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amandajoyce118 · 6 years ago

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The Punisher Season 2 Easter Eggs And References

Yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me that the second season of The Punisher dropped on Netflix a month ago. Surprisingly, this last month has been extremely busy for me. Birthdays, family stuff, changes in management at my day job, changes in editors (thrice!) at my freelance job, plus prepping my tax stuff has left me with very little free time. I finally managed to finish the second season this weekend (and I started Umbrella Academy, which is really interesting, but something I’m not familiar with, so no Easter Eggs on that one, sorry!) and finish writing up Easter eggs as well.

As usual, there are spoilers, but I went episode by episode with the Easter eggs. Anybody worried about spoilers has probably already watched the show at this point. I feel like I was probably the last one out there who hadn’t watched. Despite it taking me forever and a day to watch the show, there’s still a chance I didn’t catch everything, especially since the Punisher doesn’t seem like a show with a lot of in-universe Easter eggs.

Happy reading!

S2E01 “Roadhouse Blues”

The Van

Oh, look. Pete AKA Frank is using a van full time. In the comics, the van houses a wide variety of weapons and surveillance equipment, but Frank isn’t quite that high tech without the help of someone like Micro around. He also calls it the Battle Van.

Lola’s Roadhouse

It’s probably just a coincidence, because Lola is just one of those names that pop culture junkies seem to love, but… who else thinks it might be a nod to Coulson’s favorite car in Agents of SHIELD?

Fiona

Some people will try to find the Marvel character that is “Fiona,” but again, I think this one is a coincidence. Why? Fiona is a weirdly popular name in comics. There’s a Fiona who is an Inhuman who can fly. There’s a Fiona who founds the sisterhood and hates men. There are also Fionas who are artists/writers/pencilers/etc in real life. I think this is just a case of them picking a pretty name.

Michigan

It’s the last place anyone would look, you say? Kind of like how it’s the last place anyone seems to care about because Flint still doesn’t have clean water? Yep.

S2E02 “Fight Or Flight”

Pete and Rachel

I like that Frank is still using the name Pete, but can we all laugh for a second about how these two are Pete and Rachel? It makes me laugh because these are two characters in friends. Pete only asks Monica out because he overhears Monica and Rachel talking about their love lives (or lack of them). Pete, funnily enough is like a Tony Stark character here: wealthy, throwing money around to get what he wants, buying women buildings, etc. He’s also played by Jon Favreau AKA Happy Hogan in the Iron Man movies. It’s one of those things that’s not meant to be a connection, but proves you can find “Easter eggs” in anything.

Rachel AKA Amy

Amy is based on a comic book character, but she’s been completely changed for the show. In the comics, she was a little girl who saw Frank escape a crime scene and promised him she wouldn’t tell anyone. He helped her out a few times as well. But, like I said, completely different. (Of course, the use of the name Rachel, and some of her later story gives a nod to another comic book character as well. We’ll talk about that later.)

Larkville, Ohio

Clearly based on Clarkville, Ohio. They thought leaving off one letter would make it less obvious? Anyway, here are some fun facts about Ohio in the MCU. It’s where there was a secret wing of a prison for powered people (thanks, Agents of SHIELD). It’s also where Coulson and company went to get information about CENTIPEDE (again, thanks Agents of SHIELD). Lincoln Campbell tried to escape Inhuman life as a doctor there (again, Agents of SHIELD). It’s also where Bucky sarcastically remarked Steve Rogers was from for one of his many fake ID’s to get in the army (Captain America: The First Avenger). And, it’s also where Helmut Zemo tracked down a super soldier in hiding (Captain America: Civil War). So, what I’m saying is, if you’re interested in lying low in the MCU, you don’t go to Ohio. Someone will find you.

Billy’s Memory

Billy Russo’s memory being jumbled, or having gaps, provides a nice storytelling device, but it’s also a nice nod to the comics. His memory was manipulated, or he was brainwashed, a few times. The only thing that restored his memory those times? Fighting the Punisher, of course.

A Jigsaw Puzzle

Lots of puzzle references to Billy, and with good reason. In the comics, he’s Jigsaw. The guy gets thrown through a plate glass window and his face is put back together like a jigsaw by a surgeon. He takes on the name and vows revenge.

Billy’s Mask

His mask is more than just to build suspense by covering up his face. You’ll see there are red and blue colors on the sides? It’s meant to be a nod to an art therapy practice that’s become helpful in treating soldiers with PTSD as a result of their work. Soldiers are instructed to create a mask to show people what they’re feeling on the inside, even if they can’t say it. National Geographic did a whole piece on how the work has been helping people. I wrote about it in my Jigsaw list, briefly.

S2E03 “Trouble The Water”

129

The door number that is clearly visible when Billy breaks out of the hospital with his therapist’s help is 129. To be fair, most house numbers, door numbers, and phone numbers are completely random. This one might be a coincidence. But… Amazing Spider-Man issue 129 was the very first appearance of the Punisher. Jigsaw AKA Billy Russo appeared over 30 issues later in the same series. It seems purposeful.

Mahoney

Look at Mahoney, making the rounds still. He started as a character on Daredevil and has worked his way through the Netflix shows.

The Pilgrim

That’s the name given in press releases to the religious villain who has some, uh, questionable tattoos removed once upon a time. He’s not a specific comic book character, but a lot of people have compared him to the Mennonite from the old Punisher comics.

S2E04 “Scar Tissue”

WHiH

The world news station of choice in the MCU, this one gets more attention in the movies. It’s covering news from every corner of the globe. Recently, it’s made its way into the Netflix shows, Agents of SHIELD, and Runaways as well.

WJBP TV

Another station in the MCU, this one is local. It’s typically only seen in the Netflix corner of the universe, so it’s usually covering New York news.

The Kitten Hanging On The Branch

I’m sorry, but did anyone not see one of these posters if they grew up in the United States? Nice nod to the inspirational poster schtick the public school system has. I think I saw it in guidance counselor offices at every school I went to.

New York Bulletin

Yes, the Bulletin is still going strong despite losing a lot of its staff in the second season of Daredevil.

Amy AKA Rachel

Okay, so despite looking like a nod to the little kid who keeps Frank’s secret in the comics, this character also appears to be a nod to Rachel Cole. She ended up in the middle of a gang war and became a vigilante, falling in with Frank.

Baseball

So, Billy had a thing for baseball? You know who else had a thing for baseball? Dex AKA Bullseye in Daredevil season two. Nice job keeping your sociopaths on theme, Netflix MCU.

S2E05 “One-Eyed Jacks”

Three Card Monte

I have a hard time believing that Frank Castle, marine, killer, and all around street savvy dude, doesn’t understand how Three Card Monte works. Then again, maybe no one has tried to swindle him with cards because they value their life. Who knows? Anyway, I found this version interesting because most people who hustle with it want you to “find the lady” as the queen of hearts. Here, it’s the queen of diamonds. I’m not sure what that says, but it’s interesting. (Also, I feel like Amy AKA Rachel and Skye AKA Daisy would get along. It reminded me of the sugar packets and Mike’s ID in the Agents of SHIELD pilot).

Turk Barrett

At this point, if you don’t know who Turk is, I’m just going to assume you haven’t seen any of the Netflix shows before. In which case, why are you reading these Easter eggs? Go start watching from the beginning, and then come back.

Oh, sh1t!

I think it’s cute that for all her life as a hustler, she doesn’t use actual curse words, but instead, speaks the way teens might curse via text.

S2E06 “Nakazal”

“You could always burn the place down.”

I feel like this is a nod to how arson tends to be a last resort for Frank in the comics. He prefers to go in, guns blazing, and just take people out. There are a few stories where he’s torched whole buildings, but they usually are just a minor thing in a major story arc.

Anderson And Eliza Schultz

Not comic book characters, but they do share their surname with Herman Schultz AKA the Shocker. I think that’s probably not a big connection. Instead, it’s more likely that the writers liked the name, and as a bonus, it gives them a nod to comic creators Charles Schultz (Peanuts) and Mark Schultz (art for DC, but also really big in indie comics).

I’m not going to list all of the political commentary in this episode, but whew. They really went for it.

S2E07 “One Bad Day”

The Title

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man to lunacy.” Or at least, that’s what the Joker believes in Batman’s The Killing Joke. It’s one of the biggest Batman stories ever, so I’m thinking the title is no coincidence. I also think a few staff members are Batman fans since the kid in the first episode also had a Batman backpack.

Fragmentation Grenade

An interesting choice for a weapon since in the comics, Jigsaw gets healed a few times, only to have his face ruined again by the Punisher. One of those times is the result of a fragmentation grenade.

S2E08 “My Brother’s Keeper”

The Fatal Shore By Robert Hughes

The book Amy reads when she’s bored in the trailer is actually about the founding of Australia. History teaches us it was a penal colony - the place where criminals were shipped to start over - but there were already Aboriginals there, which made for quite the conflict. Someone like Amy probably would have found the crime, the hustle of the whole thing, interesting, but she doesn’t strike me as someone who would be into history, so it’s no wonder she put it down.

“He did everything he could to you to make sure you suffered for the rest of your life.”

Yes. This is exactly why Frank leaves Billy alive in the comics. He kills everyone who had a hand in the deaths of his family - all but Billy, even though they weren’t as close as brothers in the comics. He leaves Billy alive so that the guy can suffer, but also to serve as a warning to anyone who comes after him. Billy spends a lot of his story arcs either trying to get revenge, or trying to get his “pretty boy” looks back.

S2E09 “Flustercluck”

Valhalla

Do we say this is a nod to the Thor franchise, or do we just accept that the world at large has the idea of Valhalla as paradise? Your call.

“I’m not the one that dies…”

I’ll confess Punisher is not my comic book cup of tea, but I feel like he said this line in a comic once. I could be wrong.

S2E10 “The Dark Hearts Of Men”

The Title

Pretty sure this is a nod to a Bible verse about humanity. But I’m not up on my Bible knowledge and a google search just gives me a bunch of reviews of this episode, so I’m sorry this isn’t more specific?

“Drunkards Prayer”

This is the song that plays when the Pilgrim is both fighting and recovering from his fight. It’s a song about wanting to be pious, but knowing you’re an addict. And it fits with his character pretty well. AJ McLean (of the Backstreet Boys) covered it once, if you’re interested. I think you could also apply it to just about any character in Castle’s world - people wanting to be better, but unable to leave the bad things in their life behind. And no, I won’t dissect every song choice for the season, but this one stuck with me.

