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nerianasims · 4 years ago

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Billboard #1s 1971

Under the cut.

Tony Orlando & Dawn – “Knock Three Times” -- January 23, 1971

Lounge lizard smarm. Coming on to a neighbor who doesn't even know you is not going to end well, especially when you're bugging her by note in her own home.

The Osmonds – “One Bad Apple” -- February 13, 1971

Gah, another little kid singing a love song. And one that would be sleazy if it were sung by an adult. "I can tell you been hurt/ By that look on your face, girl/ Some guy brought a sad evening/ To your happy world." Or maybe she has indigestion. Or maybe that look on her face is because you're being a total creep at her. Go away, shut up, and grow up. This song is terrible.

Janis Joplin – “Me And Bobby McGee” -- March 20, 1971

Janis Joplin finished recording this song three days before she died. Always the good ones. In this case, a great one. This is one of my favorite songs.

The Temptations – “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” -- April 3, 1971

The narrator is in love with a woman he doesn't know. Whether the woman even exists is an open question. He's dreaming of finding a love to have a nice life with, "a little home in the country." The background strings give the song a fitting dreamy quality. Brilliant and moving.

Three Dog Night – “Joy To The World” -- April 17, 1971

I've loved this song since I was a little kid, and it's easy to see why. "Jeremiah was a bullfrog! Was a good friend of mine!" My favorite part now is "If I were the king of the world/ Tell you what I'd do/ I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the wars/ Make sweet love to you." It's a song I have to dance to (while sitting nowadays), and is another of my favorite songs.

The Rolling Stones – “Brown Sugar” -- May 29, 1971

Whoo boy. Okay so. I didn't know what the lyrics were to any part of this song but the chorus until a couple years ago. Mick Jagger was capable of singing clearly, but he chose to pull the marbles in the mouth technique on this one, and you can see why. If people had had the internet to look up the lyrics easily in 1971, would this have been a hit? I'm not qualified to say anything else about it.

The Honey Cone – “Want Ads” -- June 12, 1971

Her husband is cheating on her, so she plans to advertise for a replacement, specifically a "young and single and free" one. It's Motown, but not the best type. The chorus is memorable, and the song is fun, but it's nothing too special.

Carole King – “It’s Too Late” -- June 19, 1971

Carole King, with her husband Gerry Goffin, was one of the biggest songwriters of the 60s. By 1971, she'd divorced her husband and released one of the most successful albums ever, Tapestry. I've got the CD. It's a song about a breakup, but not heartbreak. They tried to make it, but it's over now. It's a resigned, adult song about some very tired people. It's not my favorite song on Tapestry; that's "I Feel the Earth Move." But it's a really good song.

Paul Revere & The Raiders – “Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Reservation Indian)” -- July 24, 1971

Well, it's progress since "Running Bear" and "Custer" anyway. It's well-meaning, probably. And that's the only good thing I have to say about it. Moving on, as quickly as possible.

James Taylor – “You’ve Got A Friend” -- July 31, 1971

This is another Carole King song, and her version's on Tapestry. I prefer hers. It's a little faster, and I don't like James Taylor's voice.

The Bee Gees – “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” -- August 7, 1971

Speaking of voices I don't like. This is before the Bee Gees got into disco. I think the song itself is probably pretty okay. But the way the Bee Gees sing it is too slow and overly mannered. At least there’s no falsetto.

Paul & Linda McCartney – “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” -- September 4, 1971

Um... what? I think this is Paul apologizing to what the Baby Boomers would later decree was the "Greatest Generation." Sort of. There's a bit of "sorry not sorry" about it too. It hardly feels like an intentional song at all though. More like Linda and Paul were screwing around in the studio.

Donny Osmond – “Go Away Little Girl” -- September 11, 1971

Seriously? Okay, Donny Osmond is a little boy, and a little boy telling a "little girl" to go away is more odd than creepy. But also, he's already in a committed relationship and so doesn't want to be tempted to cheat when he's what, twelve at most? Sheesh. People's taste is a mystery to me.

Rod Stewart – “Maggie May” -- October 2, 1971

UM. An older woman lured a young man away from home. A really young man. A really, really young man. Not a man, but a boy. He's obviously supposed to be under 18 -- I'd guess 16 at most. The lyrics are very much about grooming. It's musically good. And the lyrics don't excuse Maggie or anything. But it's not a song I want to listen to a lot either, considering the subject matter.

Cher – “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” -- November 6, 1971

I had no idea "gypsy" was a slur until a few years ago, or even that it was connected with the Romani people. I think most Americans probably still don't know. And they really didn't know in 1971. The narrator probably is not Romani, but who knows. The point of the song is that she's part of an underclass that's insulted and abused, but then "every night, all the men would come around and lay their money down." A 21 year old man seduces her when she's 16 and now she's pregnant, and he's nowhere to be found. What else is an underclass for, after all? Cher sings the hell out of it. So that's two songs in a row about an adult sexually exploiting a teenager.

Isaac Hayes – “Theme From Shaft“ -- November 20, 1971

Some levity is welcome. Especially when it's this good. Damn right.

Sly & The Family Stone – “Family Affair” -- December 4, 1971

This song has a slow funk beat. Slow for funk. It's also kinda repetitive. As for the lyrics, I don't know what's going on. It starts seeming like it's going to be about how kids in a family can turn out different, but they're still family so everyone's gonna love each other any way. Then it veers off into newlyweds who are still checking each other out. I think. And then... I don't get it. The song sounds good though, whatever it's about.

