleans' to the Queen's bedroom (Funny that he doesn’t pop up in any of the eyewitness accounts of what went down in the Queen’s bedroom). Some accounts (Who?) also claim he was dressed as a woman.

He was a sadist who, when the Princess Lamballe's head was brought to his window on a pike, merely stood up, looked at it, and sat back down to his supper.

Whatever ambitions he had to seize power went unrealized when he was arrested and executed by Revolutionaries along with the remaining Bourbons under suspicion (*cough* karma *cough*) (If you dare to hope that the world might be a better place, you deserve to be ripped away from your family and then executed. Sympathy for victims of the Terror is only to be extended to. Like. Royalists.).

Some of this, like the Versailles thing, are pretty much. Recognized as being false. Like, WHATEVER role he MIGHT have had in organizing the March (which...I honestly don’t like that line of thinking because it really does take the agency away from the women who DID PARTICIPATE, and ties into the usual Royalist take that the people were incapable of independently rising up, there HAD to be an evil, aristocratic genius on the sidelines), he was not IN THE AREA. We have multiple ACCOUNTS of him not being in the area at the time.

The Lamballe thing...MIGHT be true, I have read the accounts of that one, though Grace Dalrymple Elliot, who renounced her friendship to him after he voted for Louis XVI’s death, said that he cared a great deal for Lamballe and would have done anything in his power to save her. The truth is so muddied at this point and the Legende Noir around Philippe is so thick that I can’t be sold one way or another. I really, really don’t think that he was a sadist, though, regardless. That goes against everything that I’ve read about the man, every fact that we do HAVE about him. And, at the risk of being an apologist...IF the story is true, and that’s a BIG if that I’m not willing to concede, people can react very differently to shocking events. Sometimes, you see something horrific, go about your business, and then freak out three hours later.

And, IF he had any ambitions to the throne, which...again...we can’t KNOW for certain, I don’t know if the stray thought entered his mind at 2 AM one day, but IF he did, he went about it in a very, very stupid way. And that’s possible! But what I firmly believe, given the evidence and his own personal statements, is that he genuinely did NOT want the throne and would have been perfectly happy as an English squire with a passion for horse racing. Every single time allegations about him wanting power came up, rather than openly working to unseat Louis, he tried to go off somewhere else. At one point, he allegedly wanted to go to America, but his longstanding favorite, Madame de Buffon, said that she wouldn’t go with him because, essentially, she could never take the blame for when he came to regret it. After Lafayette pinned him over the March to Versailles, rather than take the accusations head on, which MIGHT have salvaged his reputation, he went into voluntary exile in England much, much longer than he needed to.

And, of course, there’s the various and other rumors spread about him via the various pamphlets that were written about him. One of the longstanding favorites, dating back to his own lifetime, is of course that he sexed the Prince de Lamballe to death. (The claim is that he wanted the Prince’s fortune and, since he was married to the Prince’s sister, he hoped to get the inheritance via her, so he had the Prince sleep around in hopes of getting the venereal disease that would eventually end the Prince’s life. Though there is also a distinct feeling of Dorian Gray and Lord Henry in the descriptions of the Prince’s “seduction,” he was not by HIMSELF accused of personally sexing him to death. It was a sexing him to death by proxy, really. Even Talleyrand thought it was ridiculous, with the real explanation simply being that the two of them were thots.)

Orléans’ sex life in general tends to be amped up to 11, even past the thottiness that can be confirmed via actual sources. Like, it tends to become one more aspect of his “villainy,” with the “wholesome” world of the Royal Family and the more conservative, domestic family values that they exemplify being contrasted with the Depraved Duc D’Orléans and his various and assorted fuck-a-thons (”Yeah, it’s fine to support an oppressive class system that heavily punishes any transgression from the social norm, whether in terms of sexuality, gender, religion, or just. Saying something like “I think people should have human rights.” But I for one draw a line at fucking between multiple consenting parties.”). Pamphlet writers really stumbled over one another trying to outdo themselves with describing the scenes in lurid detail, like they’re fascinated by it but they’re also repulsed at the same time.

Really...there are just. Too many ridiculous takes, too little time.

#long post #philippe égalité #mssmartian

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headspace-hotel · 2 years ago

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Yeah Mojang can hire more people if they don't want to crunch to fulfill their own promises.

Idk I've seen a lot of stuff about how people are being "ungrateful" or whatever and we should just be happy that we got an update but listen.

Caves and Cliffs was delayed and it was 100% worth it and no one complained.

I definitely feel like this update was the devs rushing to put out stuff that was promised in Caves and Cliffs and at the same time trying to add some "new" features so it wouldn't feel like just Caves and Cliffs pt. 3

But what they promised was, well, The Wild Update, some updates to make Minecraft feel more alive and give the Overworld more atmosphere, and in the end there were zero updates to existing biomes. None!!

@ Mojang: The next update needs to just be a more low-key update based on details and improvements to existing content.

No new mechanics, no hugely complex new structures, no new functions for blocks, just give the community little things that make the content in the game feel coherent. Slabs, stairs, polished blocks and bricks for basalt and tuff and calcite and dripstone so they can actually be functional decorative blocks. Variations in dungeon structure. Variations in mineshafts.

Make mineshafts that generate high in mountains and make them have spruce wood rather than oak, i don't know. Put moss carpets in mega taiga. Put glow lichen in dark forests. Put mud on river bottoms and in regular swamps. Put basalt on ocean floors. Give azalea its own wood.

And for the love of god, no more mob votes. No one likes those. Don't show us a cool mob and then tell us it's going to be scrapped forever. Just don't do that. Why would you do that.

okay back to being a hater about the Wild Update

I think the reasons why we were disappointed not to get those little "extras" like the reeds and shelf fungi or literally any updates to other biomes have a lot to do with the fact that this would be such a logical and natural progression to improve Minecraft.

With adding content, there's a lot of freedom to do whatever, but the Wild Update was supposed to improve existing biomes, and a lot of biomes are in great need of improvement to "fit" with newer content.

And updating existing stuff should come before adding totally new stuff! It just makes sense!

1.18 provided the foundation to build upon by DRASTICALLY improving the terrain generation. It just...made perfect sense that 1.19 would be about filling and populating that terrain with stuff.

So I REALLY wanted them to give us

more plant diversity. Particularly cattails/reeds, but like...giant Rafflesia flowers in jungles. Thorny brambles in deserts. Pleeeease

more incorporation of "new" natural blocks into older biomes (are you telling me mud only exists in mangrove swamps?? No mud in rivers or ponds or regular swamps? Hello??)

Moss 100% needs to exist in mega taigas if nowhere else. In one of my (sadly now deleted) survival worlds I added moss everywhere to a mega taiga and it looks so lush and gorgeous next to the podzol and mossy cobblestone

I could go on and on: lichen needs to exist outside caves, moss carpets should be under big oak trees, mossy cobblestone and moss should like. Exist in the same places

In general we need some kind of fungi-related update. Make the mushroom island seem like an ecosystem. Put patches of mycelium in swamps.

give azalea trees their own wood

GIVE AZALEA TREES THEIR OWN WOOD THIS MAKES ME SO ANGRY it's supposed to be a new tree but it has OAK WOOD??? A SCAM??

#minecraft #mineblr #minecraft 1.19

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quakerjoe · 7 years ago

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It's been a while since I've written a "Cuppa Joe" sermon, so to speak, and for that I apologize. I've been getting over-saturated by the news and haven't been in the mood. With that, I challenge you to read this. A "Shot of Joe" for the end of February... ----------------------------------------------------- Gun violence. It won’t end in our lifetimes here in the United States. We won’t see the end of it, but perhaps, just maybe our children or grandchildren will see a day when America is once again worthy of seeing themselves as the “Land of the Brave”. Right now, we simply aren’t, and it has a lot to do with the differences we all imagine as the End Game for our futures. Some seem to strive for a sort of Utopian society where we all have health coverage, free education on all levels, clean air and water, safe food, honest, livable wages for all, and a society where it no longer matters what color our flesh is or from where our ancestors come from or what religious backgrounds we have or what sexual preferences or genders we are. We’ll reach an age, with any luck, where we’re all just simply… Americans.

However, while some of us strive for that sort of end game in the US, there are others who crave a time more akin to the post-apocalyptic times seen in Mad Max films or they hope for a zombie apocalypse or some sort of breakdown of society where they can unleash their darkest desires, including crime without fear of punishment like rape and murder, the re-implementation of slavery, and moves to put women back where they “belong”; back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and free to beat and slap around for being “uppity”. You know; “Biblical Times”. Praise Jesus, right?

The fact remains that so long as we, as a nation, glorify war and death and murder, all for the selfish sake of owning guns, then we have no business thinking we’re free, because we’re not, and there’s no merit for even remotely considering ourselves brave. Last I checked, there isn’t a nation on the planet who can assemble any kind of army, traverse the massive oceans of the Atlantic or Pacific, reach our shores and invade us. Mexico will never have enough of an army to come close to being a match for our over-bloated military. Canada… They’re simply not interested and that’s not their style since forever as a nation of their own. (They did burn down the White House during the War of 1812, but they were British back then.)

Given the massive natural barriers between us and anyone who could possibly want to do harm to the US, it seems beyond INSANE that our military is so bloody huge. We’re already fairly untouchable, and the world knows it. They, like many of us, know that our military budget is only rivaled by that of the next 15+/- nations COMBINED after us, and all but one are allies. Most of THEM, on the other hand, have amazing health care systems and far better education systems. They invest in their PEOPLE and not corporations. They have better and more modern infrastructure. They’re fighting climate change. They’re not at war with other nations like the US is all around the world. They care for their troops and don’t just talk about it and put bumper stickers on their cars.