Making Castle Believe The Worst

Making the Punisher believe he killed innocent people is straight out of the comics. It’s one trick a villain uses to bring him down, though ultimately, he figures out he wasn’t the one responsible. That looks like the same thing here with Castle believing he killed the women and the therapist’s “I know how to break Castle” thing.

S2E11 “The Abyss”

Queens

I find it interesting that the Punisher is frequenting Queens a lot in this season. (The warehouse where he gets arrested, as noted in the radio broadcast, is in Queens.) Why? Because he was introduced in a Spider-Man comic and frequently crossed paths with the web crawler. Where is Peter Parker from? Queens.

Karen Page

Karen’s appearance as Frank’s “lawyer” here muddles the timeline a bit. We’ve all been thinking this occurs after season three of Daredevil. That season ended with Matt and Foggy reforming Nelson and Murdock, but with making Karen a partner as well. Never mind that she doesn’t have a law degree or anything like that. But, Karen introduces herself as representing Nelson and Murdock. Maybe her name isn’t in the business because she’s not a lawyer? Or maybe this is actually set before that? Who knows? It’s all very ambiguous.

Sacred Saints Hospital

While this hospital didn’t appear in another episode, the Sacred Saints Cemetery did, and I wonder if they’re connected to one another? Sacred Saints is where Elektra was supposedly buried, which gives us a lot of Daredevil connections in this episode, huh?

Matt Murdock

Frank mentions the man himself while talking with Karen. I feel like this is more of a reminder that Frank knows Matt is Daredevil than it is a legit comment on the state of Matt and Karen’s relationship.

Karen’s Shoes

Not an Easter egg, but I like that the payment to the morgue tech/assistant medical examiner was her very expensive shoes, not something tropey like drinks with him. Thank you, writers. This was cute. Also, it gave Karen the means to run around the hotel easier and not be held back by her heels.

S2E12 “Collision Course”

Mr. Blue

The only thing I noticed in this episode was the nickname given to Billy by the florist. It’s actually the alias Betty Ross used in the comments when Bruce Banner was a fugitive and she tried to stay in contact with him. Probably not intentional, but you never know.

S2E13 “The Whirlwind”

“...pull your spine out of your throat…”

In the “Space” stories for the Punisher, he does something like this to Ultron, funnily enough. He reaches into Ultron’s mouth and pulls his core out, not his spine, through his throat.

Dive School In Florida

Okay, I couldn’t find any characters associated with the Punisher who spend a lot of time in Florida, but I can tell you Florida made its first appearance for Marve in Marvel Comics #1, that Man-Thing is from there, and that Captain Marvel spent time there working for NASA. Florida has also popped up in a few episodes of Agents of SHIELD. It’s where Joey (former SHIELD ally and Inhuman teammate) lives, where Elena has friends, and where May and Coulson pretended to be married to steal a painting.

The Final Shot

That final image of Castle in his Punisher vest opening fire has been in several comics. It’s clear it’s intentional.

Stan Lee

The final episode closes with an “in loving memory.” Not really an Easter egg, but worth a mention. While Stan Lee did not create the Punisher, he had a hand in his name. Originally, Frank Castle was going to be called the Assassin. Lee thought they should go for something a little less on the nose, and coined the Punisher.

A few notes for the season:

Castle never purposely uses lethal force against law enforcement. I guess that’s supposed to make us believe that his killing of all the bad guys is acceptable.

The support group that Curtis leads? One of my favorite things is that there are a lot of flyers on the bulletin boards behind them for things like free puppies. A lot of these guys would do better (not suddenly be whole again, but maybe do a little bit better) with an emotional support animal. It’s proven that having an animal to come home to can actually help you live longer. It’s one of the reasons there are groups that take animals into children’s hospitals and retirement homes for people to play with.

The season finale actually feels very final to me. I think this might have been the only one of the MCU Netflix shows where the writers thought they might not come back? Because it seems like they closed everything up nicely instead of teasing something else down the line.

That’s all I’ve got this time around. The next Easter egg list on the horizon for me is, I believe, Captain Marvel, which should be up the same weekend it releases since I’m seeing that one opening night.

#punisher #punisher season 2 #punisher easter eggs #marvel easter eggs #easter eggs

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fapangel · 7 years ago

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Tell me, anon, how do you feel about going to Mars - to stay?// You do know that NASA got a half a million applications to do just that? Look, I think that anon attempted to point out that the Left is so far gone, that yes, they would allow a Carrier to go down just to take a swing at Trump. After the shooting that the baseball game, I just can't put it past them.

… okay, bruh, I get where you’re coming from, but I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell every fuckhead who says “Obama is a Muslim:” that doesn’t give you free license to sling the same breathtaking, demonizing slanders the Left does. And that includes not slandering everyone on The Other Side by the actions and words of their most violent and insane members.

Listen, Obama was a shitshow. He was a narcissistic asshole who had his dick sucked so much from Day One that he came to believe he really was infallible, a narcissist that indulged his own whims to the detriment of long-standing alliances from day one, when one of his first acts in office was to exile the Winston Churchill bust from his office in favor of an MLK one. If you think that’s not important, I’ll let you read between the lines of this CNN shill piece trying to defend it and decide for yourself, given the British reaction and the history of the gesture, what the message that sent was. Also consider this:

Winston S. Churchill is the only U.S. Navy vessel to have a Royal Navy Officer permanently assigned to the ship’s company (usually a Navigation Officer).[3] The U.S. Navy had a permanent U.S. Navy Officer on the Royal Navy ship, HMS Marlborough, until its decommission on 8 July 2005.

Moving that bust out of the Oval Office mattered. And while the impact of that at the beginning of Obama’s reign was minor, what he did at the end of it was not - the man with essentially anti-colonialist views ended up lecturing Duterte, the democratically-elected President of a sovereign nation, as if the Philippines was still our fucking colonial lapdog. He managed to damage one of our most important regional alliances and open the door to a China eager to capitalize on it at the worst possible goddamned time. He’s a prick, who’s full of himself:

This is precisely why his Big Legacy, Obamacare, is a fucking dumpster fire - because it was forced through the Senate without a proper vote, using the Slaughter Rule, without fuck one being given for the fact that the people who’s co-operation they’d need to make Obamacare work - i.e., state governments - were the same ones they completely blew off when crafting it. Even if you think that Obamacare was totally fine and only those evil conservative states refusing to “pay their fair share” sabotaged it, you can’t deny that the Democrats - led by Obama - are the ones that rammed it down their throats while screaming “EAT IT, BITCH!” Politically, it was built to fail.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about Obama politicizing the executive branch to an unheard of degree? Examples? Using the IRS against his political opponents, for one. Or the time when twenty-six states sued to stop (another) of Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy, and his Justice Department responded by willful and active obstruction of the legal process so severe that the Federal Judge called it out as deliberate deception, and ordered every single one of the government lawyers to take remedial ethics classes. This is also the same Justice Department, under that fuck Eric Holder, that presided over the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking “sting” op that deliberately let American guns get smuggled to Mexico - ignoring multiple tips and reports from other gun dealers/FFL holders who knew who the smugglers were and how shady they were. Not only did the “sting” operation utterly fucking fail, but a US Border Patrol agent was killed by one of the weapons. And he wasn’t the only one - check out this NBC report that didn’t age so well, full of horror and so aghast at how American guns are fueling that awful Mexican drug war. Fuckin NRA, amirite? This is what Obama did for brown people - he killed a lot of them. Oh, he also killed two fucking pipelines - Keystone XL and in his last days in office put a pause on the Dakota Access - because fuck energy independence, oil is evil, Elon Musk is building those nifty electric cars, just pony up $100,000 like all the rich Sillicon Valley cunts do! Oh, he also killed Yucca Mountain, because FUCK nuclear power! And fuck the tons, literally TONS of already generated nuclear waste sitting in aging, cracking containment pools at shut-down decommissioned power plants across America - nuclear power is bad, and he cares about the environment, just not all the environments near those shut-down plants.

Are you getting the picture? I could keep going all fucking night. I hate Obama. I hate the motherfucker. They have literally written BOOKS about all the horrible, stupid, and downright criminal shit the son of a bitch did - oh, how about the deliberate spreading and down-classifying of information and the “unmasking” of people in domestic intelligence reports for political purposes? See, I’m still going!

So if you’re a conservative, and you know all this shit, why are you standing there comparing him to leftists? Because this is how the real radical leftists see him:

I could write you a book just about how badly Obama fucked up everything he did on the War on Terror, but you cannot deny that he did fight the War on Terror. For fucks sake, he even used the troop surge in Afghanistan that McCain said he wouldn’t - even if his pulling troops out of Iraq, despite all indications that they weren’t ready for it, created the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to rise. He’s a squeamish little bitch constantly trying to pick up a turd by the clean end, and that cost him time and time again (like the time he tried to be all taciturn and circumspect over having Osama killed, then bragged about killing Osama during his midterm election campaign.) But he’s not a radical leftist, because he killed brown people, and they just ain’t down with that, bro. He also deported more immigrants than any other US President in history. If you think leftists didn’t scream about that, just look at the WaPo trying their damndest to soften the blow. Or hell, just look at what the actual radical insane leftists say themselves: “The idea of white countries having borders is inherently racist.” Yes. Borders. Inherently racist. But only for whites. Brown people can kick us the fuck out - or murder Otto Warmbier - because of our fucking privilege, man. They need their safe spaces, even if that’s an entire country, so just deal, man, just deal!

You, as an alleged conservative, know all these things. You know the length and breadth of Obama’s fuckups and outright crimes. So why the hell do you start hurling demented slanders like a lunatic leftist, instead of making actual arguments, like a rational human being? Obama is many things, mostly bad, but he is not bug-fuck insane. He’s not calling for violence, the suppression of free speech with violence, or characterizing American sovereignty as inherently racist. So when someone stands there and says Obama would “murder an entire battle fleet just to fuck Trump,” it is exactly, exactly, the same kind of gibbering fucking lunacy exhibited by the left wing, like Phil Montag screaming that he wished Scalice had died in the shooting because those fuckin Republicans are takin our healthcare, man, so he deserves to be murdered.

Listen to the video. LISTEN to the end of it, where another Democratic Party official tells him, to his face, that he recorded the whole thing and that he’s going to release it. There are still liberals and sane people in the Democratic Party who have not surrendered to the militant Left, and they do not approve or condone the lunatics calling for violence and murder.