Melanie – “Brand New Key” -- December 25, 1971

Roller skates used to have keys. My mom liked Melanie, so she had an album with this on it, and so this song is how I learned about that. Also, I'm pretty sure this song is about sex. "I've got a brand new pair of rollerskates/ You've got a brand new key/ I think we should get together/ And try them out you see." It's a bouncy, fun little song.

BEST OF 1971: "Me And Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin WORST OF 1971: "One Bad Apple" by The Osmonds

#billboard number ones

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newstfionline · 6 years ago

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Venezuelans become Latin America’s new underclass.

By Anthony Faiola, NY Times, July 27, 2018

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago--Free-spending Venezuelans once crammed store aisles in foreign countries famously uttering “dame dos”--”I’ll take two.” But the citizens of what was once South America’s richest nation per capita are now confronting a devastating reversal of fortune, emerging as the region’s new underclass.

As their oil-rich country buckles under the weight of a failed socialist experiment, an estimated 5,000 people a day are departing the country in Latin America’s largest migrant outflow in decades.

Venezuelan professionals are abandoning hospitals and universities to scrounge livings as street vendors in Peru and janitors in Ecuador. Here in Trinidad and Tobago--a petroleum-producing Caribbean nation off Venezuela’s northern coast--Venezuelan lawyers are working as day laborers and sex workers. A former well-to-do bureaucrat who once spent a summer eating traditional shark sandwiches and drinking whisky on Trinidad’s Maracas Bay is now working as a maid.

The U.N. refugee agency has called on nations to offer protection to the Venezuelans, as they did for millions of Syrians fleeing civil war. But in a part of world with massive gaps in protection for refugees, Venezuelans fleeing starvation at home are often trading one harrowing plight for another. Trinidad, for instance, has no asylum laws for refugees, leaving thousands of desperate Venezuelans here at risk of detention, deportation, police abuse and worse.

Sometimes much worse.

Luz, a 21-year-old Venezuelan single mother, came to Trinidad by boat with two friends in May, trusting a man with a soft Caribbean lilt who claimed to be from a Christian group offering aid and resettlement. Instead, she said, the three women were taken to a house and beaten before being abused by what appeared to be a pornography ring. Each woman, she said, was filmed while being raped by a series of men.

“We are helpless,” Luz said. “All because of the crisis.” She and the other two women escaped and are now in the care of a Catholic charity.

Carolina Jimenez, a senior official with Amnesty International, said, “Venezuela’s unprecedented situation has turned a domestic human rights crisis into a regional human rights crisis.”

“Countries in the region are not prepared to take in so many migrants and do not have the asylum systems needed to prevent job exploitation and human trafficking,” she said. “These people should be protected, but instead they are being taken advantage of.”

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, Venezuela was an economic dynamo--a nation with the world’s largest oil reserves and a beacon for immigrants from as far away as Italy and Spain. Then oil shocks and currency crises plunged the country into turmoil.

Hugo Chávez, who became president in 1999, adopted a form of socialism that resulted in many businesses collapsing or being nationalized. A purge of the state-run oil industry--a center of opposition to his rule--removed thousands of workers, who were often replaced by political supporters with little to no technical experience.

Venezuela’s slide turned into a free fall under President Nicolás Maduro--a former bus driver and union leader who inherited power after Chávez’s death in 2013. Critics say his government’s mismanagement and corruption and Maduro’s own ruthless bid to cement power--even as oil prices tumbled--have broken the nation.

Wealthy Venezuelans have been fleeing their homeland for years, landing in multimillion-dollar homes in Miami and Madrid. But as the economic crisis escalates, those leaving now are increasingly destitute, including members of a crippled middle class. The United Nations projects 2 million Venezuelans will exit their nation this year--on top of an exodus of 1.8 million over the past two years.

Those with means and visas are still venturing to the United States, where Venezuelans now make up the single largest pool of asylum seekers. Far more often, escaping Venezuelans are finding themselves in Latin American and Caribbean nations.

But in a region where many already live on the margins of society, governments are making it harder for Venezuelan refugees to stay.

Last year, Panama slapped new visa requirements on Venezuelans. This year, Colombia ended a program that allowed tens of thousands of Venezuelans to circulate in its border area. Chile welcomed tens of thousands of Venezuelans who showed up at its land border in 2017. But in April, it threw up new hurdles, requiring them to have a passport--something the vast majority do not possess--and to apply for asylum through Chilean consulates in Venezuela rather than at the border.

The regulations are “leaving Venezuelans with no choice but to work for pennies in the informal sector while being extremely vulnerable to exploitation and a high level of abuse,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing to the Caribbean--where many island nations lack asylum laws--face particular challenges. Mary Anne Goiri, spokeswoman for Venex, an aid group on the island of Curacao, said Venezuelan migrants there were being brutally exploited. In one case, she said, a restaurant owner had been holding the cash savings of one of his undocumented Venezuelan workers. When the employee asked for her money back, the owner beat her and called the police to have her detained, Goiri said.

Up to 45,000 Venezuelans, aid groups say, have crossed the narrow straits in recent years to Trinidad and Tobago, a country of 1.4 million. As many as 160 a week are still making the trip.

Irregular migration is criminalized here, and Venezuelans who arrive on smugglers’ boats face possible detention and fines. In April, Trinidad sparked international condemnation following the deportation of 82 Venezuelans.

“We cannot and will not allow U.N. spokespersons to convert us into a refugee camp,” Prime Minister Keith Rowley said after the incident.

