#stop letting people who are not allies dictate what is or isn’t feminist action.

[shyshitter]

Interesting how Johnny depp donated his money to sick kid and environment charities instead of women’s rights charities like. Yea those things need funding too but buddy. Do you understand what you were on trial for?? Violence against women. You’re not gonna idk. Maybe try to amend that? Even for your image? biting scratching

[theculturedmarxist]

The New York Times is literally a propaganda outlet and Timothy Egan is a deceitful chode. His every word drips with the anxious desperation of the Democrats who know their goose is cooked.

Watching “Succession,” the HBO show about the most despicable plutocrats to seize the public imagination since the Trumps were forced on us, made me want to tax the ultrarich into a homeless shelter. And it almost made a Bernie Bro of me.

That’s the thing about class loathing: It feels good, a moral high with its own endorphins, but is ultimately self-defeating. A Bernie Sanders rally is a hit from the same pipe: Screw those greedy billionaire bastards!

Sanders has passion going for him. He has authenticity. He certainly has consistency: His bumper-sticker sloganeering hasn’t changed for half a century. He was, “even as a young man, an old man,” as Time magazine said.

But he cannot beat Donald Trump, for the same reason people do not translate their hatred of the odious rich into pitchfork brigades against walled estates.

Because powerful oligarchs that own their government murder them with impunity when they do.

>March 7 was a bitterly cold day in Detroit, and a crowd estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000 gathered near the Dearborn city limits, about a mile from the Ford plant. The Detroit Times called it "one of the coldest days of the winter, with a frigid gale whooping out of the northwest". Marchers carried banners reading "Give Us Work, "We Want Bread Not Crumbs", and "Tax the Rich and Feed the Poor". Albert Goetz gave a speech, asking that the marchers avoid violence. The march proceeded peacefully along the streets of Detroit until it reached the Dearborn city limits.

>There, the Dearborn police attempted to stop the march by firing tear gas into the crowd and began hitting marchers with clubs. One officer fired a gun at the marchers. The unarmed crowd scattered into a field covered with stones, picked them up, and began throwing stones at the police. The angry marchers regrouped and advanced nearly a mile toward the plant. There, two fire engines began spraying cold water onto the marchers from an overpass. The police were joined by Ford security guards and began shooting into the crowd. Marchers Joe York, Coleman Leny and Joe DeBlasio were killed, and at least 22 others were wounded by gunfire.

>The leaders decided to call off the march at that point and began an orderly retreat. Harry Bennett, head of Ford security, drove up in a car, opened a window, and fired a pistol into the crowd. Immediately, the car was pelted with rocks, and Bennett was injured. He got out of the car and continued firing at the retreating marchers. Dearborn police and Ford security men opened fire with machine guns on the retreating marchers. Joe Bussell, 16 years old, was killed, and dozens more men were wounded. Bennett was hospitalized for his injury.

> All of the seriously wounded marchers were arrested, and the police chained many to their hospital beds after they were admitted for treatment. A nationwide search was conducted for William Z. Foster, but he was not arrested. No law enforcement or Ford security officer was arrested, although all reliable reports showed that they had engaged in all the gunfire, resulting in deaths, injuries and property damage. The New York Times reported that "Dearborn streets were stained with blood, streets were littered with broken glass and the wreckage of bullet-riddled automobiles, and nearly every window in the Ford plant's employment building had been broken".

The United States has never been a socialist country, even when it most likely should have been one, during the robber baron tyranny of the Gilded Age or the desperation of the Great Depression, and it never will be. Which isn’t to say that American capitalism is working; it needs Teddy Roosevelt-style trustbusting and restructuring. We’re coming for you, Facebook.

Yeah, just look how well that’s worked out, you fucking idiot.

The next month presents the last chance for serious scrutiny of Sanders, who is leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire. After that, Republicans will rip the bark off him. When they’re done, you will not recognize the aging, mouth-frothing, business-destroying commie from Ben and Jerry’s dystopian dairy. Demagogy is what Republicans do best. And Sanders is ripe for caricature. 