But if they cross the aisle and all they meet are people screaming that Obama is a fucking nigger, Obama is a fucking Muslim, Obama wants to murder American soldiers and sailors and rape your daughter and burn your house down and turn America into a caliphate, they’re going to step back and decide that their own side is the lesser evil. Do you understand what I’m saying? The way the Left is right now - a bunch of screaming fucking lunatics powered by blind hate, driven by their conviction that everyone that doesn’t agree with them is an evil, racist Nazi bigot - that’s exactly what you look like to the sane liberals across the aisle when you conflate every Democrat with the insane, violent leftists. And a lot of the people in the Republican party who do this, do it because they’re not much better than leftists themselves - dogmatic assholes, idiots, the usual wastes of carbon that’d probably be screaming FUCK TRUMP #RESIST right now if they’d grown up with parents that voted Democrat instead of Republican.

We are better than the Left for three reasons: one, we are actually in touch with reality, rather than basing our worldview on blind, fervent and zealous hatred of anyone espousing doctrine that goes against our Holy Writ. Two, we make arguments, and judge by arguments, because we give a fuck about the truth, instead of claiming that our feelz and idealz and burning Brooklyn Rage give us the right to have it all our way, and Three - and this is the big one - we are not dogmatic, tribal fucks who will tolerate any lying, thieving, raping monster in our midst just because he’s on “our side.”

We police our own.

Consider this policing.

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stringnarratives · 6 years ago

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The Unexpected Virtue of Losing Touch With Reality: “Birdman”

[I wrote the below essay on “Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” just after its wider theatrical release in 2014, two weeks before the film was awarded Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Written for an art criticism class, it’s ironically less academic than most of the articles I post to the blog -- a little less analysis and a little more review -- but I still find myself going back to read it around Oscar’s season, and thought I’d share it this evening. Spoilers ahead for this and a handful of other films. Enjoy.]

I was under the impression that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest film, Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance starring Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, and Ed Norton, was a “dramady,” an amusing-enough film with a fair amount of emotional impact. A feel-good film, perhaps. A little off-beat, but nothing too deep or too sinister to be categorized as anything that I would think about longer than until the end of the night.

Fortunately, I was very wrong.

The dramatic film, which has been nominated for nine Academy Awards this year, focuses on washed up action film superstar Riggan Thomson as he struggles to direct a successful Broadway play, breathe life back into his acting career, rekindle a relationship with his formerly drug-addicted daughter, and reconcile a past that has left him a legend with a future that has found him a virtual nobody. Taunted constantly and sometimes violently by his own alter ego— the titular superhero he once played on-screen and who he still, in his mind, could be— he bumbles through each challenge with a strange brand of dignity, a craving for acceptance but a stubbornness that dictates that he must have it on his own terms.

Birdman and reality have a strange and sometimes uncomfortable relationship in the same way Fight Club did, in the same way the Matrix did, and—in some aspects— the same way that Inception did. It’s a heavy film, but one so interspersed with the “meta,” the subconscious thoughts of a man who we as viewers really only follow through the film, that the heaviness takes on the swirling lights of lunacy almost as much as the sharp clarity of some painful reality. We are left wondering what is real, what is only in Riggan’s mind. Overall, we can not be entirely sure what will happen to Riggan Thomson, nor what has happened to him in the past. We can only live in the quickly-moving present.

The artistry behind pulling us into this shadowy and fluid world is brilliantly calculated, taking our world and placing it in the fictional, reflecting it back at us in a way that is strange and distorted, though familiar. Most of—if not all of— the music in the movie is strategically diegetic, and occasionally the camera pans over to show a street performer, to give us context to the world in which we have been placed. Throughout Birdman, we are reminded, in purposeful irony, of the world of the real-life action stars, the blockbuster screens where capes and explosive special effects still dazzle audiences, including, maybe even ourselves.

And then we are reminded that this is not one of those movies, but perhaps the unmade sequel, “the fourth movie” referenced several times during the film. This is the story of what happens after Captain America or Batman or Spiderman ends. This is the story of a man who was once a hero, is remembered as a hero, but who is no longer, who is catapulted back onto the artistic scene after years in the shadows.

That man is as much Michael Keaton (the artist formerly known as Batman) as it is Riggan Thomson.

Whether it was some sort of self-fulfilled prophecy, an uncanny self-awareness, or an abundance of confidence on behalf of both Michael Keaton and the team behind the film, we cannot say for sure, though other casting decisions may persuade us to say that it was no mistake. Who else, for example, knows more about a movie about yielding to the advice of a violent alter ego than Edward Norton, the star of the 1999 film Fight Club? And Emma Stone, fresh from the most recent Amazing Spiderman franchise due to her character’s death, surely knows something about getting the boot from the action film industry.

The filming of the movie is reminiscent of that in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rope, a seamlessly edited string of shots that gives the impression that the whole thing was filmed in one long take. This in particular lends to the whole film a feeling of stage-production, of watching a play, with actors coming on and off stage, the action typically focusing on whatever character has the most dialogue at the time. With it comes a level of dramatic irony not usually present within film: in one particular scene, Stone’s character Sam Thomson is just off-screen, hiding in the dressing room while another character degrades her her to Norton’s Mike Shiner. We are present for an odd little subplot in which two of the actresses in Riggan’s show discuss him and then make out backstage. That kind of detail, even in the strange little diversions, gives the audience a certain presence in the movie.

The typical three-shot shooting process is also, for the most part, absent from the fabric of the film; we are not presented only with a person, a thing, and the person’s reaction to the thing. Rather, we are left several times to focus on one character’s reaction to whatever is happening outside of our view. For example, after an explosive argument between Sam and Riggan, the camera lingers on Sam’s face instead of cutting to Riggan’s, watching her expression fall from tension and anger to something very near regret. The strategy works poignantly in the study of character in the film and even goes so far as to contribute to the very symbolic— though highly ambiguous— ending.

The characters themselves serve an important role (no pun intended) in making the film the artistic statement that it is. Their emotions, the fluid way that the actors interact with the camera, make them seem a part of our reality in an almost high definition way. Emma Stone’s pale, fragile-looking physique, her wide, wild eyes and her withdrawn, timid demeanor make her role as a recovering addict believable. Michael Keaton’s tiredness, his very real connection with his character, add to the Riggan Thomson that the audience sees on screen. Even Edward Norton’s theatrical range, his capacity to be both amusing and, at times, frightening in his intensity, works for the betterment of Birdman. But at the same time, even the characters are both very literally and figuratively acting, feigning happiness or health, playing for an audience of their peers and those they wish to impress.

Keaton’s character obviously suffers from some breed of depression; schizophrenia, in some interpretations of his very talkative alter ego, may not even be a far-off diagnosis. Stone’s character continues to have issues with addiction and dealing with a broken family. Norton is addicted to grandeur, but is unable to function when he is not onstage or preparing to be on stage. They are all only striving to achieve the flimsy appearance of normality, all of them fighting the nagging concept of their own “Birdman,” their pasts and the consequences that have resulted from the decisions they have made.

For all of these things, though, for better or for worse, there was no battle scene. The bad guy was never slayed; there was no bad guy to slay. There was no enormous and cathartic climax for the viewer to rely on, only a single tense event that leads us further down the rabbit hole in the two-hour-long game of real-or-not-real. Which, in true form to its being poised as the anti-hero movie, the film may have benefitted from in some literary way. While it progressed fine without the hero moment, the movie had a subtly intense plot that may leave the viewer feeling stressed and unfulfilled, especially since this plot ended fairly vaguely. Leaving the theater, one might not know what to think, may be overwhelmed by the little knots of tension that dotted the film.

But, at least, you leave the theater feeling something.

From start to finish, Birdman is a film filled with distorted reflections of our own reality, our world seen from a funhouse mirror. While it may not be the cup of tea of those looking for a thrill ride, for an action film, for something more than, simply, a weird study of humanity and the theater, it was a film that can be commended for its daring technical aspects and its attempts to reach out towards a deeper meaning. Keaton, Stone, and Norton made the film a success, and it is likely that they will reap the rewards of their hard work during the upcoming awards season. But, in the end, it is the work of a whole team to produce a film such as this, with detailed artistry, unorthodox approaches to modern philosophy and just overall cleverness giving Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance its wings.

#Film #Birdman #Movies #titles

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ileneca7 · 6 years ago

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Non-Farm Friday - Is America Working? The Liar-In-Chief Says Yes!

Courtesy of Phil of Phil’s Stock World

America is barely working.

Our Government is barely functioning and the President spent yesterday afternoon lying to the “failing” NYTimes – in an interview with a paper that employs fact-checkers. Trump talked about repealing Obamacare, Building a Wall to stop the flow of drugs, funding the military, appointing Secretaries, China’s Trade Deficit and his poll numbers and NOT ONE thing the President said was actually true – NOT ONE THING!!! Not only that but the Trump Administration has backed themselves into a corner with China and, with one month to go – Trump will have to accept an even weaker deal than new Nafta simply in order to avoid looking like he was completely defeated in “The Art of the Deal.”

As noted by the “failing” NY Times, Trump’s whole take on the Trade War is complete and utter BS as the tariffs he is “imposing on China” are nothing more than a tax on the American people and, if Trump expands the tariffs, as he is threatening to do – it will be nothing more than a $125Bn tax increase on US Consumers in order to pay for the Billionaire Tax Breaks he has given out to his friends and family. One has to wonder whether Trump WANTS a deal with China – I think he wants the tax money more:

WHAT TRUMP SAID

“We have 25 percent now on $50 billion. And by the way, Peter, that’s a lot of money pouring into our Treasury, you know. We never made 5 cents with China. We’re getting right now 25 percent on $50 billion.”

False.

Tariffs imposed on imports of foreign goods do not mean another country is paying the bill. The costs are largely passed onto American companies and consumers.

Tariffs generated almost a third of all federal revenue in 1915. In the 2016 fiscal year, the Treasury Department collected $35 billion in tariff revenue.

8:30 Update: Apparently though, America doesn’t need a working Government or a truthful leader as we added 304,000 jobs in January – despite the Government shutdown. That likely means the Fed is making a HUGE mistake in easing off on rate hikes as job numbers like these can quickly lead to inflation – but at least it’s the good kind, caused by putting more money in workers’ pockets. 304,000 jobs is almost double the 180,000 expected by leading Economorons BUT, be careful as last month was revised down by 90,000 jobs – from 312,000 to 222,000 and one could imagine how a dishonest President who surrounds himself with a staff that already has 6 convictions with another half-dozen indictments in progress (that we know of) MIGHT have lied about last month and MIGHT be lying about this month too – in order to escape criticism over the shutdown.