In Trinidad, diplomats and international agencies say, there is also evidence of a worrying trend: Desperate Venezuelans, particularly women, have become commodities to be bought and sold.

In Trinidad, the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations body, has received 23 suspected cases of trafficked Venezuelans in the past three months--compared with no Venezuelan cases last year, according to Jewel Ali, the organization’s local director.

They include victims like Luz--who said she lost one of her three children in April after the hospital in her Venezuelan town ran out of medication to treat her daughter’s bacterial infection. When she was approached to come to Trinidad, the offer seemed too good to be true.

“But I told myself, I’m going anyway. I’m not going to lose the chance for my kids to be better off just because I had some doubts,” she said.

The ordeal--five weeks spent captive and repeatedly filmed being raped--had “damaged” her, she said. At one point, Luz said, she and a friend were tied up and raped side by side.

“We were looking at each other,” Luz said, tearing up. “We would cry. And I would tell her, ‘Sister, be strong, you have a daughter.’ I would just keep repeating that.”

The case has been documented by the U.N. refugee agency as a potential act of trafficking. Alana Wheeler, head of Trinidad’s counter-trafficking unit, said authorities were looking into Luz’s case and could not comment on an active investigation.

In a telephone interview from a detention center for migrants in the Trinidadian town of Arima, a 34-year-old single father said he came ashore in November after selling his possessions to pay for passage. He was arrested in June. Although he produced his asylum documents from the U.N. refugee agency--which give him a legal right to remain in the country--a policeman demanded $700, he said.

“I told him I didn’t have the money, so they took my belongings, what money I had and detained me,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trinidadian authorities.

Dozens of Venezuelans are being held at the facility, he said. He said guards are serving food by throwing it to the floor and that he had witnessed several Venezuelan inmates being beaten. One migrant with advanced cancer, he said, is receiving no medical attention. No soap, shampoo or clean clothes are being provided, he said.

Guards, he said, routinely humiliate the Venezuelans. Trinidad’s Ministry of National Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“They tell us, ‘Go back to your country, or we’re going to make your life impossible,’” the Venezuelan said.

For many Venezuelans, life in Trinidad amounts to a jarring turnaround. Jhohanna Mota, a 42-year-old former secretary from coastal Venezuela, studied English in Trinidad in the 1990s. She spent Sundays at the beach and evenings at the discos. In 2016--with inflation soaring and food growing scarce in Venezuela--she opted to abandon her three-bedroom house to come back to Trinidad with her two sons.

But it has not gone as planned. She said she worked under the table in a bakery for a year, doing 8½-hour shifts for $20 a day. Then she got fired. “My boss didn’t want to employ an ‘illegal.’” She tried to legalize her stay but said she was duped into paying $800 for a visa that turned out to be fake.

She now faces a hearing and potential deportation proceedings. In the meantime, she is supporting her boys as a house cleaner--and is at risk of arrest for working without a job permit.

“Every time I walk out my door, I know I could end up in jail,” she said, weeping as her two boys sat in the hall of the building where they all now sleep in one rented room. “I think, ‘What will happen to my boys? Why am I doing this? How did we get here?’”

#Venezuela #Trinidad #Venezuelans in Trinidad #Venezuelan refugees

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coreybass84 · 4 years ago

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Defining Racism

“What is Racism?”

A once unique, American system built and implemented to segregate people into artificial socio-economic environments in order to define their existence according to the needs, desires, and beliefs of the ruling class. It’s worldwide now, to the detriment of the human race.

“How was Racism created?”

Originally, the Africans brought here were treated as indentured servants and worked alongside other indentured servants and given the same provisions. They could buy their freedom, own land, marry women from the colonies, and that their children would not be born as slaves. Just as anyone else. But as the slave trade proved highly profitable, hiring indentured servants became costly, Native Americans were either successfully running away or dying from European-borne diseases, and the risks of losing free labor that could survive said diseases and brutalities became considerable enough, more and more Africans were bought and kidnapped from Africa and Slave Laws were put into place in order to keep profits up and costs down and keep Africans enslaved. Africans were no longer on the same level as indentured servants and Africans who were indentured became slaves outright. Any children born from African parents or at least one African parent (and could not pass for White) were forced into slavery at birth rather than being born free. They could no longer buy their freedom or land, were forbidden to read, forbidden to marry colonists, had their histories wiped away and converted to Christianity, and the “white” designation was created to further the divide so that it became clear who was a slave and who wasn’t. Myths and fairytales about African slaves spread to prevent them from intermingling and developing relationships with the newly designated “whites”. Surely enough, a clear divide was made between “whites”, “others”, and “slaves/blacks”, with social/economic benefits were given to people who upheld the laws and distinctions between the groupings.

And...that’s how Racism was born.

“Don’t you have to hate in order to participate in Racism?”

Nope. You can have friends and loved ones that are a different ethnic group or nationality than you. You can even have kids with someone that from a different ethnic group or nationality than you. Plenty of people who participate in Racism make “exceptions” and will continue to do so without ever questioning or disrupting Racism. But at the end of the day, even with intermingling, as long as the false generalizations and distinctions are being made that benefit Racism, then it doesn’t matter how it gets done.

“But isn’t Racism about the Individual?”

Individuals play a role in the system, but individualism does not drive the system and stopping the individual from participating in Racism and focusing solely on the individual does not stop the system. That, and the United States’ idea and desire to further idealize the individual as some sort of mythic figure that changes the course of history on their own is mostly ahistorical mythology and a problem of the system itself.

“Then what is Racism about?”