The same Republicans that got their breakfast ate by the dottering windbag cheetoman? The same Republicans that are unpopular with over half the fucking country? The same Republicans which have shown majority support for Sanders’s policies in the past? Those are the Republicans you’re talking about, right, Timothy, you fucking asshole?

I’m not worried about the Russian stuff — Bernie’s self-described “very strange honeymoon” to the totalitarian hell of the Soviet Union in 1988, and his kind words for similar regimes. Compared with a president who is a willing stooge for the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, a little vodka-induced dancing with the red bear is peanuts.

Nor am I worried about the legitimate questions concerning the candidate’s wife, Jane Sanders, who ran a Vermont college into the ground. Again, Trump’s family of grifters — from Ivanka securing her patents from China while Daddy made other promises to Beijing, to Don Jr.’s using the White House to leverage the family brand — give Democrats more than enough ammunition to return the fire.

This is fun. Due to a complete lack of incriminating conduct, little Timmy has to invent wrongdoing to libel Jane Sanders. I suppose he’s relying on his readers being too stupid to read the article that he himself links, another NYT hitpiece that desperately tries to paint Ms Sanders as a shady character without anything in the way of tangible proof.

>Federal prosecutors have not spoken publicly about their investigation, though late last year, Ms. Sanders’s lead lawyer said he had been told it had been closed. And while doubts remain about the contribution pledges claimed by the college, the lawyer has said that neither Ms. Sanders nor her husband was even questioned by investigators, indicating a lack of significant evidence of a crime.

>After Ms. Sanders’s ouster, the college’s troubles worsened. It abandoned a promising effort she had undertaken to sell some of its new land to improve its finances, interviews show. A few years later, when it did begin selling, it was to a consortium that secretly included at least one member of its board, raising conflict-of-interest questions.

>There is little question that the college’s 2016 demise can be traced to Ms. Sanders’s decision to champion an aggressive — critics say reckless — plan to buy the land. But with potential students put off by the lack of a campus, and with many such colleges struggling at the time, her move was the academic equivalent of a Hail Mary. Her allies said she never had a chance to fulfill her vision.

>“Jane made an audacious gambit to save the college,” said Genevieve Jacobs, a former faculty member. “It seemed to be a moment of ‘change or die.’”

>In interviews and emails, Ms. Sanders expressed frustration at her dismissal and the college’s failure to continue her rescue plan.

>“They went a completely different direction in every way than what we had proposed and decided upon as a board — with the bank, with the diocese, the bonding agency,” she said. “They didn’t carry out any of the plan. It was very confusing and upsetting at the time.”

The TL;DR seems to be: Jane Sanders tried to save a struggling school with an audacious but risky plan that ended up being aborted when she was let go by by a board, some of the members of which may have had a stake in seeing it fail. At the very least, a much more complex situation than the aspersion of “running it into the ground.”

Trump bragged about sexual assault, paid off a porn star and ran a fraudulent university. He sucks up to dictators and tells a half-dozen lies before he puts his socks on in the morning. A weird column about a rape fantasy from 1972 is not going to sink Bernie when Trump has debased all public discourse.

No, what will get the Trump demagogue factory working at full throttle is the central message of the Sanders campaign: that the United States needs a political revolution. It may very well need one. But most people don’t think so, as Barack Obama has argued. And getting two million new progressive votes in the usual area codes is not going to change that.

“Ah jeez, ah fuck, he has no sexual indiscretions that I can dredge up and his Feminist polemic against pornography and the rape culture that it engenders is old news, and if I actually reported on it honestly people might actually read it and support his ideas. Oh, well, you see, despite the incredible groundswell of support for just such a thing, Barack Obama, the man that gave the banks trillions of dollars and then allowed the state apparatus to function as their gestapo-cum-storm troopers, says we don’t need one!”