Still, until we can prove it to Fox New’s satisfaction, we can keep pretending that America is a magical land where you can furlough 800,000 workers and the economy IMPROVES! The Soviets used to say Russia was a “Workers Paradise” so often that people actually started to believe it and that is the GOP/Fox strategy – they endlessly repeat their talking points until you begin to forget what the truth actually is – even when you are the one suffering from their lies!

Now I like living in an Orwellian Dystopia as much as the next prole BUT we are also investors and investors are supposed to want to know what the truth actually is so we can make proper investing decision. President Trump’s Attorney insists that “Truth isn’t Truth” where everyone can have their own version of the truth that’s just as valid as everyone else’s and even a jury of your peers isn’t qualified to decide what’s true – that’s something only the President is allowed to do.

Sure, if you are a Republican and you heard that kind of nonsense coming out of Russia, you’d be outraged and you’d want our country and NATO to intervene and help free the Russian People from the Authoritarian Oligarchs who took over the country, raped it’s resources and robbed it’s wealth.

However, Trump is your Republican President and he’s one of our Oligarchs with a Cabinet of other Oligarchs and the resources they are robbing and the land they are destroying is our land and we don’t like NATO anymore, or the UN but we do like Russia and the truth was never the truth anyway… Right?

From 1984 – or is it 2019?

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?”

SOMEHOW, we have to sort through this endless BS and figure out what’s happening and, for that, we need to ignore the noise of the short-term data (especially when it can be exaggerated by 50%) and look for EVIDENCE of how things are actually going. Average Hourly Earnings, for example, slowed to 0.1% growth from last month but are still up 3.1% from last year and, as I said above, that’s actually a good thing for the economy, though not so good for Corporations – who have to pay those wages.

The Corporate CPI is up just 2.2% from last year so, as a FACT, the prices they command is losing ground to wages at a 33% pace. That’s going to impact earnings going forward and, with 35% of the S&P reporting Q4, we’re already seeing earnings growth slow down to 2.3% with REITs, Materials and Utilities all going negative and no growth from Financials (0.2%) while Energy (6.4%) and Industrials (6.1%) are the biggest stars and both of those sectors can drag on the economy if they demand too much money from the Consumers.

So the truth is that we have a mixed picture and, despite our Glorious Leader telling us how GREAT he is making America again (the delayed State of the Union will be Tuesday at 9pm with the Orwellian theme of – and I am not joking – “UNITY!“), we will have to look at the data (the data we can trust), and make our own decisions, much like the President is now making his own decisions on our Nation’s Security.

Since Trump didn’t like what his own Intelligence and Security Department Heads said about his asinine policies when giving their annual briefing to Trump’s own GOP Senate, he has CANCELLED his Daily Intelligence Briefing and will just wing it – much the way George W Bush winged it when he ignored this Briefing on August 6th, 2001, which was titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the US.” The brief warned, 36 days before the September 11 attacks, of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, including “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for a hijacking” of US aircraft.[1]

Bush didn’t even skip that briefing, he just decided his vacation was more important than National Security. Being the President is an important job (I know, shocker!) and you can’t just do it when you feel like it or only when your Department Heads are willing to parrot whatever you want them to. Sometimes news is unpleasant and sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do for the good of the people and… Oh who am I kidding? Is there anyone out there still left who thinks Donald J Trump is doing anything for the good of the people?

Putin Puppet is a strong word, but it gets 3,640,000 results in Google while Putin Pawn only gets 760,000 hits. Putin Pawn lands Trump in the hall of shame, next to George W Bush as, very possibly, the worst President in our country’s history while Putin Puppet or Russian Agent, on the other hand, may well land Trump in jail.

Google has the odds running about 5:1 in favor of Putin having a hand right up Trump’s ass and pulling the strings to make Trump do and say whatever it is that advances the Russian agenda but we’re hoping the Mueller investigation shows that Trump is merely a pawn, just a semi-senile, power-obsessed racist who is being manipulated by the Putin Puppets he surrounds himself with.

Let’s hope for the best!

Have a great weekend,

– Phil

p.s.

If you missed Phil on Money Talk, here’s the video:

Non-Farm Friday – Is America Working? The Liar-In-Chief Says Yes! was originally published on MarketShadows

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libertariantaoist · 7 years ago

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James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t a radical. If you look at his published output – a series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about matters nearly every progressive cares about: taxes (the rich don’t pay enough), healthcare (the government must provide), income inequality (it’s all a Republican plot). All in all, a pretty unremarkable worldview that any partisan Democrat – either a Bernie Sanders supporter, as Hodginkinson was, or a Hillary fan – could sign on to.

So what drove him over the edge?

One of his more recent Facebook posts was a link to a petition that called for “the legal removal of the President and Vice-President, et. al., for Misprision of Treason.” Hodgkinson had signed it and he was asking his readers to follow suit: “Trump is a Traitor,” he wrote, “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” He was also a big fan of Rachel Maddow, who – incredibly — has spent the majority of her airtime ranting about “The Russian Connection,” as this Intercept piece documents. Hodgkinson was also a member of a Facebook group ominously dubbing itself “Terminate the Republican Party,” an appellation Hodgkinson apparently took quite literally. The group has over 13,000 members. The main page of the Terminators is adorned with a cartoon of Putin manipulating Trump like a puppet.

When Hodgkinson left his home and his job to travel to Alexandria, Virginia, he told his wife he was going to “work on tax issues.” But is that what motivated his murderous spree? Do “tax issues” really seem like something that would inspire someone to plan and carry out an assassination attempt that, but for the presence of Capitol police on the scene, would have certainly resulted in a massacre?

Hodgkinson clearly believed that the President of the United States was an agent of a foreign power. He had signed on to the idea that Trump not only benefited from a Russian campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, but that he is engaged in a war against his own country. As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

“If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American Presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian Intelligence Services, and an American campaign, I mean, that is so profoundly big. This is not part of American politics; this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.”

“International warfare” – and Hodgkinson, a soldier in that fight, saw it as his duty to use the sort of weapons that are commonly used in international warfare. That’s why he sprayed that baseball field with a hail of gunfire – over fifty rounds. And when his rifle ran out of ammunition, he took out his handgun and continued firing. Because “this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country” – and it’s the obligation of patriotic citizens to take up that fight and take out the enemy.

This sort of craziness is usually reserved for the farther fringes of the American polity. Back in the 1960s, far-right groups like the Minutemen – who believed the United States government was effectively under the Kremlin’s control – armed themselves to prepare for the day when they would “liberate” America. Indeed, this sort of lunacy has traditionally been a fixture of extreme right-wing politics in this country: that it has now appeared on the left – and not the far-left, but in the “mainstream” of the Democratic party, which has taken up the Russia-gate conspiracy theory to the virtual exclusion of all else — is the proximate cause of what I call Hodgkinson’s Disease: the radicalization of formerly anodyne Democrats into a twenty-first century version of the Weathermen.

How did this happen? Democratic party leaders, in tandem with their journalistic camarilla, have validated an unconvincing conspiracy theory for which not a lick of definitive evidence has been provided: the idea that the Russians “stole” the election on behalf of Trump, and that the Trump campaign cooperated in this treasonous effort.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the Democratic party leadership from taking this ball and running with it. As Jennifer Palmieri, a top official in the Clinton campaign, put it, Democrats should push the “collusion” issue “relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview.” The New York Times writes about this conspiracy theory as if it is uncontested fact. Democratic officeholders have declared that the alleged “hacking” of the election was an “act of war” – with the NeverTrump Republicans echoing the party line – and the Twitterverse’s conspiracy theorists are having a field day with the dangerously loony contention that we are at war with Russia. What’s more, the wildest imaginings of the nutjob crowd are being taken up and amplified by “respectable” people like constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe.

In this way Hodgkinson’s Disease was incubated, its toxicity penetrating the mind of a suggestible and embittered little man until the poison had accumulated to such an extent that it burst through to the surface in an explosion of uncontrollable rage. Rachel Maddow is the theory: James T. Hodgkinson is the practice. The ultimate result is civil war.

That such a conflict would be born out of a full-scale delusional system that resembles a third-rate cold war era thriller just adds a Bizarro World cast to the whole sorry spectacle. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory that has consumed the energies of the media, the Congress, and President Trump is an elaborate hoax. This farrago of falsehood rests on a fallacious assumption: that the Russians necessarily “hacked” the DNC and John Podesta’s emails. The contention is that the methods supposedly utilized by the alleged hackers were similar to those used in the past by “suspected” Russian hackers, and that this makes the case. Yet this argument ignores the fact that these tools and methods were already out there, available for anyone to use. This is a textbook example of what cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr calls “faith-based attribution,” which amounts to, at best, an educated guess, and at worst is the end result of confirmation bias combined with the economic incentive to tell a client what they want to hear. In the case of the DNC/Podesta “hacks,” the company hired to investigate, CrowdStrike, had every reason to echo Hillary Clinton’s contention that the Russians were the guilty party. CrowdStrike, by the way, never gave US law enforcement authorities access to the DNC’s servers: indeed, the FBI’s request for access was rebuffed.

The “Russia-gate” hoax has injected a pernicious and highly dangerous theme into our political discourse: the accusation that the Trump administration is a traitorous cabal intent on “destroying democracy,” as Hodgkinson put it, and handing over the country to the tender mercies of a foreign power. Taken seriously, this theme necessarily and inevitably leads to violence, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see more Hodgkinsons in the headlines.

And standing behind it all is the Deep State – the leakers (with access to all our communications) who are feeding disinformation to the Washington Post and the New York Times in order to bring down this presidency. One prong of this operation is embodied in the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation was provoked and fueled by Deep State leakage. The other prong consists of the useful idiot crowd, those who believe the propaganda and can be mobilized to take to the streets.

The Deep State types don’t have to get in direct contact with people like Hodgkinson in order to provoke violence against this administration or Trump’s supporters. They have only to continue to do what they’ve been doing since before Trump even took office, covertly spreading the idea that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it: radicalized useful idiots like Hodgkinson will do the rest. It is eerily similar to the methods the CIA has used to overthrow foreign governments: spread rumors, utilizing their journalistic sock-puppets, and indirectly motivate and mobilize mobs to carry out their “regime-change” agenda. The only difference now is that they’re doing what they’ve always done on the home front instead of in, say, Lower Slobbovia.