Place. The goal of Racism is to dictate what your place is in a society, as a group, and keep the majority within that grouping in that designation.

“Can anyone participate in Racism?”

If you participate in the artificially constructed socio-economic segregation and believe that the classifications and dynamics created by Racism are normal and observable, whether it’s necessary evils, natural and biological occurrences, a moral and ethical certainty, then yes. Or, as it was originally, just making money from Racism.

“Can Black People participate in Racism?”

If a Black man or Black woman, consciously or unconsciously, upholds or perpetuates the beliefs and myths that Racism needs to maintain itself and keep people within their place as dictated by the system, then yes. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas believed in Black Exceptionalism but promoted it through the ideas of segregation created by and enriched from hostility from White people, and the rulings he helped to vote for have led to harm towards Black communities and continue to do so.

“Can other minorities actively participate in Racism?”

Yes. For the same reasons that Black people can.

“Why would Black People willingly participate in Racism?”

That is a difficult question to answer without getting into ADOS/FBA, Pan-Africanism, and the overall complexities of the Black Diaspora. But suffice to say that money, sex, and self-esteem are themes that pop up often.

“But how do black people benefit from Racism?”

They don’t. Not in the long run, and sometimes not even in the short run.

Racism was specifically designed to designate Black people* as a permanent underclass to be exploited and killed without question. So even the richest and most powerful of Black men and women can still be seen, spoken to, and treated as an underclass.

*Native Americans and brown/black Mexicans and certain Asians hold that underclass status as well. In different ways, but the same results.

“Do any minorities benefit from practicing Racism?”

Most people don’t benefit from practicing Racism. Period.

“But what about “model minorities?” They make a lot of money so don’t they benefit from Racism?”

Yes, certain groups that are considered “model minorities” do have a higher median household income, but they don’t control the system or how they are perceived within it or have any real access to the upper echelons without engaging in their countries of ancestral Ethnic origin. Money is meaningless without control of the levers of power in a society.

“But what about minorities that aren’t labeled a permanent underclass but aren’t designated a “model minority” by Racism?”

They get ignored and abused/mistreated until it’s time to reinforce Racism and White Supremacy, whether it’s as tools to oppress others or punching bags to bolster the esteem of certain people looking to attack people who can’t fight back.

“Then who benefits from Racism?”

Only the ruling class/Rich White Supremacists can truly benefit from Racism, for they are the ones who created Racism and placed themselves at the top, and have the resources to keep the system functional while receiving the most benefits from the system they created.

“But aren’t White people the biggest participants in Racism?”

It’s more like they’re kept in the nicest, most obscuring (but not that much) bubble.

“How so?”

In America, everyone has been taught that life is a certain way and that people are a certain way. But a large percentage of White people, specifically the White working class, have been placed or actively entered into a bubble where they do not have to see or deal with any minority group beyond media or meaningless interaction while being taught that life is a certain way and that people are a certain way. For all intents and purposes, for a lot of White people, minorities have become a myth in their everyday lives. Visible but not tangibly real until forced to be.

“So, yes?”

In a frustrating way. It’s easier to deal with people getting outright screwed over than White people who get the crumbs from rich White people who are screwing them over. It’s like what I’d imagine dealing with a victim of Stockholm Syndrome would be at it’s worst. Or a happy cult at it’s best.

“Do White people, in general, benefit from Racism?”

Kinda, but not really.

“What are you talking about?”

In general, working class and poor white people, whether willingly or by coercion through social forces, give up their votes, their money, their independence, sense of self and an honest sense of their place in the world and the people around them for the sake of upholding Racism and White Supremacy. The only thing that poor whites and working class whites get in return for everything that’s being taken from them is a pat on the head, a job/house, and the lie that they matter to the elites who happen to have skin like theirs even as those same elites control their lives, tell them how to think and how to react, and perpetually keep their hands in their wallets and purses.

“Is Racism natural?”

No. Racism cannot and does not exist on it’s own. It was birthed by greed and laws meant to create a artificial underclass, and even though it has transformed by the ruling class to keep on making obscene amounts of money off of depressed and subjugated labor, without constant vigil in keeping everyone separate and defined by artificial constructs, the system will collapse.

“What does White Supremacy have to do with Racism?”

It was land owning, rich white men who came up with the Slave Codes that kept people segregated, benefited from the myths perpetuated by ignorance and classism, and defined through the political system a permanent underclass of people to be exploited and deemed subhuman. If Racism is a tool, then White Supremacy is the mind that manipulates the tool and the face that represents the work when finished.

“Can Black Supremacy exist as mentioned by Terry Crews?”

In America...no. Just no. In order for Black Supremacy to exist in America, a major socio-economic shift would have to happen that reverses the positions of black people and rich white men. Black people would have to control the means of production and propaganda so thoroughly that the transition would be seamless, and there’s more than 400 years of propaganda and structural opposition against Black people to prevent such a change from happening without drastic use of force.

“Can Racism end?”

Yes.

“How can Racism end?”

Through full-on, no fault/no requirements/no limitations/no illusion of meritocracy integration.

“But Killer Mike said Black people were better off segregated?”

Killer Mike says things sometimes. And a lot of those things lack historical context and romanticize an era of neo-slavery that lasted up until the 60’s. For every successful black business, there were hundreds of thousands of black people that were denied anything but laughter and got told to go serve the white man’s family with no back talk or side eye. And for the few black people that were successful, there was always the risk that if enough white people got upset about it, they were going to get shut down with no recompense and the chance of being killed in the process. Killer Mike’s ideas of a Black Renaissance in the South ignore how the South has been operating since it became the South and the problems that continue to plague Black people all across the country.