Timothy Egan wants to dismiss “two million new progressive votes” after doing a little gaslighting. His Democrat masters don’t want people to remember that it was Obama’s promises of Hope and Change after 8 years of Republican tyranny that generated a record breaking voter turnout. They would also like you to forget that 2016 was a 20-year low in voter turnout. Do you think those things are related, Mr Egan? Do you think that there might be some connection between Obama taking advantage of the desperation of millions of people, betraying them, and then those people not fucking showing up next time, causing your party to lose to the dimwit that they themselves boosted to the position?

Give Sanders credit for moving public opinion along on a living wage, higher taxes on the rich and the need for immediate action to stem the immolation of the planet. Most great ideas start on the fringe and move to the middle.

But some of his other ideas are stillborn, or never get beyond the fringe. Socialism, despite its flavor-of-the-month appeal to young people, is not popular with the general public. Just 39 percent of Americans view socialism positively, a bare uptick from 2010, compared with 87 percent who have a positive view of free enterprise, Gallup found last fall.

“Just” 39 percent of Americans, up 4% from 2016. This is ignoring for the moment that due to Americans’ piss-poor education system they have no idea what “Socialism” means aside from “more government.” Looking at the breakdown of results, it seems as though they just asked people off the top of their head what they thought about X, no definition or elaboration given. Unsurprisingly, when you look at the actual numbers on specific issues, you can see exactly why Egan has to play this deceptive bullshit: of respondents 18-34, 52% have a favorable view of “Socialism,” as opposed to 47% supporting “Capitalism.” This is in sharp contrast to the 35-54 and 55+ cohorts. 65% of Democrats have a favorable view of “Socialism.” Those with a “Liberal” ideology are even more in favor at 74%, Timothy Egan, you massive shithead.

What’s more, American confidence in the economy is now at the highest level in nearly two decades. That’s hardly the best condition for overthrowing the system.

"The highest level in nearly two decades.” That’s faint fucking praise right there.

You can see the tremendous fucking crater caused by the crash in 2007/8, a reversal of a whopping -81 points from the previous year. With many economists forecasting recession beginning either this year or the next, we’ll see how long the confidence lasts. 

So-called Medicare for all, once people understand that it involves eliminating all private insurance, polls at barely above 40 percent in some surveys, versus the 70 percent who favor the option of Medicare for all who want it. Other polls show majority support. But cost is a huge concern. And even Sanders cannot give a price tag for nationalizing more than one-sixth of the economy.

A ban on fracking is a poison pill in a must-win state like Pennsylvania, which Democrats lost by just over 44,000 votes in 2016. Eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another Sanders plan, is hugely unpopular with the general public.

“Medicare for all is really unpopular, except when it isn’t.”

Hmm, you know? Hmmm.

As for fracking, from his own link:

>A November poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report found that only 39 percent of Pennsylvania swing voters saw a fracking ban as a good idea, even as nearly 7 in 10 of those same voters said they supported the idea of a “Green New Deal” for the environment.

Democrats are whinging on the jobs “lost” to a fracking ban as though it exists in isolation. 39% might support a fracking ban, but 70% support the GND, which could potentially offset the “job loss” with industry that has the potential not to leave their state as a fucking environmentally ruined horror show. I haven’t run the numbers on this, but not living in a cesspool of polluted air and water tends to be pretty popular, Timbo.

More shellgames from Mr Egan regarding abolishing ICE.

> Only 1 in 4 voters in the poll, 25 percent, believe the federal government should get rid of ICE. The majority, 54 percent, think the government should keep ICE. Twenty-one percent of voters are undecided. 

That sounds bad. Maybe it’s not such a good ide

>But a plurality of Democratic voters do support abolishing ICE, the poll shows. Among Democrats, 43 percent say the government should get rid of ICE, while only 34 percent say it should keep ICE.

Oh.

Sanders is a rigid man, and he projects grumpy-old-man rigidity, with his policy prescriptions frozen in failed Marxist pipe dreams. He’s unlikely to change. I sort of like that about his character, in the same way I like that he didn’t cave to the politically correct bullies who went after him for accepting the support of the influential podcaster Joe Rogan.