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #james hodgkinson #rachel maddow #russia-gate

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evilelitest2 · 8 years ago

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100 Days of Trump: What Happened?

So awhile ago I recommended 100 Works to sum in the course of 100 Days, exactly WTF happened in 2016. And now I think it is time for a conclusion

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First set the stage. Long before Trump is anything more than a racist reality TV star, the United States was in deep trouble, and these issues weren’t new to American society, but were long standing problems that our terrible education system ensured nobody properly understands (Extra History). While reading on always bear in mind how ignorant, uneducated, and anti intellectual the American populace is, So in the 1980s and 90s, the US goverment has embraced a Supply Side/Neoliberal economic platform that lowers taxes, encourages privatization, and deregulates the system, which worked great for the rich but left millions of Americans without support (Rodger and Me). The US for a long time has idealized wealth which helped rationalize such reforms (The Great Gatsby) Since the system hasn’t had a proper reform since the late 70s, the government is hopelessly underfunded, outdated, and continuing stupid policies because no one in power is brave enough to fix them (The Wire). At the heart of this broken system is the increasing wealth gap and since America stubbornly refuses to talk about class, that divide only grows more contested (Veronica Mars). This wealth gap leads to whole previously great communities like Detroit slipping into poverty (8-Mile). However these Americans increasingly desperate and unfulfilling lives just lead them to idealize the wealth even more (Fargo). The political class might understand these problems, but they focus primarily on securing their own positions rather than solving any major problems (Yes Prime Minister), and is set up in such a way that most don’t understand it (Crash Course Government) Due to how isolated the political class is, their prioritizes are not necessarily those of the country as a whole (I Claudius). This bubble in turn lead to extreme ambitious as those in power pursue power at any cost (The Lion in Winter). This in turn leads to more reasonable politicians having to become ruthless and partially corrupt to simple survive in politics (The Good Wife), and effectively all the major difficult problems that need reform go unnoticed (Common Sense), with even good ideas being morphed into tools for the ambitious (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Which in turn weakens the entire structure of society as a whole, as the system ceases to function as intended (Revolutions), and public service starts to stall as a result (Brazil).

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This situation is exasperated by the US’s love of endless unwinnable war with concepts, which waste money, men, and resources for little result and only cement the view that the political elites have no idea what they are doing (Prohibition), and an electoral system which favors conservative minorities rather than liberal majorities (CGP Grey). And when you factor in Gerrymandering, politicians are more focused on pleasing their radical base than helping the country (Extra Credits).

It is into this battlefield that the sheer level of ignorance of the average American comes into play. Due to our terrible education system, most Americans have only a murky understanding of current political events (Vlogbrothers Current Events) and a very lose understanding of politics and the economy (Vlogborther Politics). They don’t know anything aobut the outside world (Geography Now), they are more familiar with historical myth rather than real system (Crash Course World History) nor the historical context of what happens around them (World History II) or even anything about the founding fathers (1776). Which makes them unable to understand the long running issues of America itself historically (Crash Course US History). Whats worse, Americans crave simplicity and are distrustful of complicated solutions even if those actually work (In a Nutshell). This is especially true for healthcare where Americans are hilariously uninformed of what Healthcare is (Healthcare triage). Now our media should be working to solve this, but ever since corporate media ownership became the norm, the media is either pursuing ratings over subsistence (The Daily Show) or aggressively push for said ignorance as a virtue (Colbert Report). So even when the media is correct Americans don’t trust them (All the President’s Men) Which leaves Americas in a perpetual state of confusion and mostly just blaming the wrong people rather than think critically (Last Week Tonight). This situation is compounded by the corrupting power of language in our society to get people to support the rich rather than their own interests (History Plays)

With this broken system, it becomes easy for the rich to us lobbying to make politics primary controlled by them (State of the Union) and spin exploitation as necessary (The Third Man)create self perpetuating systems that help their interest without having any single person to blame (Papers Please), and in the process paint opposition to plutocratic exploitation as selfish and weak (Metamorphosis). So corporate bullshit dominates the lives of Americas who can tell they are being lied too (Jimquisition), and people become disillusioned with the system as a whole wishing for the whole thing to come crumbling down (Leonard Cohen). Nothing can get done in society without the approval of the rich (The Godfather) This system is sold through American Optimism (Chinatown) and so when it eventually is called out as bullshit (Pump up the Volume) these former optimists turn to an equally short sighted form of nihilistic pessimism which offers equally simplistic answers (Eminem). That is rage is then harnessed co-opted by faux right wing populists (Bob Roberts) and the Ring Wind Media Bubbles works to ensure people stay perpetually angry and thus not thinking critically (1984). These angry people are encouraged to imagine an idealized past which never existed (FallOut New Vegas) and they use politics as an emotional outlet for anger rather than complicated understanding of the problems (Into Pieces) So they rebel against the superficial trappings of the mainstream while in fact upholding all of its tenants and ideals (Fight Club). Respectability politics ensures that this mentality is utterly normalized as an acceptable political belief rather than lunacy (Half Life 2). Meanwhile the desperate white lower class seeks desperately for a way to solve their problem and lash out at other oppressed groups vainly believing that it might help (Night in the Woods). They seek a leader who will be their spokesmen and don’t care how much he takes advantage of them (Huey Long)

This situation is exasperated by War, a war which breaks the fundamentals of American democracy, because in times of war people like to pretend the world is simple when it is not (Foyle’s War) We enter a war with the assumption and desire to be a hero and find instead ourselves as the villain and violating our own principles on the world stage (Apocalypse Now). Rather than reevaluate, we dig in our heels and hope if we just keep indulging in military power fantasies the war will suddenly justify itself (Spec Opts the Line). As the war continues democratic institutions are inevitably weakened due to this sense of uncertainty and people try to use radical means to save America from its internal crisis (Watchmen) and the desire to beat the enemy comes before our own basic self interest (Dr. Strangelove). When people are scared enough, they forget how many advantages they have in terms of power and lash out violently (City of LIfe and Death). And when the war doesn’t go well, conspiracy theories emerge to explain why rather than address the root problem (The Crucible). The media makes the problem worse by encouraging a culture of fear (Bowling for Columbine) and this leads to the rise of hate mobs who are apoplectic with fear (The Russians are Coming). This environment of fear ironically serves the interest of our enemies but we are too terrified to stop and think about whether targeting Muslims as whole actually works (Staleg 17). Politicians pander to this stuff because even if they don’t believe it, they don’t want to be labelled as cowards (Thick of It), and the Media’s need to not seem bias means they in fact validate them (Goodnight and Good Luck). And since there legitimately are evil forces out there threatening our country, people falsely believe that the most extreme methods will save them from it even though it never works (M)

Lets take a break to talk about race. The type of race baiting we saw with Trump isn’t new, we saw it back during the Civil War itself, racism is used by the rich to pit the oppressed against each other so they stay powerful (Ken Burns Civil War) For a long time racists have worded the debate so that they are somehow being oppressed by minorities demanded basic human rights (Eyes on the Prize). Then society as a whole tried to pretend that the existing bigotry didn’t exist and not address these underlying problems (Maus) and over time these attitudes were normalized (A series of Unfortunate Events) The White majority got majorly freaked out by a Black President (Heat of the Night). With the rise of the progressive movement, a lot of white men with extremely ridged and nuanced understandings of morality fear having to question their base assumptions on race (Why are you so Angry) and so lash out to avoid having the debate. And many people are afraid of feeling shamed for their underlying assumptions, so they dig in/violently lash out (In Cold Blood). Because racism is so integrated as part of the society any challenge to it is seen as a challenge to the whole society (To Kill a Mockingbird). And since whites think racism is over you have this sort of hipster racism which is nothing more than racism classic with an obviously fake mustache (Rope). What really complicates it is that a lot of these racists are victims of other forms of oppression, most notably classism, but they while they are legitimately victims, they blame women and minorities for their problems rather than the real oppressors, because intersectionality is hard evidently (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Generally speaking when people want a simple solution to complicated problems, it never ends well (Animal Farm)

Since society already encourages dehumanization (Charlie Chaplin), it becomes extremely easy for hate groups to latch unto existing capitalist rhetoric to justify full on hate crimes (Persepolis), a problem compounded by psychotic willing ignorance of the Religious Right (Handmaid’s Tale). And they see people come out live alternative life styles, this scares the conservatives because they associate change with the problems with their lives and initiate a backlash (Cabaret).

And then the economy crashed, and it all went to hell (The Big Short). Well Shit, we know what happens during times of extremes (Hardcore History), and this is where far right mentality is able to thrive as people get desperate (Christopher and His Kind)

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At long last, lets talk about Trump and his base. So while Americans idealize and fetishize the American Dream, a lot of people try their hardest and fail anyways (Death of a Salesmen). But they also strongly believe in the Just World Fallacy (Full Metal Alchemist 2003). And when these people who buy the American dream are confronted with its reality, they feel cheated, like the promise of America was denied them, and they to resort to a sort of demented Nihilism (Assassins). People whose lives haven’t gone the way they want begin to believe they are “owed success” and become obsessed with feeling powerful even if it hurts those around them (Breaking Bad). And on the other extreme, lonely sad miserable young men turn their isolation into a weapon against easy victims, as always women and minorities (Taxi Driver). They are encouraged by the Youtube Alt Right community whose entire ideology is in essence trying to explain why your failure isn’t your fault while simultaneously trying to not acknowledge that the system itself is broken (Hbomberguy). And since they are feeling helpless and weak, they are easily attracted to simplistic juvenile self indulgent internally inconsistent power fantasies masquerading as philosophies and ideologies that tell them that they are in fact the most special person in the world despite having nothing to show for it (Bioshock). And because these people are so emotionally maladjusted, they turn internalized insecurity into bigotry at a moments notice (The Social Network)

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This hits especially home with Nerd Culture who are mostly white men who never really were able to capitalize on their privilege and still feel resentful for how they were treated in school, and so have devolved this persecution complex in response. (Moviebob). This gets compounded with nerd cultures total failure to understand what criticism or censorship are (Part 2) eventually culminating in Gamergate (Part 3). And they were told “Be part of the movement, be part of the cause, and you find strength and lose your insecurities, radicalism helps sooth the internal fear” (The Wall)

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And finally comes Trump himself, a man who confuses popularity for policy in politics (Citizen Kane), who takes advantage of the internalized shame of a once powerful country (Complete History of the Soviet Union to the Melody of Tetris), and offers to give people a role, a place to belong and feel secure (Pan’s Labyrinth). And in their insecurity, they put their own emotional self image into that of their strongman, which makes them very difficult to change their minds (Last King of Scotland). And once extremists get access to society’s mainstream, they can alter the Overton Window to make their believes seem rational rather than utterly demented (Conspiracy). Weak willed people will not support him but won’t oppose him out of fear of conflict (The Conformist) while the Media uses his ratings to basically give him free PR (The Network). Meanwhile the Clinton campaign is so embarrassed to be liberal that they manage to bungle the election (The West Wing). And the political leadership keeps pretending like this isn’t a problem until too late (Rules of the Games) And since people judge on appearances, a shouty man seems to offer more safety despite not knowing anything about anything and making the country more unstable (It Happened Here). And after all, this sort of right wing double thing has been around for a long time (Angels in America)..And a lot of toxic broken people who have seen their relationships collapse around them, they find a strong man who tells them “no its ok, you aren’t wrong, everybody else is wrong, your explosive unhealthy behavior is in fact ok” (We need to Talk about Kenny). And somewhat healthy people can easily be seduced by somebody they see as powerful telling them that the answers are simple (Protagonist).