“But I thought we were already integrated?”

We really, really weren’t. The most blatant of laws enforcing segregation were mostly taken off the books, but the social-economic structures that encourage and reward segregation are still going on. Redlining and blockbusting and white flight did not go away, they just were hidden behind “good schools” and good neighborhoods” and “good cops.”

“What do you mean about “good schools”, “good neighborhoods”, and “good cops?”

Money as a measure of Morality and Segregation as an ethical choice. Convincing people that having a lot of money equals good morals because how else is it supposed to work? But you have to use that money to get away from all of the bad elements which so happens to a result of Black people who “just can’t get their act together.”

“Now you’re getting into Capitalism.”

Capitalism is kin to Racism.

“What do you mean?”

It’s pretty hard, mentally and emotionally, to oppress and dehumanize and segregate from people, whether for your personal gain or to uphold the social order. You need something to keep you going and to justify what you do. A system of morals and ethics with a “benevolent good” that is tangible enough to participate in and observe, but intangible enough to keep pursuing without questioning how it truly functions.

And then you need an enemy. Someone you can point to and say, in the same way you can point to money as a benevolent good, that their existence is evil or misguided and perverts the benevolent good and your access to it when allowed to. So segregate from them, keep them from that source of good, and better your own life in the process.

Money as a measure of morals and segregation as an ethical choice. A job is a virtue and measure of the morality of the person. You suffer for it because that suffering proves that you’re a good person. And people who don’t look like you are evil beings who threaten your ability to be a good person. And then you have an excuse to be horrible to other human beings.

“It sounds like you should be focusing on Capitalism.”

Even if you get rid of money and the elite’s control on us through money, people will always want to feel good about themselves and know their place in the world. And Racism, as horrible as it is, gives people answers and a place in the world and someone to look down on and fight against.

Ideally, I’d curtail both. But if I had to choose, then Racism would be the one I’d get rid of first.

“Why?”

Because at the heart of everything, it’s about controlling who gets put where and why and how. Control who gets the money and why, control a woman’s ability to have children and why, control the narrative/stories/propaganda about others and yourself, and then give yourself an “other” that justifies it, and you have your system.

And I think that if you collapse Racism, you collapse the system. Racism gives people fictional enemies that can’t be anything else but an enemy because you can’t change skin color. People understand fighting more than they understand money and power, and once you get rid of that fiction, that perpetual mythological enemy, then what is left but people. And people are far easier to fight when you can see them clearly.

#racism

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politicaltheatre · 5 years ago

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The Boy In The Bubble, pt.1

If you’re of a certain age, you might just remember a TV movie starring John Travolta, “The Boy In The Plastic Bubble”. Travolta was only TV famous then, not yet movie famous, and the bubble wasn’t literally a bubble, it was all of the plastic suits and rooms and boxes on gurneys that protected Travolta’s character and his broken immune system from the always sunny yet lethal outside world.

It was an innocent story from an innocent time. Of course, no one at that time thought of it as being particularly innocent. In the mid to late 1970s, America was still dealing with the fallout from the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the sexual revolution, spiritual curiosity and psychological awakening, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement.

We dealt with none of it well.

Far from learning any actually helpful lessons from the carnage of Southeast Asia, American foreign policy switched from supporting dictators and death squads there to doing so in Central and South America. Those working for Nixon who didn’t end up going to jail, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, only learned the lesson that next time, whatever they did, they just shouldn’t get caught. That, for them, was Nixon’s only sin.

Meanwhile, whites were fleeing to the suburbs and the cities they left were burning. The religious cults that people fled to for emotional support either fleeced their flocks or convinced them to kill themselves - sometimes both. In the cities and suburbia, depraved serial killers suddenly seemed to be everywhere and spreading like a plague. Children were no longer safe playing outside at night. Worst of all, the decades long threat of nuclear war was rapidly becoming matched by the growing fear of nuclear power and nuclear meltdowns.

All this, and the pandemic that would come to be known as AIDS wasn’t yet even on anyone’s radar. That would come a few years later, about the same time we learned not to trust non-prescription drugs like Tylenol without tamper-proof lids.

And yet, it was a much more innocent time. Perhaps this is because we knew less. We didn’t yet know what we didn’t know, and what our leaders knew, they generally didn’t share. Not that we knew, or even thought to ask. Nixon and the Pentagon Papers destroyed our faith in government, but even then we chose not to seek answers we didn’t want to know.

There’s a lot of willful ignorance now, too, but it has more to do with the corruptions of consumerism and tribalism. Thanks to the internet and mobile devices, we have the ability to learn what our leaders once hid and got away with hiding, and to do with speed that 40 years ago seemed like science fiction.

Sadly, that same technology has allowed us to have what we want when we want it, right down to a reflection of our own, narrow, self-serving political beliefs and the fantasies we require to hide from what we don’t want to know or even see.

We aren’t challenged, we don’t have to be, and to make matters worse we have externalized so much of our collective memory that we each know just about nothing that doesn’t reflect those same narrow, self-serving interests.

We fetishize our ignorance, embracing it as an affectation, something restoring us to and maintaining us in the perceived safety of pre-adolescence. If anyone comes along showing us rational proof that we are wrong, we dismiss them because we can and continue until we absolutely can’t.

If nothing else, this helps explain our current economy and with it our current politics.