Essentially, Americans are, in general, totally full of shit, mostly empty thoughts, and blasphemous prayers that mean fuck-all nothing. It’s how they cope. What the hell is wrong with Americans? They’re the loudest, mouthiest, and chicken-shit nation there is today. Those in charge use the military as mercenaries for the rich and powerful private sector. We treat those poor patriots like they’re going off to save the world, but does anyone ever wonder who “wins” in these overseas operations? Who gets the goods in the aftermath? Big Pharma gets poppies from Afghanistan. Big Oil corporations get benefits from constantly destabilizing the Middle East, either through bullshit invasions like in Iraq, or through undercover ops via the CIA and private merc companies. Big. Fat. Rich. Fucks. They are the ones who reap the prizes from war. Our own troops get shot at for the privilege of putting on a uniform and being led to believe that they’re going on some sacred, patriotic crusade for Uncle Same and the country they love. Their prize? They get PTSD, debilitating wounds, lost time away from home, and pretty much fucked over and forgotten in the VA system and there’s never enough money in the Big Military Budget to take care of those who they conned into facing lethal force for a king they don’t know even exists. Their bravery and duty to country is taken advantage of by those who will use them to get more money, either for their own corporations, or from donors who put big wads of cash into a politician’s coffers. We watch on as corporate money bucks taxpayer money and gains control over politicians who USED to work for “We the People”. Too many politicians work for “We, the Corporations” and the rest of us can simply go to hell, plug in to whatever diversion makes you happy, and simply… fuck off. We let politicians go unchecked. Some of us have been screaming warnings about shit like “Citizens United” which essentially has made bribery LEGAL for politicians to receive. When a politician abused his/her power, he was held accountable to “We the Taxpayers” and be ousted in the next vote or thrown out of office through recalls and so forth. Now, politicians are expected to get a return on investment for their rich donors who now get massive tax breaks while the rest of us are being lined up for slaughter because it is easier to rob a million dollars from a million people, one buck at a time, than it is to steal a cool mil from one rich fucker in one go.

The guns… Oh, the guns! It’s a religion in the US. People are simply just that selfish. Knowing FULL WELL that if there were fewer guns, people would be safer, people will NEVER give them up. That would take empathy, consciousness, conscience, and total honesty, not to mention… BRAVERY. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, we’re nowhere NEAR to any danger of being invaded. We already have a method for overthrowing the government; it’s called “SHOW UP AND FUCKING VOTE”. If you don’t like what’s going on, RUN FOR OFFICE. But give up guns? Hell no! Americans are afraid of just about everything, the worst being white dudes. Old ones. Young ones. Generation after generation, they’re bred into fear; fear of everything not white-cist-male-heterosexual and of course “Christian”. Because, you know, Jesus LOVES the AR-15 and I’ve always seen him as a sort of fifty caliber Desert Eagle carrying motherfucker, don’t you? Americans are afraid of each other. They’re afraid, like the Native Americans before them, of immigrants. You see, once you fuck someone over, you get paranoid. You’re afraid that what you did will turn around someday and come to bite you in the ass. Genocide of the Native Population. African Slavery. Religious altercations against non-Christians. Keeping women from being equals at home and in the workplace. Going overseas and shooting up the place so we can rob them of their resources to make the rich even more wealthy. Keeping the LGBTQ community hidden, repressed in the shadows and imprisoned in their closets for fear of being fired, brutally beaten or even tortured and killed. One day, there is that possibility that ALL of that could come together and bit a white man in the ass. The harshest, most brutal parts of American history were all committed by…. Wait for it… WHITE DUDES! It’s why they’re the biggest gun nuts and ammosexuals there are on planet Earth. They know their time of supremacy is coming to an end. Not all of them are on “their side”. There are those, and in ever increasing numbers, who want that Utopian society with all the clean air, food and water, livable, honest wages, and for ALL citizens of our nation to prosper and live decent lives and not have to be homeless and to live in squalor. ALL of us. Americans. Even the shitbags, chicken-shit gun nuts. That’s what being a Liberal and a Progressive means, kids. No more super-rich assholes buying our government for their own self interests. No more abusing our patriotic military to use as cannon fodder for profit. No more shafting rules that deliver justice and that protect and serve “We the People”. We won’t see it. We’ll grow too old, as we work ourselves to death because retirement is no longer an option for survival anymore. We’ll die younger and younger because only those of privilege can afford health care while the safety net programs leave more and more “We the People” out in the cold to starve to death or to die of poor health. We’ll be dead because our water is getting contaminated; our air getting more dangerous to breathe; our food becoming a corporate mob owned operation that’ll have us by the short hairs to keep us all docile and in line. We’re going to die, and not in a nation that’s brave or free.

The American Dream is just that. It’s time to wake up and decide if we’re going to pursue that dream, or let it all slip away into the nightmares that lie on the horizon because not enough of us are learned enough to see what’s going on. Not enough of us are mobilized to get politically active. That’s part of why keeping us all poor works for the rich and powerful. If we can’t afford to take time off from one of our several jobs needed to survive, we can’t afford to march, protest, or support candidates who want that Utopian End Game. Keeping us stupid, by buying up all the media outlets and only telling us what they want us to know and keeping us divided (divide and conquer; heard of that before?) keeps us from coming together as the “We” in “We the People”. Keeping our children stupid keeps this ball rolling, and shafting the education system repeatedly is well on its way to achieving that. Add to that: School Massacres! As people become more and more afraid of sending their kids to school, what will they do?

Three choices are before them. First, Home Schooling; keeping children stunted and limited in their educational input because face it- parents are not all rocket scientists and parents cannot all teach their children well enough on their own. “It takes a village”, they say, or at least a proper, public school. Second, if you’ve got the coin, there may be private schools and they’re typically religious-based, jamming their religion into you while you’re trying to learn basic math. Lastly, for the growing masses of the not-so-well-to-do, there’s fuck-all nothing. No school. Keep the masses dumb, and let them get into the work force as soon as possible. There’s always the military. We’ve already been warned that the influx of applicants to our armed forces is overrun with the not-so-bright and that it’s a matter of national security because they’re not intelligent enough to do the really important jobs needed in our armed forces. The rich love that shit. Keep the kids fed with “America is the Best!” and “USA! USA! USA!” when they haven’t a fucking clue why they’re saying it. Keep them all armed, because gun deaths maintain the fear the rich and powerful crave. Keep the general population stupid and paranoid and they can rule supreme forever, right? Possibly. We shall see.

~Quaker Joe

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dallasareaopinion · 4 years ago

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An open letter to all the Republicans who voted against the election certification

Dear Senator Cruz, Senator Hawley, Representative Brooks et al,

Now the obvious question is why, but lets get to a more specific why.

You have watched a certain person lie to the American public on a regular basis for years. You have watched this person insult, chide, bully, not take responsibility, point fingers, no shame or regret, and generally tell you that if you do not tow his line, there is something wrong with you.

And if you don’t, your reward is hate. Mike Pence towed the line, backed the President and when it came to a very simple job, something that was so basic and completely ceremonial, the President threw him under the bus. No responsibility, Pence did what he was supposed to do, nothing less, nothing more, but the President decided his life was not worth anything. Oops they guy who says he is pro-life, endangered lives for his ego. Only for his ego.

So what gives? Why do you think supporting him will be beneficial? As soon as you have to make a decision between Trump or something more important or something even completely out of your control such as opening envelopes on the Floor of the House, you are going to lose with him.

This person does not care about anyone so why do you think you are different? Why do you think that if you jump on these hand grenade of lies, that you will benefit in any way shape or form? What makes you think by any stretch of the imagination that somehow if you support Trump something good will happen to you?

The headline now, right now as I write is Trump is telling his staff not to pay Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees. Right now, I wouldn’t pay his fees either the way he has been acting, however, Mr. Giuliani has been out front for the President, now that there is trouble Trumping is dropping the Mayor off the proverbial cliff.

And do you think you are different? You think somehow that you can rise up above the fray and be Trump’s hero. You are not. You are expendable. Your support, your help, your life does not mean a damn to him. One slip, one falter and he will unleash hate upon you. He will encourage others to hate you.

And all this for a person that is encouraging people that hate to support him. So what are your expectations?

And for Senator Cruz specifically, this man insulted your family and now you kowtow to him. Why? You are not a man. He did not apologize, offer amends, or what, nothing, absolutely nothing and you go around touting his lies that the election was stolen, hoping some crumbs of support from hate groups will fall your way, that you won’t get “primaried” by his supporters. You represent Texas and you cannot stand up for yourself, so basically you do not represent Texas. I would say you only represent yourself, but since you are jumping on Trump, you do not even represent yourself. You are only a tail, something that clings to the rest of the body that wags when you make the head happy. You should resign and let someone who can stand up for what is right represent our state.

Are all 70 million Americans that voted for Trump, right wing extremists? No, but enough are that any elected Republican that supported the lie that the election was stolen is supporting hate and is complicit in destroying our Constitution. I have said it many times, that most of the Trump supporters have let themselves be mislead, but they are not evil. Unfortunately there is evil that supports Trump. The white nationalists, the neo nazis, right wing extremists that stormed the Capital or other acts of sedition do not care about Trump as a President, they like they can practice mayhem because he is President. These same people do not care that you support the President. Remember the chants about Mike Pence during the storming of the Capitol Building. The very same Mike Pence that supported the President unflinchingly for four years. In one hour all that almost went to waste as his life became in jeopardy.

And so why do you support the lie, the person? Do you think the mob that stormed the Capitol will care who you are if you are in their way? They won’t, they don’t and neither does he. He does not care about you. He only wants you to say out loud the words that protect him because he cannot protect himself. He is not person enough. And you may have noticed I have said person in many cases not man. That is intentional because I cannot call Trump a man, much less an adult.

He has no plan, no strength except what you feed his narcissism, no values, no moral compass, no compassion, no redeeming qualities as a human, so why do you support him. He is all talk, no action, except action that benefits him.And in most cases someone else did the heavy lifting, he doesn’t even do the light lifting. Something goes wrong and it is your fault, never his, so why on God’s green earth do you think you will benefit supporting him? Or there may be a fleeting moment when the crowds cheer, but in the long run the crowds will stop cheering for him. The extremists will still exist and look for a newer more debase leader, then where do you stand? Are you asking for their support then?

Most Americans that supported Trump if told the truth will be angry, but they will come to accept the truth because it is the truth. And truth does win out. They will regroup and look for a new leader, one that actually represents their dreams. The hate groups will look for a leader that represents their dreams. So again whose support are you going to chase? If you tell the truth you will get the support you want, if you continue the lie, what does that say about you?

So now I ask why?

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bryanharryrombough · 4 years ago

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There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

During the sixties, in common with many other periodicals, our New Worlds believed in revolution. Our emphasis was on fiction, the arts and sciences, because it was what we knew best. We attacked and were in turn attacked in the all-to-familiar rituals. Smiths refused to continue distributing the magazine unless we 'toned down' our contents. We refused. We were, they said, obscene, blasphemous, nihilistic etc., etc. The Daily Express attacked us. A Tory asked a question about us in the House of Commons -- why was public money (a small Arts Council grant) being spent on such filth. I recount all this not merely to establish what we were prepared to do to maintain our policies (we were eventually wiped out by Smiths and Menzies) but to point out that we were the only sf magazine to pursue what you might call a determinedly radical approach -- and sf buffs were the first to attack us with genuine vehemence. Our main serial running at the height of our troubles was called Bug Jack Barron written by Norman Spinrad, who had taken an active part in radical politics in the US and used his story to display the abuse of democracy and the media in America. He later went on to write a satirical sword-and-sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to display the fascist elements inherent to the form. The author of this novel existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf Hitler. The book was meant to point up the number of sf authors who were, in a sense, 'unsuccessful Hitlers'.