And of course, this leads to the rise of the really scary aspect of the left (Marat/Sade)

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rfhusnik · 6 years ago

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Remember: You’ll Do The Work, And You’ll Pay The Bills

Written By: Steven Fillmore

For many years I tried to more or less keep my mouth shut. I got up every morning and went to work. But, as a recent retiree, I’ve become very concerned about the future of The United States of America. And I don’t think the majority of Americans today realize the potentially perilous position that their dismissive attitude toward illegal immigration will most likely place their children and grandchildren in in years to come.

And as far as I can see, there are three dangerous points of view now “setting up” America for tragic consequences in years to come. First, there are those Americans who think they’ll be able to keep themselves isolated from the increasing number of Hispanics now living either legally or illegally in their nation. These are the people who illegally pay for various services, such as their children’s education, and build walls around their property, yet don’t want our nation to build a wall to protect its current poorer inhabitants. And by the way, why is it that every time a proposed border wall or border shutdown is mentioned in the media, only negative things are said? Second, there are those who believe God will provide an answer to illegal immigration. And they also believe that the Almighty won’t allow a Hispanic majority to harm or misuse non-Hispanic minorities in the years to come. And then there is that third group which says it cares about the future of the U.S.A. It has grave concerns it says, about environmental issues. But rest assured, environmental concerns will take a back seat in importance to future Americans if those Americans are no longer able to live freely because what once had been a class of illegal aliens now controls their very lives.

And, in the midst of these future fears, like most elderly white men, I’ve paid a price for the concept of white supremacy, though I never believed in it; and, if the truth be told, often wondered if a fair amount of those who said they believed in it actually did, or were simply using that bogus concept as a tool to stir up some excitement in what otherwise would have been very boring existences. But then, maybe dad was right. He told me I’d amount to nothing someday.

Yet, with that said, I can’t lie now and say that life has gotten better for white American males over the span of my lifetime – oh no! And it seems that this fact has become especially noticeable over the last ten to fifteen years. And here are some examples of what I mean. Today, America’s heroes aren’t the people who work to keep the nation functioning. No, today we look up instead to such people who are able to enter our country illegally, and then live off the fruit of the labors of this nation’s working class. And today white American males are pretty much automatically held in disdain by many women and members of other races.

Nonetheless, I’m in a reflective mood today. Thus, I hope I won’t ramble (too much) in this piece. And, let me tell you that this is the last time Steven Fillmore will appear as a writer of these posts. And I’ve informed my city’s mayor, Ralph Hawk, who compiles these writings, of that fact. And Ralph said he was sorry to hear that, but admitted that he can probably find several other people from our city who’ll be willing, able, and probably glad to hold forth here.

So, anyway, today I’m thinking back to forty some years spent working in this city’s main factory, and how yesterday, a few days after I retired from the workforce, I heard some liberal legislators say that most white males of my age actually wasted their lives. And how did we waste them? Apparently during our working years we didn’t do enough to help socialists, communists, fascists, criminals, drug users, illegal aliens, deeply indebted college graduates, feminists who weren’t living out the full feminist dream, so-called dreamers, gay, lesbian, and transgender activists, animal rights activists, environmental activists - and especially those of that group who want to ban cows and airplanes, as well as pass a number of other asinine dictatorial laws, members of Congress whose vocabulary seems to be limited to the word impeachment, members of Congress who dress as foreigners, and members of Congress who all dress in the same color for special events, just like the brown shirts did many years ago when they conducted their business in a Reichstag that was trending toward Nazism.

And, of course the American liberal media concurs with that afore - mentioned assessment of America’s working class. And it makes sure that everyone knows that during our lifetimes people such as myself didn’t care enough about the poor and downtrodden; but more importantly than even that, feared what an invasion of foreigners seeking to end what had been the American way of life would do to the legacy and wealth we hoped to leave our heirs.

Thus, I’m leaving these words as a very troubled soul. I only pray that the youth of America will reject the socialism and near communism which already we see being peddled by most of those who so far have announced their candidacies for president in the next election.

And we know that a portion of America’s youth will be, and already has been taken in by the ridiculous promises which left-wingers have, and will continue to make. But the postulation that the rich should pay their fair share in taxes is truthful, yet is easier said than done. Few know of, or take the time to learn of how dollars sheltered from taxes often, in the long run, do more for the American economy than do those confiscated via taxation, and then wasted on government frivolities such as conspiracy investigations which investigate the innocent, and allow those who may really be guilty of what’s being investigated to appear blameless, even though those of that second group are probably the same individuals who got the phony investigation started in the first place, and perhaps used America’s highest information gathering unit to aid them in that quest.

And it’s difficult to leave when it’s known that soon Americans will be bombarded by left-wing campaign ads promoting various presidential candidates. And we know that soon the youth of America will be severely tested. It will have all sorts of financially impossible promises made to it such as: Everyone should have a free college education, airplanes should be banned (can you even begin to imagine the negative impact of this!), cows should be banned – this will do wonders for America’s agricultural sector – especially when the large numbers of Hispanics whom the leftists apparently wish to have enter our country have found the livestock industry to be one of only a very few industries which actively seeks them as workers. And, the list of crack-pot ideas which already have been floated by many potential candidates for president goes on and on.

Thus, before the snowball of lunacy which no doubt will descend upon us in the months ahead reaches its full speed, I’d like all Americans, but especially young Americans to remember that nothing is ever given away, or accepted in a completely free fashion. A price is always paid; and under socialist and communist leadership, a despised lower working class always toils to benefit bureaucrats, even though socialists and communists tell the masses that the exact opposite is the true experience under their way of life. So, don’t be fooled in the upcoming presidential election. Don’t vote for someone who’ll keep you working to support him or herself, while he or she keeps right on importing more people into this nation who’ll also lessen your paycheck amount through their welfare needs.

And, as a final sign off here, I want to say that I’m aware of course that the dictatorship of the right (fascism) can be as destructive to human rights as that of the dictatorship of the left (communism). But only people who deserve to live freely will live freely. Ask yourself, “If my car died on the roadway tomorrow, would I simply leave it there, run away to the north, and not care about it anymore? And would I leave others to deal with its obstruction?” Those questions, though simplistic, are probably dually pertinent at this time. First, if something is wrong in my nation, do I simply run away to where other people can take care of me? And second, will I allow myself to be conned by politicians, either young or old, or male or female, who should know that the policies they’re advocating will be disastrous for America, yet pursue them anyway – apparently only to appease their own large egos.

Anything that’s wrong in a capitalist America can be fixed in a capitalist America. But there are a few facts to be faced. No economic system is inherently fair. Some people will always need to do the blue and white collar jobs that will need to be done. And if those people are forced to labor under a system which takes too much from them and then gives too much to criminals, illegal aliens, or government officials who don’t understand the importance of fiscal responsibility, then the entire society will have serious problems.

And remember, don’t be intimidated by old or young male or female presidential candidates. All of them have one thing in common; they want to shake their fingers at you and tell you what a bigot and destroyer of the environment you are, and have been, and, especially so if you’re white and male. And remember also, while they’re chasing their socialist dreams, such as giving freebies to non-workers, trying to end the airplane and livestock industries, severely altering the American way of life for the worse, and importing more foreigners who’ll live off your labor today, and perhaps confiscate your heirs’ wealth in the future; you’ll be the people who’ll be doing the work which always needs to be done in any society, be its economic system capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, feudal, monarchical, or whatever. Yes, you’ll do the work, and you’ll pay the bills, but they’ll continue to devastate America and its way of life.

And also, you may say this is crazy, and hopefully it will prove to be false, but what will America be like when Hispanics are the majority ethnic group in it? Will they abide by the laws and ways of life which traditionally have been the foundations of The United States of America? Or will they pursue their own agenda, using their majority status to elect Hispanic candidates to national office, including perhaps the presidency, and then use their political power to severely restrict whites and blacks, and, who knows, perhaps confiscate their lands and wealth, and perhaps even enslave them?

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Take a step back and appreciate the vertiginous absurdity of the fact that our military is now being mobilized to defend our border from a walking caravan of refugees from Central America.

There are, the Mexican government estimates, around 4,000 people in this group. They are poor men, women, and children, fleeing horrendous conditions, primarily in Honduras, and intend to seek asylum either in Mexico or the US. They are on foot in southern Mexico, weeks from the border, and their number is shrinking as they go.

Poor people, seeking asylum, walking toward the border: How in the world can that constitute a national security threat?

First, let’s acknowledge that a separate group of refugees (calling itself the “second caravan”) attempted to cross the border into Guatemala a few days ago, leading to skirmishes, rubber bullets from police, and at least one dead refugee. So the fear of a clash at the border is not totally unfounded, though the original caravan has shown no signs of violence. Still, though, we’re talking about unarmed families, on foot, weeks away.

Where is the emergency?

Well, first off, the caravan is much bigger than the fake news media is telling you. “I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size,” Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl (hilariously), “and I’ll tell you they look a lot bigger than people would think.”

Trump has also said — in one of his most nakedly racist statements to date, though there was no time to dwell on it — that “unknown Middle Easterners” are hiding in the caravan.

Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2018

Presumably, “Middle Easterners” — a class that includes more than 400 million people — is meant to imply “terrorists.”

Trump has not clarified what he meant by this comment. And there is no evidence whatsoever that any “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” are lurking in the caravan. But that has not stopped him from repeating the claims, media from passing them along, or the conservative movement from adopting them as gospel.

Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018

Across the right-wing media ecosystem, several notable commentators, including Laura Ingraham, speculated that people in the caravan may be carrying diseases. On Fox, they have repeatedly speculated about the diseases heading toward innocent (cough white cough) Americans.

That’s twice this week that a Fox host has gone to the “foreigners bring disease” trope, a staple of racist and antisemitic incitement for hundreds of years. https://t.co/7CRh034IRB

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 29, 2018

There is, suffice to say, no evidence that the refugees are carrying disease (though once they settle in as Americans, they can look forward to heart disease and diabetes).

All of this — inflating a bedraggled group of peripatetic refugees weeks from our border into a disease-ridden terrorist “invasion,” an urgent, imminent “national emergency” — amounts to a kind of willed delusion. It represents a collective agreement on the right to believe a narrative spun almost entirely out of whole cloth, draped over a reality to which it bears little resemblance.

It is also powerful evidence that America’s epistemic crisis is spinning up into a full-blown political crisis.

This is not the first time the right has told itself scary bedtime stories, of course. Conservatives have been trading lurid conspiracy theories in their own media echo chamber for ages.

But a couple of things seem different — ominously so — about this episode.

First, even more than usual, there’s a performative aspect to it. It is advantageous for the right to believe that this caravan is an urgent threat. It makes for clickable memes and video clips, gets partisans in a lather, and helps pols running in close midterm races. It is a perfect parable, emphasizing group identity and clearly identifying the corrupting, diseased, dangerous other. It is too good not to believe.

So they have simply willed themselves to believe it, or at least perform believing it, which eventually becomes the same thing.

Not despite but because of its absurdity, believing it together is a strong signal of tribal solidarity on the right.

Some of the kids with the invasion. They don’t seem to be taking their training very seriously. Victoria Razo/AFP via Getty

Second, the paranoid fantasies are no longer confined to right-wing media, as they largely were under Obama (with the occasional individual taking it too seriously, as when a gunman showed up at a pizza joint to rescue imaginary child sex slaves).

Now the right wing has control of the US government, and it can act out its fantasies with a military with real guns. The chances, in the hothouse environment Trump has created, that something will go wrong — that signals will get crossed and someone will get killed at the border — are also very real.

This is the white nationalist right emerging from its media cocoon and striding onto the world stage, running the most powerful country in the world. It is now capable of acting on all the bizarre things it persuades itself to believe.

It will not end well.

To recall how we got here, let’s quickly review what I mean by an epistemic crisis (a subject I have written on at length before).

Epistemology, for those who didn’t waste a large portion of their youth in academic philosophy programs (hi), is the branch of philosophy concerned with justified belief — with how we come to know things and what it means to know something.

The crisis, in brief, is that the US conservative movement has almost entirely divorced itself from mainstream institutions, norms, and standards, developing its own media, think tanks, legal scholars, and historians — a hermetically sealed ecosystem of knowledge, news, and information in which nonsense and conspiracy theories flourish.

Conservatives have descended almost entirely into what I call “tribal epistemology,” wherein the distinction between what is good for the tribe and what is true collapses entirely — in which “true” simply comes to mean “our narrative.” They do not defer to any transpartisan standards of evidence or reasoning; they do not believe any such standards exist. Attempts to invoke such standards are, in their view, just one side’s way of trying to outmaneuver the other. So they use the language of transpartisan standards as a weapon, but the standards themselves are not a restraint.

The result is that, as a nation, we no longer share the same facts, the same understanding of events. We no longer live in the same world. As Rush Limbaugh, father of today’s right-wing media, said way back in 2010:

We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap.

Tribal epistemology, illustrated. Javier Zarracina for Vox

The two sides share almost no factual premises, so they are no longer able to coherently argue with each other. Their enmity is total, and the country is becoming ungovernable. Politics is becoming a pure contest of wills, of power.

That’s the crisis. I first wrote about it in reference to Robert Mueller’s investigation, raising the question: What if Mueller uncovers rock-solid evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians or committed financial crimes, and … it just doesn’t matter? What if he finds something, but the Americans who get their news from conservative media simply never find out about it? What then?

Some of us have been warning for years that the (paranoid, white nationalist) right-wing fringe was, via the amplification of Fox News and its brethren, taking over the GOP. Yet many, many journalists and other members of the US political elite ignored it or dismissed fringe right lunacy as a kind of quirk, just one of those things “extremists on both sides” do. After all, Farrakhan something something.

The lunacy was somewhat suppressed under George W. Bush, or at least (fitfully) kept separate from the administration itself. And under Obama, Republicans had no power beyond opposition. They could rant on about their conspiracies and hold endless Benghazi hearings, but it never seemed to amount to much.

As so the right has spun off into a world of its own, virtually unrestrained, at little political cost.

When Trump and the Republicans took over the federal government in 2016, the remaining firewalls crumbled. The conservative base, the conservative media, the conservative government — it’s all the same thing now, all with the same perspective, all inhabiting the same epistemic universe, all pursuing the same war against the same perceived enemies. Fox News, Daily Caller, and Breitbart have more or less given themselves over entirely to serving as state media.

With the president himself coordinating the message, the process whereby the right-wing base brings itself to believe whatever it needs to believe has accelerated.

During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, they needed to believe that Christine Blasey Ford was lying, or paid by George Soros, or confused. So they did. Ed Whelan freestyled a harebrained theory about mistaken identity on Twitter right in front of everyone. It was rapidly debunked and Whelan was forced to apologize, but a goodly number of conservatives — including Sen. Susan Collins, a crucial swing vote on Kavanaugh — believe the doppelgänger theory to this day. Whelan is still gainfully employed by the conservative apparatus. (Trump, always a truer reflection of the base’s id, has simply decided it was all a big hoax.)

Collins and Kavanaugh, agreeing that Kavanaugh didn’t do it. Zach Gibson/Getty Images

The MAGA bombs were fake (they weren’t). There’s going to be a middle-class tax cut by the end of the year (there isn’t). US steel has opened seven new plants in the US (it hasn’t). The trade tariffs are working (they aren’t). The US is the only country with birthright citizenship (it isn’t).

It’s getting easier and easier. Frictionless. There’s barely a pretense at going through the motions of inquiry and evidence anymore. We’ve reached the point where the movement, including its elected members of Congress, follow Trump’s twists and turns like a school of fish.

That’s how we get the caravan “threat” and our current military mobilization.

In a sense, the caravan standoff is all conservative role-playing, a set of tribal bonding rituals and shared narratives built around group identity and hostility toward outsiders. It’s a way for the chicken hawks of the right to do war poses, the media to get great visuals, and Trump and his base to get frothed up together about the libs and the illegals.

Like I said, though, the guy who’s leading this round of role-playing, the dungeon master describing the heroes and villains to his enthralled initiates, is the president of the United States. And the president of the United States controls a real government and a real military.

So Trump’s cosplay involves sending 5,200 troops — more troops than there are people in the caravan — to “harden our ports of entry” along the border. (Er, now he’s saying he may send as many as 15,000; it could be more by the time this is published. He told Karl he wants a “wall of people.”)

Head for the border. Staff Sgt. Nathan Akridge/US Department of Defense

These troops will be armed, but they are prohibited by US law from detaining or deporting anyone, so they’ll mostly be doing support work. “Many have been pressed into service providing administrative support and doing upkeep,” reports Christopher Woody for Business Insider, “including feeding horses and shoveling manure out of stables, office work, and basic repairs and maintenance work on border patrol facilities and vehicles.”

Assuming the caravan does eventually reach the border in anything like its current form, US troops will also help Border Patrol agents spot immigrants attempting to enter the country illegally, at unapproved crossings. But remember — as Vox’s Dara Lind writes in her story on Trump’s “ongoing war on asylum” — applying for asylum, as the immigrants say they plan, is perfectly legal. So the military will only be there to help watch for immigrants who peel off and attempt to enter unlawfully.

Up to 15,000 members of the world’s greatest fighting force, sitting in the desert, watching for poor refugees approaching on foot.

They’re now in Juchitan de Zaragoza (some 12 days on foot from the nearest American city), exhausted and asking for buses. So this is what Trump feels he needs 15,000 troops to protect against? (Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images) pic.twitter.com/YBbi14ylRT

— William Low (@williamlow) November 1, 2018

The ludicrously named “Operation Faithful Patriot” will last 46 days. Even if it walks 20 miles a day, the caravan will arrive, at the earliest, in 45 days. It’s possible none of the troops will ever see an actual refugee.

In short, the troops currently heading to the border are being used entirely as a stunt to boost turnout for the midterms.

This is a hell of a lede: “President Trump is mobilizing the vast powers of the military and other parts of the federal government to help bolster Republican election efforts…” https://t.co/f0Sx9QxzDE

— Evil Prof (@dandrezner) October 31, 2018

Using the military for a domestic stunt has real consequences. “Committing troops to one operation means fewer forces for another,” write Helene Cooper and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in the New York Times. “Compared with how many troops the United States has stationed in Syria (2,000), in Afghanistan (14,000) and in Iraq (5,000), the number of soldiers sent to Texas, Arizona and California will be a significant slice of all troops deployed worldwide.”

And that’s to say nothing of the more intangible consequences of this stunt, which is yet another blow to the norms of conduct that hold our political life together.

And of course there’s the small but not inconsequential risk, if things go badly wrong, that we could see footage of US troops firing on unarmed refugees before the year is out.

With Trump, the base and the government have merged. The paranoia, hostility, and tribalism that have characterized right-wing media for so long now extend all the way up to the top; they now command troops.

As Voltaire famously put it: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

If Trump can take a bedraggled group of asylum seekers and transmute it into a national emergency just by tweeting about it, what would it take for him to do the same to his domestic political foes? How hard would it be for him to use antifa, “ecoterrorists,” or inner-city gangs as a pretext to expand police powers or justify political violence?

After all, he has already encouraged violence numerous times and told his followers that Democrats are a crazed mob.

[embedded content]

Even though it’s been shown pretty clearly that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was specifically enraged by the “Soros funded the caravan” theory — “The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history,” Adam Serwer writes in an excoriating essay, “was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election” — the numerous Republican leaders who endorsed it have conspicuously refused to disavow it.

Trump is still flirting with it.

The right, in all its organs, from social media to television to the president, is telling a well-worn, consistent story: Opposition from the left and Democrats is fraudulent, illegitimate, a foreign-funded conspiracy against the traditional white American way of life.