We jump from one short term solution to another, from one passion to another. Our collective speculative interest raises the fortunes of politicians as if they were stocks on Wall Street, reducing them to flavors of the week, almost all fading just as quickly as they rise.

To win, a politician needs a hook, something to elicit strong emotions. It must be bold or reckless, or even violent. To sustain that success, a politician needs to keep delivering. What they deliver seems to matter less than the how and the when.

It’s quantity over quality. In short term thinking, quantity will do. You offer options and the enabling audience takes what they want to suit their own short term interests. Everything else is just a cost of doing business. It’s transactional, pure and simple.

Quality demands more from an audience. It answers the rarely asked question of what the audience actually needs rather than what it simply wants. There’s a very good reason that question is rare. Its answer demands a stronger, lengthier commitment, one that requires many to sacrifice what they want for a greater good.

If perfect is the enemy of good, in politics it’s the enemy of winning.

Deliver a clear, rational plan to solve the country’s long term problems and you should be elected; do so without entertaining, without pandering to the basic emotions and short term interest of your audience, and you might as well be one of those brilliant but cancelled shows lost to the Netflix algorithm.

Case in point, Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Senator made a few missteps in her now ended campaign for president, but the further she got the more those errors were dictated by things beyond her control.

The one getting the most press, and deservedly so, is sexism. Of course, sexism played a part in her candidacy’s failure, and that of the other five women who ran (Tulsi Gabbard’s zombie of a campaign was over almost as soon as it started).

So much of our culture, starting with our economy, is built on an imbalance of power. Today’s relationship between employer and employee is little changed from that of the feudal master and apprentice.

In this model of behavior, the apprentice starts out having no power, exchanging time in servitude for an education in a craft. The master, possessing the resource of knowledge which he may share as he chooses, may exploit his apprentice however he pleases.

In the short term, this works for both of them. The master is served and the apprentice learns. An imbalance of power, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely. The more the apprentice learns, the less of an imbalance there is and the more difficult it becomes to exploit him.

To maintain his power, the master has two choices: enable the apprentice so that he may himself become a master and then find a new apprentice to replace him, or abuse the apprentice so that he will be forced to stay as and where he is. The more the master abuses the apprentice, the more the apprentice wants to leave and the more effort must be made to keep him where and as he is, and so the cycle repeats until the apprentice revolts against the master, removing him one way or another.

For decades now, the backlash against unions as well as civil and women’s rights has attempted to maintain an economic underclass, to push men and women back where and as they are supposed to be. This has not been some grand conspiracy. It is just what happens when a group that has had it good finds itself in decline, or merely in competition.

Sadly, this backlash has to a great extent succeeded. Union membership has fallen, partly because union leadership has become disconnected from those they serve and partly because laws have gutted their ability to fight. Civil and women’s rights have never been stronger, but members of those groups face racism and homophobia and sexism transmitted like a virulent plague by bots and trolls hiding behind the perceived safety of anonymity.

For someone representing a group that has been abused and exploited because it was different enough and acceptable enough to be abused and exploited, the challenge of campaigning for office let alone winning an election is daunting. They do from a position of weakness defined by the same imbalance of power that underlies the very culture and economy in which they run.

So, how else can we expect the candidacy of someone on the wrong side of that imbalance to end?

True, Barack Obama won twice, but his victories were an outlier. He was the right, inspiring campaigner at the right economic catastrophe of a time going up against Republicans who failed to show either economic competence or empathy when it was most needed. Had it not been for the idiotic deregulation of banking that helped John McCain and Mitt Romney’s most important campaign contributors, Obama may have faced far stiffer competition both times. He might even have lost.

Obama was helped, too, by changes in our culture. Black, male presidents had already been portrayed as competent, empathic heroes in popular films and television shows. All he had to do was inhabit the role, and he did so as if those earlier films and shows had been written specifically with him in mind. If only he had their script writers.

He arrived with a mandate for change, and yet in his two terms Obama just about gave it all away. Part of that was because even as “the most powerful man on the planet” he was still on the wrong side of an imbalance of power. An unscrupulous Republican-led Congress obstructed him at every turn, nakedly serving the very wealthy at the expense of everyone else and daring him to call them on it.

He never really did. Perhaps this was because, as a follower of The Chicago School and “Clinton” Democrat, he simply agreed with many of the Republican’s “business friendly” policies. Mostly, though, it was because of the color of his skin, which those same Republicans and their business friends exploited to stir up fear and hatred in communities facing decline, ones looking for an other to blame.

What’s odd is that Obama won in many of those regions, even as congressional Republicans shifted their party further and further towards the naked racism and scapegoating of Donald Trump. Those people, the ones who voted for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, really did seem to want change, and perhaps still do.

Could Warren have won in those regions? Possibly. Campaigning as a woman meant that she, too, had to curb her sharp edges the way Obama did, and for a while that seemed to be working. But then it didn’t.

That, ultimately, had less to do with being a woman and more to do with being a brand.

Bernie Sanders is a brand. So is Joe Biden. The difference between them and the twenty-something candidates they have so far beaten has been name recognition. You might be thinking, “What do you mean, ‘name recognition’? Everybody knows who Elizabeth Warren is by now!”, and to an extent you’d be right. But you’d also be wrong.

What the Bernie and Biden brands have going for them is longevity. Brand loyalty is built on habit, and people having a good feeling about a brand for a long time is an enormous advantage. It’s incumbency by another name.

The Bernie brand has been around for four years and it remains strong, in no small part because it has big ideas that require no detail whatsoever. Ask any die-hard Bernie fan to describe his Medicare For All plan in any kind of detail, and the vast, vast majority won’t be able to. It would be great if they could. It would be great if they even took the time and effort to look it up. Few do.