Many Americans came to use NW as a vehicle because they couldn't get their stories published in the US. Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs, Harlan Ellison and others published a good deal of their best and at the time most controversial work in NW -- and Heinlein fans actually attacked us for 'destroying' science fiction. Escapism this form might be, but it posed as a 'literature of ideas' and that, we contended, it wasn't -- unless The Green Berets was a profoundly philosophical movie.

Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed that ' this Organisation would buy advertising space in the sf magazines condemning the war in Vietnam. I was around when this was proposed. A good number of members agreed with alacrity -- including English members like myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and, to be fair, Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying that the SFWA 'shouldn't interfere in politics.' Okay, said Merril, then let's say 'The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in the Vietnam War etc.' Finally the sf magazines contained two ads -- one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MaCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer and as many other popular sf writers as were against the war. The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity -- but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of 'good leadership'; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) -- the answer is always leadership, 'decency', paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values...

What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc.) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc.) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be ,employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or 'genre' fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality and that, of course, is what propaganda does.

The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their 'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be; because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the charismatic heroes, if they are lucky, die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar has manipulated himself into the position of power and Terror has returned with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic lie. Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right: they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear. They are 'leaders'. Traditional sf is hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology (invented by the sf writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as 'radical' is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.

In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused for) a terror of the masses, the 'ugly' crowd. But this is so common to so much 'horror' fiction that it's hardly worth discussing. Lovecraft is morbid. His work equates to that negative romanticism found in much Nazi art. He was a confused anti-Semite and misanthrope, a promoter of anti-rationalist ideas about racial 'instinct' which have much in common with Mein Kampf. A dedicated supporter of 'Aryanism', a hater of women, he wound up marrying a Jewess (which might or might not have been a sign of hope -- we haven't her view of the matter)Lovecraft appeals to us primarily when we are ourselves feeling morbid. Apart from his offensively awful writing and a resultant inability to describe his horrors (leaving us to do the work -- the secret of his success -- we're all better writers than he is!) he is rarely as frightening, by implication, as most of the other highly popular writers whose concerns are not with 'meeping Things' but with idealised versions of society. It's not such a big step, for instance from Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum.

I must admit I'm not following a properly argued critical line. I'm arguing on the assumption that my readers are at least familiar with some of the books and authors I mention. I attack these books because they are the favourite reading of so many radicals. I attack the books not for their superficial fascination with quasi-medieval social systems (a la Frank Herbert). Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction. As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings and queens, lords and ladies, figure largely -- yet I am an avowed anti-monarchist. Catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favour of militarism. And just because many of Heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers I don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favour of war. It depends what use you make of such characters in a story and what, in the final analysis, you are saying.

Jules Verne in The Masterless Man put some pretty decent sentiments in the mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist and his best characters, like Captain Nemo, are embittered 'rebels' who have retreated from society. Even the aerial anarchists of The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffiths have something to be said for them, for all their inherent authoritarianism, but they are essentially romantic 'outlaws' and the views they express are not sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890s.

H.G. Wells was no more the 'father' of science fiction than Jules Verne. He inherited a tradition going back some thirty or forty years in the form he himself used and several centuries in the form of the Utopian romance. What was unusual about Wells, however, is that he was one of the first radicals of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them with powerful and telling images to make Bunyanesque allegories like The Time Machine or The Invisible Man. Wells didn't have his characters talking socialism. He showed the results of capitalism, authoritarianism, superstition and other evils and because he was a far better writer than most of those who have ever written sf before or since he made his points with considerable clarity. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking. Wells took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of socialism. Until Wells -- the most talented, original and intelligent writer of his kind -- almost all sf had devoted itself to attacks on 'decadence' and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral line and our armies to re-equip and get better officers. By and large this was the tone of much of the sf which followed Wells, from Kipling's effective but reactionary With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC (paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify 'the mob') to stories by John Buchan, Michael Arlen, William Le Quex, E. Phillips Oppenheim and hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning us of the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots, Zionist conspiracies, the yellow peril and so on and so on. Even Jack London wasn't what one might call an all-round libertarian any more than Wells was when he toyed with his ideas of an elite corps of 'samurai' who were actually not a great deal different to how Soviet Communist Party members saw themselves, or were described in official fiction and propaganda. The quasi-religious nature of sf (which I describe in a collection of pre-WWI sf Before Armageddon) was producing on the whole quasi-religious substitutes (a variety of authoritarian socialist and fascist theories). A few attacked the theories of the emerging dictators (Murray Constantine's Swastika Night, 1937, seemed to think Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future). By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the sf writers of the day hoped we would have -- 'strong leaders' reshaping nations. The reality of these hero-leaders was not, of course, entirely what had been visualised -- Nuremberg rallies and Strength Through Joy, perhaps -- but Kristellnacht and gas ovens seemed to go a bit too far.

At least the American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were not, by and large, offering us high-profile 'leadership': just the good old-fashioned mixture of implicit racialism/militarism/nationalism/paternalism carried a few hundred years into the future or a few million light years into space (E. E. Smith remains to this day one of the most popular writers of that era). John W. Campbell, who in the late thirties took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and created what many believe to be a major revolution in the development of sf, was the chief creator of the school known to buffs as 'Golden Age' sf and written by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists, whose work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting. They believed, in common with authoritarians everywhere, that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of 'workers' with themselves (the radicals) as commissars. They offered us such visions, when they attempted any overt discussion of politics at all. They were about as left-wing as The National Enquirer or The Saturday Evening Post (where their stories occasionally were to appear). They were xenophobic, smug and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe, though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of exploiters (no longer Jews but often still 'aliens'). Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage -- in the pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier, and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do...

The war helped. It provided character types and a good deal of authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly 'expert'. Those chaps had the tone of Vietnam twenty years earlier. Indeed, it's often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a 'Waldo' handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell's image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone's standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an 'alternative' that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as 'Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind'), a perpetual motion machine known as the 'Dean Drive', a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren't 'abused', and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all -- 'science-fiction' -- 'psychology' -- Jesus Christ!'- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last 'straight' sf serial for Campbell before he began his 'serious' books such as Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as 'radical' was easy enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it. Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkein and Heinlein? The clue could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth century -- it is Reaganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Maclean and The Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy -- at its most refined it is William F. Buckley Jr., who, already a long way more sophisticated than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.

Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier -- the chain of command is complex -- many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly enforced, rules from 'high up' are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A 'rebel', certainly, he or she does not assume 'rebellious charm' in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular Star Wars series which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious 'Force' which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian 'samurai' again?) and upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. Star Wars is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a compendium of other people's ideas) in its implicit structure -- quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around their necks.

Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. it raises 'instinct' above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.

It was Alfred Bester who first attracted me to science fiction. I'd read some fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs before that, but I thought that if The Stars My Destination (also called Tiger! Tiger!) was sf, then this was the fiction for me. It took me some years to realise that Bester was one of the few exceptions. At the ending of The Stars My Destination the self-educated, working class, 'scum of the spaceways', Gully Foyle, comes into possession of the substance known as PyrE, capable of detonating at a thought and probably destroying the solar system at very least. The plot has revolved around the attempts of various powerful people to get hold of the stuff. Foyle has it. Moral arguments or forceful persuasions are brought against him to make him give PyrE up to a 'responsible' agency. In the end he scatters the stuff to 'the mob' of the solar system. Here you are, he says, it's yours. Its your destiny. Do with it how you see fit.

This is one of the very, very few 'libertarian' sf novels I have ever read. If I hadn't read it, I very much doubt I should have read any more sf. It's a wonderful adventure story. It has a hero developing from a completely stupefied, illiterate hand on a spaceship to a brilliant and mature individual taking his revenge first on those who have harmed him and then gradually developing what you might call a 'political conscience.' I know of no other sf book which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism almost wholly acceptable to me. It is probably significant that it enjoys a relatively small success compared to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Leaving aside the very worthy but to my mind journalistic The Dispossessed by U.K. Le Guin, it is quite hard for me to find many other examples of sf books which, as it were, 'promote' libertarian ideas. M. John Harrison is an anarchist. His books are full of anarchists -- some of them very bizarre like the anarchist aesthetes of The Centauri Device. Typical of the New Worlds school he could be described as an existential anarchist. There is Brian Aldiss with his Barefoot in the Head vision of an LSD 'bombed' Europe almost totally liberated and developing bizarre new customs. There are J. G. Ballard's 'terminal ironies' such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash and so on, which have brought criticisms of 'nihilism' against him. There is Joanna Russ's marvellous The Female Man. So little sf has fundamental humanitarian values, let alone libertarian ideals, one is hard put to find other examples. My own taste, I suppose, is sometimes at odds with my political views. I admire Barrington J. Bayley, whose stories are often extremely abstract. One of his most enjoyable books recently published is The Soul of the Robot which discusses the nature of individual identity. Charles L. Harness is another favourite of mine. The Rose, in particular, lacks the simplifications of most sf, and The Paradox Men with its sense of the nature of Time, its thief hero, its ironic references to America Imperial, is highly entertaining. I also have a soft spot for C. M. Kornbluth who to my mind had a rather stronger political conscience than he allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favourites (though structurally it is a bit weak) is The Syndic (about a society where a rather benign Mafia is paramount). Fritz Leiber is probably the best of the older American sf writers for his prose-style, his wit and his humanity, as well as his abiding contempt for authoritarianism. His Gather, Darkness is one of the best sf books to relate political power to religious power (this was also serialised in Astounding during the forties . John Brunner, author of the CND marching song 'H-Bomb's Thunder', often writes from a distinctly socialist point of view. Harlan Ellison, who for some time had associations with a New York street gang and who has identified himself for many years with radicalism in the US, writes many short stories whose heroes have no truck with authority of any sort, though the conventions of the genre sometimes get in the way of the essential messages of his stories. This has to be true of most genre fiction. Ellison's best work is written outside the sf genre. Philip K. Dick, John Sladek, Thomas M.Disch, Joanna Russ...