Democrats win with broad-vision optimists who still shake up the system — Franklin Roosevelt, of course, but also Obama. The D’s flipped 40 House seats in 2018 without using any of Sanders’s stringent medicine. If they stick to that elixir they’ll oust Trump, the goal of a majority of Americans.

Democrats lose with fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. Three times, the party nominated William Jennings Bryan, the quirky progressive with great oratorical pipes, and three times they were trounced. Look him up, kids. Your grandchildren will do a similar search for Bernie Sanders when they wonder how Donald Trump won a second term.

“Failed Marxist pipe dreams.” Aaaaay lmao. You should also have an inkling something is wrong when you have to go all the way back to FDR to find someone that supports your point. Talk about “poison pills,” Obama proved himself to be as much of a snake as the rest, and the effects of that resonated in 2016 when the Dems ran on a platform of “that’s a nice country you have there, you wouldn’t want Trump to get elected, would you?” How did that work out? You ran one of the most unpopular politicians in the country—after very blatantly rigging the primaries against Sanders to do so—against one of the most unpopular capitalists in the country, and lost, dipshit!

Ironically, I think Timbob’s closing statement will prove true, though not in the way his clown ass intends. Shills like Egan are doing everything they can to try and poison public perception against Sanders and his policies, who only proves increasingly popular as time goes on, so much so in fact that the DNC is already biting its nails and muttering to itself about ways it can try and cheat his supporters again.

In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.

They deny it in the article, claim that changing the rules would be “bad sportsmanship,” but one would be a fool to believe them. If anything, their ambivalence towards relying on Superdelegates would make me even more nervous at this stage. Politico wants it to seem like the DNC is bent on playing fair, but more likely than not they have no intention of changing the convention rules because they believe there’s no need. With Warren’s flagging support and the luke-warm response to Biden, I doubt they’re overcome with optimism of beating Sanders in an honest primary. With all the shenanigans from last time’s primaries in mind, it’s likely that the machinery to rig the results their way is already in place—the primary could already be over before it even begins.

[hotmario-blog]

Police States

There’s so much that is so wrong to me, and so deeply wrong, that every time I try to start at some point and build from there, I find myself writing pages of explanation and contextualizing.

So I’m not going to try to do comprehensive breakdown of my feelings and fears from their source to conclusion, I’m just going to broadly appeal along emotional, and practical lines.

Here goes.

I believe that people are fundamentally good, regardless of privilege or oppression, and I believe that accountability and forgiveness can go hand in hand for everyone. Unfortunately, I find these beliefs impossible to reconcile with feminism, even intersectional feminism, as it is now, maybe so-called “wartime feminism.” People are given platforms to hurt and discredit the opposition, and those people are absolved of guilt if and only if they happen to call themselves feminists (or, more pointedly, if they are allowed to cite the many sources of oppression that cause them to lash out.)

In a patronizing, and perhaps dismissive way, I forgive these people. Their reasons are valid, and I know I have lashed out at people I otherwise love and respect when I am hurt. Their voices are real, their pain is real, and they deserve to have their concerns heard.

But not by the other side. not by the opposition, not by the people we’re trying to convince and convert.

Violence against men or white people is wrong, like all violence. So obviously the desire to commit violence should not be met with support and signal-boosts! True, that desire conveys a real pain, and true, that pain ought to influence the feminist agenda, but that’s as far as it goes! Valid emotions do not suppose valid courses of action, and this is especially and almost ALWAYS true for emotions like fear and anger!

And yet you, and feminism as a whole seems ambivalent to this distinction, this important distinction that every successful society, every successful movement before has internalized. What’s more, at times you seem to oppose it!

Critiquing over. Here’s where the appeals come in.

If you care about these people, your people, really care in a protect-them-no-matter way, if you care about this cause in a protect-it-no-matter-what way, if you LOVE these people, then you CANNOT let them self-sabotage like this!