So few people do, in fact, that the insurance lobby has gotten away with painting it as irresponsibly expensive - it isn’t - and even aired a commercial during the South Carolina debate in which they claimed that it would raise already expensive insurance premiums. Medicare For All doesn’t even have premiums! Aside from one article published just last week in the New York Times, no one in the media even caught on. That should embarrassing all of us.

Still, the Bernie brand is strong. He represents a fantasy of what our country could and should be for a growing percentage of the population. That he may not be able to achieve his campaign promises is beside the point. That is, it’s beside the point for enough of his fans - the real fans, not the possibly Russian and/or alt right Bernie Bots - that they don’t want to hear about it.

That, naturally, hurt Warren. The cold, hard reality of what we must do for each other has long been her brand. That means details, and details mean quality, which requires long term thinking on the part of an audience, which means good luck back in the Senate.

Too late, she tried to pivot to place herself as the sensible choice halfway between Sanders and Biden, but sensible isn’t a choice voters like to have to make, and Biden’s brand has proven to be just as strong as Sanders’.

Biden’s strengths both match and mirror those of Sanders. His name recognition was so great that before he even announced he was the frontrunner. He was a popular vice president, endearingly known for gaffes, not policy. The details of his past are not pretty, not if you were on the wrong side of that imbalance of power.

His current power, however, rests in fantasy, one equal and opposite to that of Sanders in one very specific way: Joe Biden is the “safe” choice, promising to return us to a happier past.

In his case, it’s life before Trump, which is quite a fantasy to have when you consider just how bad things were under Obama. This is because life under Obama was ruled not by him but by his nemeses in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who together pushed the imbalance of power in the country almost all the way back to the time before unions or civil rights or women’s rights really took hold.

It was their effort, along with their friends in business and in the right wing media, that paved the way for Donald J. Trump to take Movement Conservatism and make it his own. They, of course, were just building on the work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who rode the Bush family brand back into the White House and rode American credibility and the American economy right into the ground.

They were as responsible as anyone for the election of Barack Obama. That was the America we wanted to leave behind. Now, we have something far worse.

The idea of going backwards to something better is a terrible brand to have for Democrats. It’s one built on fear. It’s one built on short term, transactional thinking. Biden’s solution to our growing health care problems is to slap a patch on it, to tweak it here and there. He, too, doesn’t have any details, but he isn’t offering them because it’s an advantage not to. We want fantasy, we want that protective bubble, and the fantasy he’s selling of leaving this toxic world behind is plenty.

For now.

Biden currently has momentum and it may well be enough to secure the nomination before the party convention this summer. If he does, expect Sanders to endorse him and campaign with him in order to rid the country of the one thing they both agree it needs to lose: Donald Trump.

Do not, however, expect a campaign filled with details. The fantasy, writ large with big, bold messaging and one main theme, is all you will get. It may be all want, especially if he succeeds.

Then what?

- Daniel Ward

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feimineach · 8 years ago

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Women are similarly encouraged to ‘free their nipples’ in the name of ‘sex-positive’ feminism*, because get-your-tits-out-for-the-boys is perceived as a revolutionary act subverting the status quo while keeping attention firmly on our bodies and how they look rather than on what we’re saying or doing- and do men care why we’re getting our tops off, as long as they’re off?

While many liberal feminists acknowledge that mainstream porn falls short, failing to represent healthy sexuality or female pleasure, they argue the answer is better quality porn - so-called feminist porn. However, the bar for what constitutes feminist porn is set very low, with content frequently reflecting the same gendered power dynamics and even the same violence against women. Pornography featuring women being subjected to degrading or violent sex acts, such as choking, can be categorised as feminist porn if it is produced by a woman or includes diverse body types. Way to smash the patriarchy...

Even the commodification of women and girls in the global sex trade can be regarded as feminist now. Sex industry profiteers and lobbyists go to great lengths to reframe the purchase of female flesh by men not as exploitation and abuse, but as an exercise in women’s choice and autonomy, despite survivors telling a very different story. Many enter the industry as children, destitute and without viable alternatives, and go on to experience routine violence and according to research, levels of trauma comparable with that of war veterans.

How can proponents of a movement to end the oppression of women support an industry that requires an underclass of vulnerable women, including indigenous women and women of colour, available for men to access for sex? In today’s feminism, “paid rape”, as survivors put it, becomes ‘sex work’, women are expected to embrace their objectification, find empowerment in being commoditised and cheerfully submit to their subordination. Ask yourself, who benefits from this?

Rather than challenging male entitlement to women’s bodies, encouraging men to consider their participation in a patriarchal system or to reflect on the privileges and benefits they enjoy as males at the top of the gender hierarchy, this watered down version of feminism challenges nothing. It requires nothing of men. In fact, it has made men so comfortable that some feel justified in schooling women on feminism when they fail to conform to a form of feminism* that privileges men’s orgasms over women’s basic human rights.