To my mind one of the best examples of imaginative fiction to ear in England since the war is Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht, written in the forties and recently republished by John Conquest (available from him at Compendium Books). These 'Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman's Club' are superbly laconic pieces, concentrating more original invention into fewer words than almost any writer I can think of. They outshine, for me, almost anything else remotely like them, including the stories of Borges and other much admired imaginative writers. Richardson goes swiftly from one idea to the next, using a beautifully disciplined prose. He has the advantage of being a great ironist and I find that more palatable. Such a style can become one of the most convincing weapons in the literary arsenal and it often astonishes me how cleverly Kipling influenced generations of writers by disguising his authoritarian notions in that superb matter-of-fact, faintly ironic prose. Many writers, not necessarily of Kipling's views, have used it since. We find a debased version of it in the right-wing thrillers and sf novels of our own day. It is probably this 'tone' (employed to suggest the writer's basic decency and commonsense) which enables many people to accept ideas which, couched differently, would revolt them. Yet what Heinlein or Tolkein lack is any trace of real self-mockery. They are nature's urbane Tories. They'll put an arm round your shoulder and tell you their ideas are quite radical too, really; that they used to be fire-eaters in their youth; that there are different ways of achieving social change; that you must be realistic and pragmatic. Next time you pick up a Heinlein book think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower or, if that image isn't immediate enough, some chap in early middleage, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-pieced suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read.

Michael Moorcock, May 1977, Ladbroke Grove

#michael moorcock #science fiction #authoritarianism #fascism

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Letters to the Editor: August 5, 2020: Propagandizing for the enemy

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Letters to the Editor: August 5, 2020: Propagandizing for the enemy

Propagandizing for the enemyWith the headline “Netanyahu: Annexation is still on the agenda” (August 4), the reporters are apparently still buying into our enemies’ propaganda line – if not stating an outright lie!It’s also laughable, as the article starts by quoting the prime minister himself saying that Israel may still apply sovereignty.It has been pointed out by many columnists in The Jerusalem Post that the term “annexation” is a misnomer. The proper term is “applying sovereignty” or applying Israeli law to the areas mentioned in the Trump peace plan.So why does the Post continue to mislead the entire world by putting the word “annexation” in the headline?The article itself mentions the terms applying sovereignty or law no fewer than nine times. Nowhere is the word “annexation” mentioned – except when quoting the French foreign minister.AVRAHAM FRIEDMAN Ganei Modi’in PHYLLIS HECHT Hashmonaim The Trump and Netanyahu monstersIn “Callous inhumanity” (August 4), Heather Stone manages to cramp into her short article demonizing US President Donald Trump words and slurs including: he is callous, inhumane, inept, narcissistic, ruthless, prostrated himself, enables hate, emboldens violence, depraved indifference, doesn’t value the lives of civilians, soldiers or schoolchildren and more. Guess what? The writer is the Chair of Democrats Abroad – Israel. Does she really believe that this type of “political hate journalism” will influence anybody to change their voting preferences to Democratic? Rather the opposite. The article is hysterical, largely unsubstantiated and says nothing about real issues of concern, such as the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren approach to Israel and the takeover of the Democratic Party by the radical anti-Israeli left wing. YIGAL HOROWITZ Beersheba Regarding Ehud Olmert’s latest article (“Police vs. the citizens,” (July 31), my previous letters regarding Olmert’s “yellow journalism” have not been published, but enough is enough! What kind of excuse for commentary is “until Netanyahu leaves and with him his delusional wife and deranged son!” This is not journalism, it is simply dirty revenge. I do not remember anyone attacking Olmert’s family using such words during his terms in office. While Olmert evidently hopes that Netanyahu will soon disappear into the depths of the sea or some other place, we might recall that Maasiyahu Prison served well enough for Olmert. The author of this letter was never the prime minister of Israel, but has also never been imprisoned for any criminal offence.PROF. KENNETH KOSLOWE Petah Tikva I rubbed my eyes three times before re-reading “Yair Netanyahu given tweeting restraining order” (August 3). I had to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me.To censure a son for defending his father would, in normal circumstances, be ridiculous, but here, when the man is being constantly vilified, cursed, slandered, witch-hunted and judged guilty before trial, it is unforgivable.Let your readers (and the honorable judge of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court) put themselves in the position of young Netanyahu, watching every day and all hours of the day and night how a mob led by mobsters (protest leaders Gonen Ben Itzhak, Yishai Hadas and Haim Shadmi) screams through the streets of our capital city, unable to digest the fact that their philosophies (nay – their motives) do not represent the majority of our citizens, as shown decisively in all the elections of the last 30 years. Unable to defeat the older Netanyahu by fair means, they have descended to the foul means of incitement to riot. What would you do, if not stand up to defend your father? Well, if you would not, then you are all either lying to yourselves, or just plain degenerate.You may not agree with or even condone his coarseness of tongue and forthright manner of reacting, but just think how hurt this young man is seeing the father whom he has venerated for so many years and felt pride in his tremendous achievements for the benefit of the people of Israel and the unprecedented upswing of diplomatic prestige in the international sphere that he orchestrated – seeing him torn to pieces by our “unbiased” media and unfettered mobsters.LAURENCE BECKER Jerusalem Could someone please explain to me (and to other bewildered people) why the government allows demonstrations of tens of thousands, where social distancing is a bad joke, and we can only have 20 or so people at my son’s wedding at the end of the month? What is the logic behind this rule?Perhaps we should call it a demonstration, (but for love and happiness). Then we will get a permit for the 300 we wanted to have.And it won’t be violent.BATYA BERLINGER Jerusalem Inclusion confusion“US Jews opposing Israeli policy must be included in Jewish unity talks” (August 2), comes from the extreme Left, as indicated by its use of the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian loaded terminology such as “occupation.” Writer Ilan Bloch claims “millions” of American Jews who are “deeply engaged with Israel see its actions as going against the essence of Judaism itself.”Really? Does the writer have any solid evidence to support these wild assertions? Deeply engaged? Really?Are these “millions” really knowledgeable about Judaism? How many of the alleged “millions” had anything remotely resembling a Jewish education?There were so many untruths and distortions in the article that discredit it, but the basic point the author seems to be making is, “You may disagree with us profoundly but please don’t ignore us or forget us.”To which the only reasonable answer can be, “So don’t try to impose your outdated irrelevant political and fundamentally non-Jewish secular positions and beliefs on us.”DR. JOSEPH BERGER Netanya Disengaged and enragedRegarding “Disengagement was ‘absolute mistake” says mission commander” (July 31), the anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from the 21 communities comprising Gush Katif on Tisha Be’av 2005) seems to bring out chest-thumpers who confess their wrongdoing. Contrite retired generals (like Gershon HaCohen featured in this article), politicians and policy makers join the ever-growing list of those who admit their folly, their fateful and fraught mistakes that led to the forceful disgorging of 8,500 law-abiding civilians.Indeed, prime minister Ariel Sharon and his government (including then foreign affairs and finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu) all bear shame for supporting and executing what was arguably the greatest tragedy in modern Israeli history. In fact, it was an orchestrated and stinking maneuver featuring Likud and their cynical coalition partners, assisted by a gleeful Supreme Court.How does a catastrophe like that occur? Where are the checks and balances crucial to democracy?But beyond skewed governmental decisions, where were the common sense and basic decency that dictate that the innocent get support and protection, while the terrorists get a good thrashing?Personally, I’ve had enough of the hand-wringing politicians and leaders who, like clockwork, annually cry “Peccavi.”Israel deserves better. We must make our leaders take responsibility for their actions, through mandated accountability and transparency. To the point, laws need to be put into place, a Freedom of Information Act that gives ordinary citizens the right to pry open – unhindered and in a timely manner – government archives. Existing, empty laws that shield corrupt leaders under one pretense or another are less than worthless.Enough of the chest-thumpers. It’s time for public action.ZEV BAR EITAN Nof Ayalon UNReal UNRWA remarksRegarding “New UNRWA head to ‘Post’: No glorifying terrorists in our schools” (July 30), who does Phillippe Lazzarini, the incoming commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) think he is fooling? UNRWA schools are using PA textbooks. Even if a teacher doesn’t praise people like Dalal Mughrabi (who was involved in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel that killed 38 Israelis, 13 of them children) in the classroom, what is to stop the students from reading about them on their own?And if UNRWA obeys UN protocols, why has UNRWA abetted Arab nations in maintaining apartheid in the Middle East? I refer, of course, to the differentiation between people claiming descent from Arabs who fled Palestine generations ago and people who don’t make that claim. Members of the former group have been sitting in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the so-called West Bank for several generations. Although living among people with whom they share language, religion and ethnicity, they have not been given citizenship in the Arab countries and they will not be given citizenship in any (actual) Palestinian state that the leaders of the PA and/or Hamas may ever deign to establish.TOBY F. BLOCK Atlanta Accentuate the positiveIn “A Different Country” (August 3), Herb Keinon presents a positive side of our state of affairs. As a mother and grandmother of young men who have served in special military units, I was especially touched by the mention of the reservists celebrating the weddings of their two comrades. I was reminded of the wedding of our son 26 years ago who had served in the first “Duvdevan” unit. Dancing enthusiastically with him in a large circle were his army buddies. One could feel the closeness and love emanating from the group. Our son was the only one who had a kipah on his head. Till this day, the former soldiers of that unit have kept in contact with each other and never miss an opportunity to meet on momentous family occasions. How heartwarming it is to see the love between people who rise above their differences of faith, status, political affiliation and find a way to express respect and affection for each other. The media would do well to focus on another reality in Israel that is not permeated with overwhelming hate. TZILA RABINOWITZ Jerusalem So sayeth SethRegarding “Seth Rogen: Herzog misrepresented our conversation” (August 4), Seth Rogen should know that the more he says the worse he makes it. Now is the time to shut up. Like many other “liberal” Hollywood Democratic Jews, learning to say his lines does not give him any special knowledge or abilities in any other field, including Israel. To say that Israelis often joke about Israel doesn’t cut it either. In the pre-PC days, famous Jewish comedian Henny Youngman used to joke about his wife: “Take my wife – please” or “My wife said, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before.’ I said, “Try the kitchen.” That’s comedy – but if someone tries saying it about my wife, suddenly it’s not funny.Consequently, if Rogen, the player of many “stoner” roles, wants to redeem himself, then he should follow the example of both his parents and work unknown in a kibbutz in Israel for a few years – and then come and talk. But we all know that ain’t gonna happen.DAVID SMITH Ra’anana Arguing for ArmeniaAs a grandson to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, I read Herb Keinon’s piece (“How can Israel navigate the divide between Azerbaijan and Armenia?” July 30) with great interest. Keinon tries to explain Israel’s current dilemma in dealing with two allies who are in conflict through the lens of realpolitik, but what he fails to point out is that this goes beyond politics. Armenians and Jews share a common history sadly defined by persecution and genocide. That’s why it’s so surprising that Israel feels that it needs to be neutral while Azerbaijan tries to finish through their unprovoked aggression what Turkey tried to do to Armenia more than 100 years ago. Then again, it’s also incredible that Israel has yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Foreign relations and human rights should not be mutually exclusive. This shouldn’t be too complicated for Israel. They can stand with Armenia, a country and people that have been victims of oppression and who promote democracy, or be aligned with a country ruled by an authoritarian and be on the wrong side of history. Political expediency should play no role in this debate. Of all countries, Israel should know that all too well, given that it was founded in the wake of genocide. The choice is really simple. STEPHAN PECHDIMALDJI San Ramon, CA On targetRegarding “Iron Dome intercepts Gaza rocket fired towards southern Israel” (August 4), the Gazans have now fired nearly a hundred rockets at Israeli civilians so far this year (an average of one every other day) and thousands since 2000 – more than the total number of rockets the Nazis shot at Britain in all of World War II.Thank God for Iron Dome; the only damage this time was to vehicles from the shrapnel, but the Gazans still have thousands of missiles pointed at us and Hezbollah has even more. It amazes me that this ongoing evil war crime gets virtually no mention in the world press and no condemnation from civilized countries or from the UN.May God and/or the IDF continue to protect us – especially in light of the fact that “Israelis near borders still don’t have access to shelters” (August 4) – and punish the evildoers.I. COHEN Sderot Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Politics