You can love them and silence them, you can love them and condemn them, you can trust in their goodness, their potential, their value, and realize that they should not fight this war! They, above ALL PEOPLE should not fight this war, should not dictate its strategy, should not be its face and its herald.

Beyond even caring about their right to be heard (which ought to only extend to feminists in general, not the opposition) your support of them now is support of everything they embody now, and what they embody is certain, eventual death; mutual destruction, living and dying by the sword.

If you don’t condemn them, publically, openly, consistently, then you allow them, you tolerate them. You’re letting love for these people trump your actual goal both in terms of creating a successful movement, and in promoting a receptive opposition.

Perhaps the motivation for this post is getting distant so let me address it directly for a moment. Let me just state again that what I am opposed to is the people who use evil tactics as a means to win, not people who lash out at others out of frustration. Both are bad for winning, their intersection is non-empty, but the latter is tolerable insofar as they may exist in the movement and contribute when they are of sound state of mind. The former, however, the op those who use evil tactics as a means, not as side-affect, they have no redemption in the movement, and no place.

Tolerating those people means recruiting those people, and it means having and promoting those people, and letting their tactics outnumber the ethical ones used by an ever-shrinking minority of clear-headed, kind people. That’s sort of the problem with kind people, they don’t like unrepentant violations of goodwill. As you build your ranks with the unprincipled and willing, you push away those who demand kindness, and you shift the ethics of feminism inch by inch.

The ones who remain are cancer, growing out of control, sacrificing those who oppose their unprincipled, unsustainable rise. These people are the ones who defect, who are willing to sacrifice societal norms for the sake of victory, and you choose them over those who demand the exact opposite.

Even putting group cohesion aside, tolerating these people and their evil tactics isn’t even a winning strategic move. When you refuse to give goodwill, it’s because you perceive it will be abused. This is the famous, winning prisoner’s dilemma strategy, tit-for-tat. Cooperation begets cooperation, defecting begets defecting, forget everything beyond the last result.

Now how the fuck are we going to get out of a defect-defect situation when you give flagrant defectors the keys to power? How can you expect someone to show you good will if you are so willing to sacrifice it to win faster?

The answer is, obviously, stop defecting, stop encouraging defecting, punish defectors only so long as they defect.

Believe it or not, there are sane people in the opposition. There are rational, ethical, kind-hearted people in the opposition. These people cooperate. These people recognize cooperative actions. And, surprisingly, these people are not confined to a dead and dying minority, nor are they so weakened that they hold no sway.

Almost the entirety of the Republican Party condemned Trump, and they continued to do so long after it was in their best interest to let the Orange guy win. That is refusing to defect. That is goodwill. As for Big PoTrumps himself, well he’s famous for making deals, isn’t he?

You cooperate, you earn cooperative allies. You defect, you earn the most selfish, opportunistic, unprincipled possible allies, and lose them the moment the tides change. There’s a reason society’s are stable and movements are not, and there’s a reason revolutionary governments are surprisingly devoid of revolutionaries: those who supported the leader’s rise inevitably became deadweight, and were immediately discarded, in exact accordance with the revolutionary principle of defect as hard as fucking possible, always, until you win.

Well I’m done cooperating with and tolerating defectors, and unfortunately that has grown to encompass the majority of feminism. I’m gone, gone until feminism gets its ethical, humanitarian shit together, and I will not be the last.

If you want to protect your people, for fuck’s sake stop adding defectors to that list. If you want to seem like a force for good, you need to act like you’re good. It’s not biased to say that among Republicans, and among undecideds, there exist intelligent, kind, worthy people. They can’t see internal power struggles, they can’t see the secret activist guidelines, they see only what is made public for them to see.

You know what public support and private admonishment looks like to the other side? To the undecided? It looks like public support! You know who is discouraged from defecting with a private admonishment? Exactly no one. There’s no punishment, and there’s no effect! You just paint a target on your back “remove after dealing with public admonishers”      

Intersectionality is not a solution to this, Calling In is not a solution to this, and pretending nothing’s wrong isn’t a solution either. Tit-for-tat, you must punish defectors.