Having two versions of reality constantly clashing in public is cognitively and emotionally exhausting. To an average person following the news, the haze of charge and countercharge is overwhelming. And that is precisely what every autocrat wants.

That is why every aspiring tyrant in modern history has made the independent media his first target. (Read Ezra Klein’s excellent essay on Trump’s war with the media.) There can be no epistemic authority, no one to trust, other than the autocrat and his mouthpieces. That is step one.

Then they go after the courts, the security services, and the military. Once they have a large base of support that will believe whatever they proclaim, follow them anywhere, support them in anything — it doesn’t have to be a majority, just an intense, activated minority — they can, practically speaking, get away with anything.

But believing absurdities comes first. If they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit injustices.

That’s why this caravan story is notable. The intensity of belief on the right has begun to vary inversely with plausibility. Precisely because the “threat” posed by the caravan is facially absurd, believing in it — performing belief in it — is a powerful act of shared identity reinforcement, of tribal solidarity.

Once that support system is in place, Trump is unbound, free to impose his fantasies on reality. He can campaign on Republicans protecting people with preexisting conditions even as the GOP sues to block such protections. He can brush off Mueller’s revelations and fire anyone who might threaten him. He can use imaginary Democratic voter fraud to cover up red-state voter suppression. He can use antifa as a pretext for deploying troops domestically.

Looks like hate speech; better call the National Guard. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Perhaps that last one still sounds implausible to you, much as asylum-seeking children in detention camps once sounded implausible to me. But do you think, in any of those cases, that any significant element of the conservative apparatus would oppose him? Is there any remaining resistance to delusion and violence at all within the right’s coalition, other than from Sen. Jeff Flake’s tweets?

Trump does not view himself as president of the whole country. He views himself as president of his white nationalist party — their leader in a war on liberals. He has all the tools of a head of state with which to prosecute that war. Currently, he is restrained only by the lingering professionalism of public servants and a few thin threads of institutional inertia.

The caravan story, a lurid xenophobic fantasia that has now resulted in thousands of troops deployed on US soil, shows that those threads are snapping. The epistemic crisis Trump has accelerated is now morphing into a full-fledged crisis of democracy.

Original Source -> The caravan “invasion” and America’s epistemic crisis

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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melindarowens · 7 years ago

Text

Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics And Paranoia In The Age Of Trump

Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

A would-be assassin was incited and validated by the media and the Democratic leadership

So what drove him over the edge?

As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

source http://capitalisthq.com/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and-paranoia-in-the-age-of-trump/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and.html

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

Text

Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics And Paranoia In The Age Of Trump

Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

A would-be assassin was incited and validated by the media and the Democratic leadership

So what drove him over the edge?

As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

from CapitalistHQ.com http://capitalisthq.com/hodgkinsons-disease-politics-and-paranoia-in-the-age-of-trump/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

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libertariantaoist · 8 years ago

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The level of lunacy we’ve reached can be measured by the brouhaha over the presence of Russian photographers in the Oval Office during Sergey Lavrov’s visit: no US photographers were allowed, but the Russians somehow got in and the Paranoid Brigade went into overdrive. They may have planted “bugs” there! No, this wasn’t nutjob Louise Mensch, the queen of the Russia-haters, but “former intelligence officials,” including the former deputy director of the CIA, David Cohen.

Given this kind of paranoia, why allow Lavrov in the Oval Office? After all, he could slip a bug into that sanctum just as easily as somehow who works for Tass – indeed, it would be far easier for him to do so, since photographers are routinely searched before they enter, and I doubt the Russian Foreign Minister is subjected to the same procedure.

Aside from that, the same people who are making a fuss about this are convinced the Trump administration is a cabal of Kremlin agents: so why would the Russians even need to plant a bug in the Oval Office? After all, according to the conspiracy theorists, they’re getting the same intelligence directly from the White House.

Yes, folks, I’m really writing about this nonsense. Because that’s where we’re at these days.

Now the conspiracy theorists who have taken over the Democratic party are screaming that the firing of James Comey is all a part of the plot: Trump did it to scotch the year-long investigation into “Russia-gate,” which has so far yielded nothing. The White House denies this, although we’re now hearing a different and probably far more accurate account: the President was pissed off that Comey wasn’t investigating leaks of classified information, and was paying too much attention to the Russia probe.

If this is true, then one can only applaud the White House and urge them to be more upfront about the reason for Comey’s firing. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory is total nonsense, is based on completely unsupportable premises, and is bad for the country. The President should quash it, so he can get back to the job he was elected to do.

The whole thing is a media-driven hate campaign that has no relation to the facts: despite the “high confidence” our “intelligence community” says it has that the Russians somehow mysteriously “influenced” our election, the alleged evidence they’ve made public is nothing but a joke. Indeed, it has been repeatedly debunked by cyber-security experts, and yet the media ignores this, just like they ignored the warnings of those of us who challenged the Bush administration’s “high confidence” that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.”

Hillary Clinton refers to “Russian WikiLeaks” as if it were a foregone conclusion that Julian Assange is an agent of Moscow, but there’s no evidence for this. Just like there’s no evidence for the allegation that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the Russians to deny her the White House: it was the American voters who did that.

In short, the multiple investigations into “Russia-gate” are based on nothing but speculation, innuendo, and unsupportable conspiracy theories – and yet they’re consuming the Congress, the White House, and the law enforcement apparatus that is supposed to be protecting us from real threats. The whole thing is a tiresome theatrical performance that has dragged on long enough: it’s long past time for the actors to take their curtain call, roll up the somewhat tattered scenery, and move on to more serious fare.

Speaking of “foreign influence” on US politics, it’s been reported that the intelligence agencies of both Great Britain and Estonia fed dirt on Trump to our own spooks, who then leaked it to their conduits in the media. While “former” MI6 agent Christopher Steele, author of the slanderous anti-Trump dossier commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, is not officially connected to British intelligence, does anyone really believe Her Majesty’s spies weren’t clued in to the operation?

Of course, that kind of foreign influence is considered perfectly okay, and will never be investigated.

The meeting with Lavrov, which our warmongering media is portraying as Trump taking orders from the Kremlin, is good news: it means that the Trump administration is beginning to implement the President’s campaign promise to “get along with Russia.” At a time when tensions in Europe are at an all-time high, and US troops in Syria are doing their best to separate our Kurdish allies from Turkish aggression, the prospect of better relations with nuclear-armed Russia is a bright spot in an otherwise darkening world. That this development scares the national security bureaucracy, especially some elements of the military as well as the ever-Russophobic CIA, is hardly surprising. The former is counting on inflating the “Russian threat” in order to grab a big share of the defense budget, while the latter is institutionally opposed to Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

What’s interesting is how this wave of anti-Russian hysteria is roiling American politics. The Democratic party has been completely captured by it: they sound like a McCarthyite mob out of the 1950s. Instead of howling about “Who lost China?” they’re demanding to know “Who lost Ukraine?”

The Republicans are split: Trump loyalists pay lip service to the “Russian threat,” but their enthusiasm is lacking. The McCain-Graham wing of the party – shrunken quite a bit since the days of George W. Bush – is in some ways more fanatically anti-Russian than the Democrats. They really want a military standoff with Moscow.

Then there are the real leftists, the Bernie Sanders types, who are also split: Bernie himself has jumped on the hate-Russia bandwagon, and many of his followers have followed suit. Yet there are the Sincere Lefties, typified by people like Glenn Greenwald, who are straddling the fence: on the one hand, they are nervous about the Russia-baiting campaign – and even, like Greenwald himself contemptuous of it – but on the other hand they go along with the mainline Democrats’ campaign to appoint a special counsel to head up the McCarthyite witch-hunt for “Kremlin agents” in our midst. This ambiguity is motivated, in part, by a need to appease their liberal fan club: these people are reflexively anti-Trump and don’t much care how he’s brought down. The Sincere Liberals’ problem is that they know too much history – and are far too aware of the foreign policy consequences of the new McCarthyism – to go along with the Russian-under-every-bed hysteria that’s gripped the Democrats’ base.

What they don’t understand – or, perhaps, don’t want to understand – is that there’s no way to separate the witch-hunt on the home front from an actively anti-Russian foreign policy. If Russia is the Main Danger, then that holds true both at home and abroad: there’s no way to escape the logic of Russophobia.

The appointment of a special counsel would mean that the current anti-Russian hysteria would be extended into the indefinite future. It would mean a witch-hunt the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1950s. And it would preclude any hope of a rapprochement with Russia: no reduction in nuclear arms, no deal over Syria, and perhaps the beginning of a new arms race, with the threat of a major war hanging over us. In short, it would mean another cold war with Russia, and the prospect of World War III.

In a recent interview Greenwald did with the left-wing “Democracy Now,” the pseudo-communist Amy Goodman was eager to buttress the Democratic narrative, averring that the Russia-gate investigation was “getting close to the truth,” which is why Comey was fired. Of course, now that Russia is no longer communist, extreme leftists like Goodman are in the front line of the Russia-haters. Greenwald, however, was visibly queasy:

“Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s the obvious perception that, even if you’re trying to wear a lens of thick skepticism through which you’re viewing these events, you have to take into account. You know, but on the other hand, I still think that it’s an extremely dangerous situation when you have two countries like the United States and Russia, drowning in a nuclear-armed arsenal, to have it be politically radioactive on both sides, to be able to have constructive relations. And so, I think it’s imperative that we keep these two things separate.”

This is wishful thinking. History teaches us that no such separation is possible. Greenwald & Co. are going to have to choose between appeasing the Democratic base or staying true to their anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties principles.

The same goes for Rep. Justin Amash, the alleged libertarian Republican congressman from Michigan, who is calling for a special counsel and is sponsoring legislation to set up some kind of “Russian Commission” to look into the issue of alleged Russian “subversion” of our precious bodily fluids. What this would amount to, in effect, would be the restoration of the old House Un-American Activities Committee, which notoriously dragged many writers, actors, and other into the dock, interrogated them, and sent some to prison when they refused to answer questions. The irony of this is that Amash is supposed to be a libertarian, and has made the defense of civil liberties his forte in the House. Yet what does he think will be the result of his “Russian Commission,” if it is ever established? It would be just another device for the government to spy on us, and to intimidate people for having non-approved political opinions. Amash’s support for this cockamamie scheme is inexplicable. – unless, that is, he’s trying to stave off another costly primary campaign from the neoconservatives, who hate him. Whatever the reason, his proposal is shameful coming from a supposed libertarian.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com

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