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mr-kamiyama · 5 years ago

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So I went to a store called Dollar Store today. Next to the name, it said "1.25$ and up." Most items had no price, and were actually 1.75$ Even the saleslady seemed to realise how disingenuous it was, and I bought nothing.

See my last post--the dollar has been in freefall for decades.

It's not just that store. 99Cents Only stores have also not only shrunk the size of their 99 cent goods (e.g., cream cheese went from a normal 12 oz. pack to somewhere between five and eight ounces. I haven't been in one in a while), but now sell many goods at the 1.99$ (aka 2$) and 2.99$ (3$) price points, and even higher.

At this point, I think calling them "dollar stores" is just false advertising. Call them Value Shops or Bargain Shops (which the reason all supermarkets can claim to have the best value, an advertising trend that began in the '60s, is because things like "best value" are vague and completely subjective) But calling them dollar stores, even if they can legally get away with it, much the same way F*X News can legally get away with that just being a name even if it's just a mix of handwringing about how dare poor people have refridgerators and blatant white supremacists, and say "oh, that's just a name," it is just *false.*

I get where companies like BP are going with different brands of gas station marketed as different lifestyle brands ( e.g. Amoco appeals to the muscle car crowd, AM/PM is relaxed West Coast and always there with coffee, day or night, etc) Lifestyle branding isn't something that can be true or false, just like you can have a depressive disco dancer or a ridiculously optimistic and bubbly punk rocker.

But when you're blatantly misrepresenting the type of product you sell, like "dollar stores" have become or F*X News may have always been ( they definitely are now, but I don't know if they were always like this or not), there really needs to be a line drawn that prevents this.

The Better Business Bureau used to, and had its teeth taken out to save abusive and tyrannical megacorps like Wal-Mart, Papa John's, or McDonald's (McDonald's in America is *evil* to its employees, explanation because they're global, and in some countries, their behaviour would be instant corporate suicide)

I dunno if they'd have domain over media. I mean, you can easily find the racism and lies that newspapers spread about internment camps for Japanese Americans, but it also remained uncontested. Even today, racism against Asians is totally cool with the rest of y'all. And y'all smother our voices and gang up to gaslight us when we do speak out. So I can't really look at that and ascertain anything from it.

But my main point is that while yes, advertising in its particular modern shape of things like lifestyle branding was actually literally Freud's nephew experimenting with peacetime uses for propoganda, it's not like Pepsi associating itself with hip youthfulness makes it any less of a cola. It's the advertisers trying to get you to associate a certain feeling with their product. But it doesn't make their product any less what it is or alter the actual product in any way. It's deceptive in a way, if you lack any sort of critical thinking, I guess, because I can drink Pepsi until I'm passed out from sugar spike, but I'll never bring my hairline back to where it was ten years ago or not have arthritis again?

But they're also not actually claiming a youth serum or anything, so I guess it's more like going to a roller rink looking for what you felt in your local one in '82.

But all these so-called "dollar stores," which mostly used to actually be "everything is a dollar," since the branding is considered to mean that, even though it's arguably legacy naming, it's not that anymore, and so, I find it deceptive enough to cross a line. Just like F*x News, which is entirely bigoted hot-takes and not actual news.

(Note that I'm not saying that decieving about what you sell and Nazism are equated, but that both have names that lure people in by easily disproven falsehoods. That's why I'm comparing. Not a whole lot does that. I'm really just putting this here because most of the English internet is made of bad faith actors who will deliberately twist others' words)

There really needs to be something done about outright easily proven deception to lure people in. Even if we consider the legacy branding aspect of the stores at hand, it's just no longer true, and they really need to rename to "Bargain Shops" or something.

But even if it's somehow just too gosh darn hard for people to, yanno, not hate everyone who's not exactly like them to care about the people making your McDonald's orders or people dying of blood poisoning like it's 1803 because of lack of insurance, people generally want stuff that's not made to break and be irreparable after two years. When I tell young people about the shrine to 1987 I live in and all of this stuff being made to be maintenanced and repaired, it always sounds so wonderful to them. And every repairman left is super depressed because buying a new unit is cheaper than bare cost of parts, and they can't complete. I don't think anyone's happy about modern technology being intentionally flimsy. Americans are also beginning to realise American food makers take more chance on variety in overseas markets. There are things the average American consumer is upset about, even if the treatment of the people who serve them isn't one of them.

But the US is just such an oligarchy. A few big companies rule everything and pay off the government like a mob.

So these companies can get away with luring us in with lies. And we're more split up, isolated than ever. I'm Gen X. We were eraced into the shadows. And I'm also Asian American and trans male, two other demographs that's happened to. Mixed is a fourth one I am. As I am pointing out,erasure of a demograph makes its members become very isolated. But I do see Millennials talking about being lonely and having trouble socialising a lot. So I think the movement of socialising to the internet did *something,* and it's actually a lot of people that are having trouble reaching out.

Never mind that 21st Century society's rule is "it's wrong to hate me but fun to hate my neighbour." Divides have gotten worse/become the rule rather than just oppressor Vs. all oppressed, and that *is* fed by social media. We should also be taking action against this! Even *I* get far-right v-logger recommendations on YouTube, and the only thing I use YouTube for is music that came out before any v-loggers were born! I watch zero v-logs. It tries to shove v-logs so massively known for being hate screeds that even *I* know those names are bad news, at me. We should be protesting Tumbler... doing a lot of things, and all sites letting Nazists flourish net-wide while I've literally seen some cartoon fish meme-style joke about white cops get people banned on Twitter.

But every so often, people do band together and still get something done. Remember the internet blackout? The "pipes" are still "dumb"!

Just like that post I have about the ways voting does still matter even though gerrymandering, rigged voter machines, etc., are all true, consumer action still matters.

But no one's ever listened to me, because I'm a mixed, Asian, immigrant, disabled, trans, ace Xer. No one wants to be forced to admit I exist. So you probably won't either. You would rather contend with a lousy hand than admit I'm right.

(I literally called the US The Ring when it came out, and subsequent similar movies "unnecessary blond hair versions" over a decade before people really started saying these things were "whitewashed." Just one example)

#American society #consumer action #consumer advocacy #efficacy #dishonest business practices #protests #21st century society #corporate greed #better business bureau #societal complacency #erasure

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phroyd · 7 years ago

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Seventy years after the week in which the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shocked the nation and the world, it is easy enough to imagine the loss of America’s longest-serving and most-transformative president as history.

But FDR understood the American story as that of a long struggle characterized by old fights on new grounds. “In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most nations,” he said. “But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.”

The way to “reaffirm the faith of our fathers” Roosevelt argued, as he sought and won his greatest electoral victory in 1936, was “to restore to the people a wider freedom.”

“That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power,” FDR explained, in his “Rendezvous With Destiny” speech to the Democratic National Convention of 1936; he continued:

In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

The whole point of the New Deal was to challenge the economic royalists on behalf of the great mass of Americans, and to establish that wider freedom.

“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live,” Roosevelt said. “Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Roosevelt was re-elected that year, as he would be again in 1940 and 1944. He led the nation as it struggled to overcome a Great Depression at home and fascism abroad. But he never lost sight of the great struggle to overcome economic tyranny.

To that end, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that was, in its themes and purposes, as bold as the first. It was this “Second Bill of Rights,” an economic bill of rights, that he promised to pursue in the fourth term that was cut short by his death.

“It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure,” Roosevelt told the Congress and the nation in the 1944 State of the Union address that framed the final year of his presidency.

“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty,” said FDR, who explained:

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

—The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

—The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

—The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

—The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

—The right of every family to a decent home;

—The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

—The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

—The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Seventy years after this country lost Franklin Roosevelt and the promise of a final term spent advocating for a realization of the “new goals of human happiness and well-being,” those goals have yet to be realized. The historian Havey Kaye has argued that President Obama should recognize Roosevelt’s vision and present it anew. The Roosevelt Institute and the Four Freedoms Center remind us that expanding and extending the debate about basic rights and democracy presents “a compelling vision for the future.” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has explored these possibilities with his “Economic Agenda for America.” Those are starting points, but they should not be the end of the embrace.

Democrats who speak of FDR’s legacy, and progressives who understand that legacy in its full measure, honor him best by renewing and extending the struggle for a “Second Bill of Rights.”

Phroyd

#second bill of rights #roosevelt

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militant-holy-knight · 6 years ago

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When Libtards Take the Terrorist Side

Leftists used to champion women and LGBT’s rights. How long until they are okay with wife-beating, hand-chopping, child marriage, FGM, slavery and polyandry?

I used to believe that those in the PC culture sphere that identify themselves as “democrats”, “Labour”, “liberals”, “leftists”, “communists” or whatever that have consistently rebuked anyone who dares to criticize Islam have done so out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness mixed with ignorance. But at this point, we can’t remain blind anymore that some self-described “liberals” are now malicious in their intent, and makes me wonder if the same Left who used to champion women’s and LGBT rights will soon say its fine for Muslims to throw gays off buildings, for women to cover themselves up or they will be splashed with acid, for Christians to pay protection money or be crucified.

I am not necessarily putting the “Left” or “Muslims” as a whole under the same blanket, I will get to this later on, but I refer to an specific alliance between far-left activists with a genocidal hatred for anything “conservative” (anything to their right-wing, including liberals who disagree with them) and those who genuinely believe ISIS was completely justified and they want to repeat the same process in the West. And worse, this rot is seeped deep into politics for anyone who sees it. The more recent examples I could think of are:

A Canadian resolution that would have recognized the persecution of Assyrians, Yazidis and Shias by ISIS as genocide was blocked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has consistently called terrorist organizations like Hamas as “friends”. Hamas is an terrorist organization dedicated in turning Israel into a Islamic state and has systematically implemented Shariah law in the Gaza Strip.

Muslim Labour member Aysegul Gurbuz have been suspended praising Hitler on Twitter.

Linda Sarsour is an activist that has been embraced by American feminists for criticizing Donald Trump but has a history of promoting Sharia law and saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Her fellow Women’s March Tamika Malory got into hot water for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and refusing to say Israel has a right to exist.

Iranian feminist Masih Alinejad condemned female SJWs for using the hijab in solidarity after campaigning so hard to be free in the Iranian regime.

Despite factual evidence to the contrary, ABC’s Matthew Douwd believes Muslims in America are far persecuted far more than Christians worldwide.

That last point is the key issue the Western left has when it comes to perspective. Recent statistics show that liberals seem to be completely divorced from reality when comparing the genocide of Christians in the Islamic world when compared to the “persecution” of Muslims in the West.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats, however, believe most Muslims in this country [America] are mistreated, a view shared by only 22% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Fewer Democrats (47%) think most Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world, compared to 76% of GOP voters and 64% of unaffiliateds...Women are more likely than men to think most American Muslims are mistreated here but less likely to believe Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world. Nearly as many voters under 40 think most Muslims are mistreated in America (51%) as think most Christians are mistreated in the Muslim world (57%).

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslims persecuting Christians are not "terrorists" (at least not formally), but rather come from all rungs of Muslim society. Take Egypt, for example (the 17th worst nation according to Open Doors, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians world wide). According to the report, along with "violent religious groups," two other segments of society are "very strong[ly]" responsible for the persecution:

"non-Christian religious leaders" — meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and the rest — "at any level from local to national"

"normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs."

Similarly, "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians, particularly "through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." Now, compare all this to the supposedly worse — in liberal minds — "mistreatment" Muslims suffer in America. According to a November 2017 Pew report: "In 2016, there were 127 reported [Muslim] victims of aggravated or simple assault." In the preceding decades, assaults on Muslims averaged around 50 a year.

Even if this number were accurate, it pales in comparison to what millions of Christians — not 127 — are experiencing under Islam. But the fact is many of these anti-Muslim hate crimes are later found to have been fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Note, for instance, how the Pew report conflates "assaults" with "simple assaults" — even though the latter "does not involve physical contact with the victim."

Moreover, Muslims in America do not experience institutionalized persecution — that is, persecution at the hands of governments, authorities, and police — as Christians under Islam do...Nonetheless... all these actual facts have little to do with what a significantly large segment of the American voting population — mostly liberals and Democrats... believe. Why they are so misinformed becomes apparent when one understands that the liberal media is dedicated to maintaining liberal narratives at all costs: in this case, that Christians are always the aggressors, while Muslims always the misunderstood victims.

youtube

Hamed Abdel Samad is an Egyptian political scientist and a former Muslim who made a scathing remark about the Western left when it came to cuddling up to Islam:

"The beginnings of the European left included principles like criticism of religion… Karl Marx was the first leftist, and he said that religion was the opium of the people. The left founded feminism and fought for women's liberation. Nobody fought for freedom of expression more than the left. The left said that nobody is above the law, and that nobody – not Moses, nor Jesus, the queen, the king, or any celebrity – is above criticism. They criticized, drew [cartoons], and made comedies about all of them. Nobody defended homosexuals more than the left, and the same is true of women's rights. But when it comes to Islam, the left morphs into the conservative right. You can draw [cartoons] of Jesus, of Moses, of anybody, but don’t draw Muhammad, because that's racism… Why is it racism? When you say that the immigrants have problems in their neighborhood, the [left] says: 'Don’t talk about the immigrants. They are victims of the West.' Man, the [immigrants] are killing one another. Their neighborhoods have become dreadful. No, you cannot criticize the immigrants, or else you are labeled racist and Islamophobic. They picked up the term 'Islamophobia' from the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and they keep talking about Islamophobia all the time.”

"In Denmark, when a Muslim kid comes to school with bruises on his face or neck, nobody says anything. They leave him alone. But if they see bruises on a white Danish kid, they report it to the police and the social services, so that they will come and investigate his family. But when the Muslims beat their kids, it is viewed as part of their culture. This is a despicable leftist approach. I call it the racism of low expectations. They look at a Muslim and say: He will never be like us. He cannot be expected to uphold human rights, to accept criticism, or to accept dissenting views. They view Muslims as barbaric savages. I saw to my Muslim brothers: Don't be pleased that these people are defending you. They are looking down on you. It's true that I myself criticize you and your religion, but I respect you and your intellect. I want you to be better and to gain your rights. I don't want you to be satisfied by someone who pats you on the back.” (...)

"The [leftists] have a psychological complex towards their Western countries. They hate capitalism. They hate America. They hate the West. They see the West as the worst thing in the world, and they embrace and defend anything that is anti-West. They always wanted to defend the working class, but there are no working classes in the world anymore. (...)

With the working class gone, the leftists were looking for someone to defend, so they got us the 'Third World' – our beloved people of the 'Third World,' who are persecuted by colonialism, imperialism, and whatnot… Bring me a 'Third World' to defend… But the 'Third World' is no longer what it used to be, and nobody uses that phrase, so along came the immigrants, especially the Muslims ones. They come to the West... How nice! Come, I will defend you. Be quiet, and let me defend you. Don't say a word, and I will get you your rights. Some Syrian refugees who come here to Germany are young and eager to work and learn German. They want to make something of themselves before it's too late. They know that things in Germany might change, and they would be sent back, just like that. If economic or political conditions change, or if a right-wing party comes to power… So the young want to start… But you see that the leftists who help them say to them: 'You are still traumatized. You are still affected by the war.' Traumatized? They want to work. But they are told it’s not time yet. They want to keep them in the role of the victim. They want to keep them in a jar or in a zoo cage, like monkeys.

"This is the left that deals with the Muslims. These leftists defend the hijab and make a hijab-clad Barbie doll. The leftists are very happy, even though the company did it for gain: 'How wonderful. They made a Barbie doll!' I will dedicate an episode of my show to this subject. I will talk about how they are promoting the hijab in Europe these days. In the past, they would say that the hijab represents modesty. But the Muslim Brotherhood realized the West would not go for that modesty business, so they changed their rhetoric. They began to say that the hijab symbolizes freedom, self-determination, and emancipation. Now they are saying that the hijab means empowerment of women. Seriously?! The hijab means empowerment of women? To hell with this deception. And the leftists willingly buy anything the Muslim Brotherhood sells them. They are oppressed… They are all victims of the West… I should dedicate an entire episode to this psychological issue. The European left has created a hierarchy of victims. The best victims are the victims of the West, of Israel, of imperialism, and of capitalism. But a Muslim who kills his wife is a 'poor little thing'… The West drove him to this…

"When a terrorist says in his message that he is killing infidels because he was told to do so by the Prophet and the Quran, and that he must cleanse the land from abomination and corruption, and he even quotes Quranic verses in support of his point of view – the leftists say to him: 'No, you didn’t do it because of your religion. You are marginalized. You are a victim of the West. You are a victim of racism. You are a victim of colonialism. You probably applied for a job and was rejected by the West. You must have tried to become part of society, but was rejected.' [The terrorist himself] cites the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran as the reason, and in his last testimony, he writes that he did it because of his religion, because he wants to break bread with the Prophet Muhammad in Paradise… But it’s to no avail. The left has him pegged as a victim. For the leftists, any Muslim or African is a victim of the West. That's pure racism. It means that they do not see Muslims or Africans as people responsible for their own lives. No, the leftists want someone to defend. They like to play the role of the advocate. They have a sort of 'mother complex' and want to protect someone – even if it is from the leftists themselves."

It hasn’t been no surprise that our biggest academic institutions have been funded by Saudi petro-dollars, which gave an open space for Islamists to infiltrate it and disseminate their ideology. The most moderate liberals are usually indoctrinated into believing that past Islamic societies were more advanced and progressive than the European West, which is why they frame things that we would consider discriminatory like the jizya and dhimmitude as some kind of enviable status where religious minorities are protected and respected when it was factually untrue.

The most shrewd of these far-leftists see this as an game against their political opponents and Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood members make the more natural allies since they share one thing in common: being control freaks. They work side by side to ensure their power base, say liberal memes in public to rally the useful idiots and the public with their media as propaganda arm. This way they can hope to get people they disagree with de-platformed, silenced or maybe even killed.

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Case in point, Islamist apologist (and possible terrorist sympathizer) Omar Aziz has recently penned an article in response to the Christchurch attack denouncing atheist author Sam Harris for having emboldened the NZ terrorist into carrying out his attack. Harris pointed out that Aziz’s article is dishonest because he is aware of Harris’ political positions as someone who opposes fascism and identity politics of any kind, yet writes such an article wasn’t tailored at refuting his points, but to discredit him in the eyes of the masses who don’t know anything about Harris. Aziz is even more dishonest by the fact the terrorist manifesto doesn’t mention Harris once the whole time, but since the public will be discouraged from reading it (and it constitutes as an crime in New Zealand), its very fortunate into misleading the audience.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Muslims and liberals themselves that disagree with the collective are rebuked and persecuted by their own rather than by “the other side”. I can’t keep keep track of the number of Muslim reformers (adherents or atheists) that are criticized by the left such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Mohammed Tawhidi, Ed Hussein, Zineb El Rhazoui or Tarek Fatah, I don’t even dare Google them to see what is the latest hit piece written by some leftist retard. On a even more serious note, some of these might actually have their lives in danger.

Zineb El Rhazoui was a writer in the Charlie Hebdo magazine who survived the 2015 massacre due to receiving a Holiday extension and being at her home in Casablanca when the attack took place where twelve of her friends were killed including Charb. After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants, taking the train and later moving from place to place because Islamists have issued fatwas calling for her death.

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali used to be a Dutch politician before having to move out of the country after her close friend Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Moroccan Islamist for making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. Considering that two years before van Gogh’s death, Dutch politician Pym Fortuin (a gay Catholic mind you) was also assassinated by an jihadist, Ali’s safety could not be ensured in the Netherlands and she had to flee.

Tarek Fatah is a liberal Indian Muslim who advocates for secularism, gay rights, opposes shariah law and other things. He regularly clashes with Canada’s Muslim community and in 2017, has been nearly assassinated by a man hired by Muslim mafioso Dawood Ibrahim.

Rather than drawing condemnation for, the left has been at best silent or ignorant, or at worse unsympathetic if not downright cheerleading for their deaths to happen:

When van Gogh was killed, Rohan Jayasekera made light of his death for “overusing his freedom of speech” to criticize Muslims (yet, Jayasekera gave a platform for Holocaust denier David Irving).

Former Charlie Hebdo employee Oliver Cyran said his former employees brought their deaths on themselves and also accused Rhazoui of being anti-Muslim racist, without revealing her name or gender to give the impression everyone in Hebdo were all white bigots. She further goes to own him by saying that (from Wikipedia):

if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people.”

How are we supposed to expect the people to uphold liberalism that can’t even protect their own free-thinkers and politicians who dare to speak out against Islamic radicalism, are going to protect the average individual. I live in Brazil where no-go areas are a sad reality of our lives, but when I look at what happens in places like Europe (specifically Sweden), I get terrified. Our drug dealers are really crazy, but none are willing to go as far as carrying out bomb attacks or are that much in a rush to get into Heaven.

And if you think the creation of Islamic states backed by the Left is unlikely, you are sorely mistaken. Islam makes up only 3% of the population in the USA, mostly concentrated in Minnesotta, yet the local politicians want to enforce blasphemy laws in response to the Christchurch attack. Minnesotta, the same state where Ilhan Omar came from and is buddies with Linda Sarsour. The people reading this and believing it to be pure paranoia would have been shitting bricks if a evangelical Christian conservative was making similar prepositions.

The first people hurt by this of course will be liberals themselves; surely they have already been. Maria Ladenburger for example was the daughter of an top European Union official who was raped and drowned by an Afghan asylum seeker who was already arrested before for trying to rape a Greek woman and admitted in prison to have raped a girl in Iran even before that. More recently, two Scandinavian girls Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were beheaded while in a trip to Morocco by ISIS militants. Several people on the far-right were specially unsympathetic, specially in the latter case it surfaced that the girls were pro-migrants themselves.

It’s easy for certain heartless individuals on the right-wing to say “they had it coming” or “burn the coal? Pay the toll” with glee, but this is an symptom of Western liberal pampering where women in particular are raised to believe everyone will be as open-minded as they were. Even though Morocco is sure a nice to place to visit, its far from an ideal place to live if you are a Christian, a woman or specially a Scandinavian liberal. I’ve seen Scandinavians saying that liberal virtue-signalling is just an natural and innocent thing to do in their countries in order to fit in better.

I am sad to say that its not just exclusive to Scandinavia. Ever since 9/11, vast portions of the Western Left have disgraced themselves by their failure to acknowledge the threats posed to security and social cohesion by radical and fundamentalist Islam, and a craven willingness to align with Islamists in opposition to American foreign policy, entangled in an obscurantist web of moral relativity, postcolonial theory, identity politics, anti-Zionism, and general moral confusion. Even back then, many leftist ideologues argued that the World Trade Center attack was a “justified” action because of the USA for supporting Israel and their actions in the Gulf War, never mind those weren’t related - bin Laden repeatedly used the sactions against Iraq to rally Muslims against the West but never had any love for Saddam Hussein and Ba’athism. The most infamous incident was an essay made by Ward Churchill where he basically called the 9/11 victims “little Eichemanns” (in reference to Adolf Eichemann, one of the architects of the Holocaust) because they were bureaucrats working for the “genocide in the Middle-East”. Not a very wise move.

I am for one sick and tired of their collusion, but I am afraid this won’t be the last time I write about such topic. While the outrage against Brunei applying sharia law appears to show that liberals will draw a line at somewhere, I don’t think this will amount to anything and I personally find their outrage hypocritical. I close this off with something for you to ponder: if you think the Muslims you know personally are moderates just ask them if they would like Sharia law to be legally enforced, then you will discover the truth about how moderate they claim to be.

#terrorism #rants #politics #persecution

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youthincare · 8 years ago

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Throughout the 2016 campaign, amid the  shock of its results, and in the various recapitulations of its lessons, great swaths of the mainstream and liberal press have been consistent about whom they blame for Donald Trump and his ultra-right-wing administration: the white working class. “That’s what Trump is playing to,” The New Yorker’s George Packer told NPR’s Terry Gross days before the election. “It’s a really dangerous, volatile game, but that’s…maybe the biggest story of this election.” In the weeks after the election, liberal-hotshot-of-yesteryear Markos Moulitsas found it appropriate to crow over retired coal miners losing their health coverage from his swanky office in Berkeley, California (median home value: $1,080,400). Even today, the contempt remains obvious: Self-appointed “resistance” leader and actual flag-wearer Keith Olbermann could find no better way to insult his fellow multimillionaires Sarah Palin, Kid Rock, and Ted Nugent than by calling them “trailer park trash.” 

Even according to pundits on the traditional right, one can find the reason for Trump’s success festering in lower-income white communities, the enemies of racial and social progress, where reactionary politics and redneck racism run rampant. “The white American underclass,” according to National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, “is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” According to this analysis, Trump’s fascism is merely a reflection of the debased preferences of poor people. 

But scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEightreported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute  bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.” 

Trump’s most institutionally entrenched middle-class base includes policeand Border Patrol unions, whom he promptly unleashed after his inauguration by allowing them free rein in enforcing his vague but terrifying immigration orders, and by appointing an attorney general who would call off investigations into troubled police departments. As wanton as their human-rights atrocities in the years leading up to the Trump era have been, law-enforcement agents are already making their earlier conduct look like a model of restraint. They are Trump’s most passionate supporters and make concrete his contempt for anyone not white, male, and rich. 

The Trump train: The candidate rallies with supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

Always and everywhere, this sort of petit bourgeois constitutes the core of fascism. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, his look at the German economy and ideology in the five years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Wilhelm Reich argued that this was largely because of the petite bourgeoisie’s dependence on the patriarchal family unit, which he called the “central reactionary germ cell” of “the authoritarian state.” As the “heads” of their families, small-business-owning men often exploited their wives and children and enforced a patriarchal morality on them in the interest of protecting their somewhat vulnerable enterprises. This oriented the petite bourgeoisie structurally toward reactionary politics. 

If the petit-bourgeois American suburbs embody a sexist hierarchy, they exist in order to enforce a racist one. In the mid-20th century, white northern and western urbanites faced a choice: Stay in the cities where Jim Crow was driving a “Great Migration” of millions of black people, or flee to the new suburban residential developments, complete with racist exclusionary charters. The Federal Housing Administration made the choice easy: Its policy redlined neighborhoods where black people were settling as having low “residential security,” thus making financial services inaccessible. In white-only suburban communities, however, the FHA was pleased to guarantee home mortgages. “There goes the neighborhood,” said millions, and fled. 

The lower you go down the economic ladder in America, the less likely an eligible voter is to go to the polls.

Their material security bound up in the value of their real-estate assets, suburban white people had powerful incentives to keep their neighborhoods white. Just by their very proximity, black people would make their neighborhoods less desirable to future white home-buyers, thereby depreciating the value of the location. Location being the first rule of real estate, suburban homeowners nurtured racist attitudes, while deluding themselves that they weren’t excluding black people for reasons beyond their pocketbooks. 

In recent decades, rising urban rents have been pushing lower-income people to more peripheral locations. As suburbia has grown poorer, the more affluent homeowners have fled for the even greener pastures of exurbia. Everywhere they turn, their economic anxiety  follows them.  

And yet, “among people I talk to, ‘economic anxiety’ has become kind of a joke slogan,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, by way of explaining Trump’s rise. “I mean, there is real economic hardship. West Virginia is not a happy place. But…it’s really mostly about race.” Krugman and Amanpour’s seamless transition from “anxiety” to “hardship” betrays the assumption that haunted the entire discussion: that the only form of economic anxiety is deprivation. To the contrary, the form of economic anxiety propelling the racism of devoted Trump supporters is associated with paying taxes; with jealously guarding their modest savings; with stopping black people from moving nearby and diminishing the value of their property and thus the quality of their kids’ schools; and with preserving the patriarchal family structure that facilitates it all.  

So where do white working-class people fit  in? When I use the phrase “working class” here, I mean “in and adjacent to poverty.” The first thing to understand about the political participation of these folks is that, as Bernie Sanders noted during the Democratic primaries, “poor people don’t vote”—not only because of their alienation from politics, but also because of voter suppression, a lack of education and transportation, and all the other practical ills of poverty. The lower you go down the economic ladder in America, the less likely an eligible voter is to go to the polls.  

Addressing America’s deep economic inequality will require working-class unity across all categories.

Needless to say, there are many white working-class people fully on board with Trump’s program. Even the portion who merely tolerate his racism and xenophobia, so long as he delivers contracts to build pipelines, present a major political challenge. But as we consider, post-election, who belongs in the “resistance,” we are making a high-stakes claim if we regard working-class white people as so irredeemably bigoted that they should not be a part of it. Any political alignment capable of addressing the deep economic inequality that fortifies and exacerbates every other problem in American life will require working-class unity across racial, gender, and sexual categories, and around shared interests. While drawing working-class white people into this coalition requires a formidable political struggle, excluding them from it makes marshaling the numbers necessary to achieve and wield power impossible. 

Whiteness itself confers a degree of property, as the legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has described, and poor and working-class whites, who lack other forms of property, therefore have reason to try to protect it. This led W.E.B. Du Bois to observe: “So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.” America’s original sin has thereby created an enormous hurdle to organizing black and white workers together. In order to do so, white workers must be convinced to give up one form of privilege—the one that’s offered by the myth of racial superiority—in order to struggle alongside black workers. Solidarity, as a result, has been a monumental challenge, and white racism has often won the day. American history nevertheless offers us a variety of examples of workers choosing solidarity, often due to the leadership and perseverance of black workers and thinkers. 

In 1894, an alliance between the poor white Populists and poor black Republican agricultural workers won control of the North Carolina legislature and started making reforms, including the appointment of black officials. Four years later, a white-supremacist election returned the legislature to the “planter class”–backed Democrats. Two days after the election, mobs of  Democrat-aligned white people roamed black neighborhoods, shooting, killing, and burning. 

During the Great Depression, Communists went to Birmingham, Alabama, to organize for economic rights among the unemployed working class; they initially thought white workers would step up, but predominantly black workers did, and they ended up organizing black and white together. Making a national cause of the 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine black teens were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, the Communists formed a series of organizations. These included the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which prefigured the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and a sharecroppers’ union that at its peak boasted 12,000 members, including white ones. As commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor waged war on them in the 1940s, and though he was able to crush the Alabama Communist Party, he couldn’t crush the groundwork it had laid for the civil-rights revolution against Jim Crow—including Rosa Parks’s early political action.  

In the late 1960s, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton assembled interracial coalitions of lower-income people. In 1967, when initiating his Poor People’s Campaign, King suggested that since “the economic question [is] fundamental for blacks and whites alike, ‘Power for Poor People’ would be much more appropriate than the slogan ‘Black Power.’” Hampton didn’t shy away from “Black Power,” but he paired it with other forms: “White Power to white people, Brown Power to brown people, Yellow Power to yellow people, Black Power to Black people, X power to those we left out and Panther Power to the Vanguard Party.” For their efforts, both were murdered, Hampton by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, and King by a “working-class white” assassin that his family and associates maintain was a pawn in a conspiracy involving the Memphis Police Department, the FBI, and others.  

War on Poverty: The Poor People’s Campaign at the State Fairgrounds in Ohio, May 13, 1968. (AP Photo)

In all of these cases, the racism that destroyed these efforts did not come from the white working class, but from affluent whites and law enforcement.  

To be sure, the white people who participated in these coalitions were not free from suspicion of and contempt for black people, but they were not so incorrigibly hateful as to be blind to the important points of unity they shared. These working-class whites were able to see working-class black people as teammates. 

This is key: People find ways to warm to those we perceive as teammates. Historian Judith Stein, for instance, cites the case of Jim Cole, who recalled of his time working in the CIO-organized Chicago yards: “I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay, or settling grievances about anything, I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world gettin’ everybody who works in the yards together, and breakin’ up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.” 

“Egalitarian racial sentiment,” Stein concludes, “is often the consequence, not the cause, of unionization.” 

Pathologizing the white working class as inherently bigoted serves two functions: It discourages working-class organizing across racial lines, and it provides white liberals with a convenient scapegoat who, being white, can’t charge racism. As Malcolm X cautioned, “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”  

If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars.  

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

To overcome fascism, we will have to stop fetishizing the middle class and start uniting the working class. To that end, the Movement for Black Lives’ platformprovides a blueprint for the emancipation not only of black people but the working class at large. With an emphasis on divesting from law enforcement and incarceration and investing in guaranteed human rights to income, housing, health care, education, and a healthy environment, the agenda provides a broad umbrella that can accommodate the visions driving several of our recent period’s social movements: Labor, environmental, peace, and immigration groups, among many others, have already endorsed it. 

As the beneficiaries of systemic racism, white people have a special obligation to organize toward the realization of this program, and to acknowledge that black people’s reluctance to work with those who hold bigoted attitudes is understandable and that the need for independent black organizing is pressing. Still, the only political force capable of advancing the Movement for Black Lives’ agenda will be rooted in the shared interests of the working class. The failure to follow the lead of Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King and engage working-class white people in the fight for socialism and black liberation will only continue to undermine that struggle and sacrifice those same people to the cul-de-sac brownshirts and the revolting demagogue at their helm.

#working class #news #trumpism

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one-of-us-blog · 8 years ago

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Larceny and Old Lace (TGG, Season 3, Episode 21)

Today Eli is forced to watch and recap Larceny and Old Lace, Episode 21 of the third season of The Golden Girls. Sophia has a dangerous new boyfriend, and Dorothy isn’t happy about the situation. Will this tale of senior rebellion steal Eli’s heart, or prove to be nothing but trouble? Keep reading to find out…

Jon, I’m glad that you enjoyed Vincent and the Doctor, and your recap was excellent. We’re building up to what I consider some pretty good episodes, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the Eleventh Doctor will grow on you, especially given that he has a pretty lengthy run in the TARDIS. Next on your agenda is a fun little episode that features a very recognizable actor, at a time when he was far less famous (though still relatively well known). I hope you like it! For now, there are some shenanigans going down in Miami and I need to make sure the cops don’t get called, so buckle in.

Buttocks tight!

Episode written by Robert Bruce, Martin Weiss, Jeffrey Ferro, and Fredric Weiss, directed by Terry Hughes

As the episode opens, Dorothy is returning home from a beauty appointment, but Sophia clearly wants her to make herself scarce a bit longer. She not-so-subtly attempts to get rid of her daughter, and Dorothy infers that Sophia must have her no-good boyfriend Rocco over for a visit again. Sophia met him at the police station, and Dorothy is convinced he is bad news through and through. We move to the lanai to meet the hooligan.

Oh hey, I knew from Vacation in Season Two that Sophia had a fondness for Japanese men, and now it seems that she’s dating Mr. Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany’s! Wait, my mistake, I believe that’s Lampie, the loveable drunk from Pete’s Dragon. No, it seems that I’m wrong again…it’s beloved, chameleonic, completely inoffensive actor Mickey Rooney! He’s here now to play the extremely nuanced character of Rocco the Wiseguy. Rocco is enjoying a cigar on the lanai, and casually mentioning that he “ran Detroit” in the mob as he plays a game of strip poker with Sophia. It’s just the kind of understated performance I would expect from Mr. Rooney. Dorothy has enough and breaks up the game of cards, causing Sophia to ask: “Who do you think you are, Donald Trump? You don’t run this casino.” No, Sophia, Dorothy is clearly not Mr. Trump. For starters, she has intelligence, compassion, common sense, basic concern for the well-being of other people, and perhaps even some general leadership skills, unlike the gross punchline from a 1980s sitcom. But Sophia is tired of being bossed around by her daughter, and I’m tired of remembering that a significant number of people in this country actually voted for a habitually lying spray-tanned conman.

In the kitchen, Dorothy confides to Rose that she is upset about Sophia hanging out with Rocco. The man is a bad influence. Rose, meanwhile, is concerned that Blanche seems to be picking on her lately. To prove this point, Blanche enters the room and insults her. When Rose departs, Dorothy asks Blanche what’s up. Blanche confides that she has been reading Rose’s diary, and reads aloud a passage in which Rose indicates she is tired of living with two pigs. Dorothy takes the high ground briefly, but after Blanche leaves the diary behind as temptation, it isn’t long before Dorothy is faking a coughing fit to cover her attempts at breaking open the book’s latch.

We jump ahead, and once again Blanche is snooping in Rose’s diary. Sophia and Rocco show up with a shopping cart full of random stuff, and we learn that Rocco has asked his best gal to store his valuables at her pad, as there have been some robberies around his place recently (and none here since Break-In, during Season One). Rose notices that her diary has been tampered with and confronts Blanche and Dorothy. They try to point out that Rose said some mean things in her diary, but it was clearly For Her Eyes Only and she is pissed. She tells the girls that they aren’t friends anymore, and storms off.

That night, Dorothy wakes Sophia up in bed. She can’t sleep because of the drama with Rose, and needs someone to talk to. Not long after, Blanche enters with the same problem, and finally so does Rose. Dorothy and Blanche apologize profusely, but Rose insists that she can no longer trust them. They again bring up the hurtful things that Rose said in her diary, before learning that what they read was Rose’s old 4H diary and that she was talking about literal pigs. Oops. Sophia makes an attempt at a “Picture It” to smooth things over but it doesn’t really materialize, and Rose says yet again that Dorothy and Blanche have finally crossed a line and that the relationship is over. Thankfully, it only takes about fifteen seconds in the hallway alone for her to realize that she misses them, and the whole gang makes up and hugs. Wait, the B plot is already resolved? Well, the group hug is actually an excuse to knock over one of Rocco’s bags, discovering a huge stash of cash within. How did Rocco get these fat stacks? Sophia mentions that he had the satchel when the two of them went to the bank, that he had her keep the car running, and that he left the bank in a big hurry. Totally unsuspicious, right? Dorothy thinks (for some reason) that Rocco robbed the bank, and wants to call the cops. Sophia stops her and defends Rocco. She gives him a call to see what’s up, and he tells her that he did, in fact, rob the bank. Well, it’s off to the kitchen for some late night eating!

In the kitchen, Sophia still doesn’t want to involve the authorities. She says that Rocco had a good reason for what he did; he’s in love. He’s coming over to explain himself. If he won’t turn himself in, then she will call the cops. But from now on, all of her relationships are going to be strictly physical. The other girls begin to tell romantic stories: Blanche has a steamy story about a perfect evening with George; Dorothy has a story about swallowing an engagement ring during Stan’s proposal; and Rose doesn’t understand the details of either of them.

Rocco sneaks onto the lanai to talk to Sophia. He has come to get her, and he wants her to make a run with him, south of the border. She turns him down, and he finally admits that he has been lying all along. He was never a big shot gangster, and he didn’t rob the bank. The money was his life savings, and he just wanted to impress Sophia and treat her like a queen. Sophia is touched.

We jump forward a bit, and Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose are playing a board game in the kitchen. They appear to be using a Monopoly board, but are pretending to read trivia questions off of cards; so, either the girls have invented a new tabletop sensation from existing components of other games, or the props department got lazy. Dorothy is waiting up for her mother when the phone rings. It’s Sophia, and she will be spending the night at Rocco’s place. Dorothy forbids it, and declares that as long as Sophia lives under her roof, she’ll live by Dorothy’s rules. Her rebellious mother tells her to go [redacted] herself in return.

The End.

This one falls into the category of episodes that entertained me, but that’s about it. I can get behind the message that you’re never too old for romance, and it was amusing to see Dorothy take on the role of overprotective parental figure. As far as Rocco, I know that Mickey Rooney is a beloved figure but I guess he just doesn’t really do anything for me, and this episode was no exception. I can’t say I’m a fan, and there doesn’t feel like much point in getting invested anyway when you know that in all likelihood he’s just going to be gone in the next episode, never to be mentioned again. The B plot with Rose also felt a little forced, and even though Blanche and Dorothy were clearly in the wrong by reading her diary, I didn’t find her indignation particularly believable. My favorite part of the episode was probably the conversation about romance around the kitchen table, with Blanche and Dorothy weaving their tales and Rose missing the point entirely. I supposed I would re-watch this episode if it happened to be on television, but I doubt that I’ll be revisiting it otherwise. I give Larceny and Old Lace a score of 3 poofy hairdos out of 5.

Be sure to stop by on Saturday when Jon will give us his take on The Lodger, the next episode of Doctor Who, and I’ll be back on Tuesday to recap Rose’s Big Adventure, the next episode of The Golden Girls. Until then, as always, thank you for being a friend, and for being One of Us!

#golden girls #the golden girls #one of us

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