#feminism #women's rights #sociology #equality #male entitlement #liberal feminism #patriarchy #social justice #women's liberation

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restless-stirring · 7 years ago

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there are a lot of parallels between far left and far right (horseshoe theory) but our ways of interpreting these issues and what we think we ought to do about them and our moral frameworks are fundamentally different. these are the issues in common:

muh guns

put an end to racial conflict

the poors are being kept down by the elites

imperialism is wrong and we’re against it

a violent revolution against the current regime must happen

we must build a new society

these parallels can fool people into thinking that the far left and far right are basically the same, but when we look at what the specific content and framework surrounding each of these points are, they turn out to be extremely different.

the “muh guns” issue is about our feelings of vulnerability against an Other. for the left, the Other is the ruling elite, the capitalists, and this class has no specific identity other than that. in contrast for the right, the Other has a split identity: it is both an underclass of racially-inferior Others, and also an overclass of administrative and economic elites, which they identify with technocratic Democrats and “jewish” capitalist-bankers.

both sides wish for an end to racial conflict (in the USA). the left wishes to bring this about by redressing grievances and forming a new society that eliminates poverty, either from a top-down state approach, or from a bottom-up commune approach; the root of the problem is seen as economic, and therefore it is interpreted as belonging to a framework of class warfare. in contrast, the right sees this as an outcome of biological nature, buying into the idea that race is a fact of matter, blood, innate heritage, and that human beings do not all belong to the same nature. this is why they talk about IQ as their supposed-objective measure of difference in human natures. this leads them to idealize white ethno-states where all “impurity” is expelled, or at least decreased to a minimum and tightly controlled.

these two points find a combination in the third point, that ordinary people, which is to say poor people, are intentionally oppressed by a relatively small, elite group of the super-rich. the left interprets this more or less according to marx, where liberalism allows the growth of socially parasitic tumors in the shape of human beings, called capitalists. most capitalists are white, because whites as a racial category hold a dominant position in society (in the USA), and this becomes self-reinforcing in a loop. however, the race of the capitalist is generally interpreted as mattering less than the behavior and function of the capitalist (aside from critiques of settler-colonialism), and this is also the principle that identifies “black CEOs” or “woman fighter pilots” as missing the point, because that’s really idpol used to defend an imperialist-capitalist world system. these imperialist-capitalists, who happen to mostly be white (in the USA) because of a long history of global war and slavery, can prey upon the rest of society because they are allowed to abuse the labor of workers. therefore, leftists must retain the ownership of weapons, so that one day, when the revolution (rapture) comes, they can slay all the capitalists and thereby rid the world of evil!

the right, again in contrast, formulates a superficially similar but fundamentally different kind of revolution. since race is thought to be a fact of nature, being white must in some way align with being good, so the emphasis of the white identity is placed on being poor (oppressed) instead of being rich. since whites are poor despite being superior, it must be that they are oppressed by their racial inferiors, who have been wrongly elevated in society by white race traitors, which stems back to ye grande olde war of northern aggression (...in the USA). technocratic Democrats and large corporations are seen as the entities “forcing diversity,” or “forcing feminism,” which are interpreted as unnatural, and this is how that oppression of whites is practiced. capitalists, therefore, are either white traitors, or more sinisterly, are jewish people, which is a conspiracy rooted in the european middle ages, and its early development of banking (shortly, jewish people are allowed to collect interest on loans, but white christians are not able to do that, because christianity is interpreted as disallowing the collection of interest). i say “conspiracy” here because that’s how it’s formulated: we see it in (what i believe are) vile anti-semitic lies, like the protocols of the elders of zion, or any number of conspiracy theories about international bankers. these supposedly-jewish bankers promote a system of capitalism that deviates from a currency backed by a precious material (gold or silver), in order to create a banking system based on leverage, which is then intentionally manipulated. it is manipulated in a way that commodity-backed currency supposedly can’t be, such that the risk it creates results in boom and bust cycles. this is a parallel to the marxist critique of capitalism, but instead of being based on any internally consistent philosophy, theory, and analysis, it is based more simply on racism, which also makes it more accessible to undereducated racist people. following from that, these boom and bust cycles are then also intentionally used to steal real property and other forms of wealth from whites during the ensuing depressions they cause, and thereby enrich the fantasized cabal of jewish banker elites (if this sounds outlandish, this is what they actually believe; i’m not just making this up). this is framed as an evil jewish corruption of pure and good (white) capitalism, and further associated with conspiracy theories about the destruction of the (white) state in order to promote a single global government (the new world order, the united nations, and curiously also a right-wing misinterpretation of post-state communism, which leads to an absurd misidentification of communists with international bankers). this fear of the boom-bust cycle, as an intentional tool to oppress whites, is further compounded with the fear of a near-total collapse, where non-whites will stream out of cities and overwhelm the (rural) whites. therefore, to keep the jewish banking elite in check, the whites must retain the ownership of weapons, so that one day, when the bankers ruin everything, the whites can slay all the racially-inferior marauders and elites, and thereby rid the world of evil!

there are plenty of other smaller parallel branches to these theories of oppression and collapse, which are found in survivalist movements (not just “muh guns” but also creating bunkers and learning survival skills), and at least on the right, the formation of extra-governmental “militias,” which the left is also usually attracted to in form, if not in moral framework and specific purpose, either as a revolutionary vanguard, or an anarchist replacement for a regular military.

the argument against imperialism likewise proceeds from these ideas of oppression and revolution: the left argues that imperialism stems from the pressures of capitalism, of requiring “ready-made markets,” and creating relationships of exploitation, where an industrialized, imperial core can abuse the labor and resources not just of its own people and land, but also of foreign peoples and foreign lands. since capitalism demands this exploitation (or IS this exploitation), it also demands and excuses the horrors of attacking legitimate foreign governments that do not act in favor of the core (or of the USA), as well as attacking foreign civilians in general, either as a byproduct (which may be a fig-leaf excuse, the so-called “collateral damage”) or as an intentional practice of disruption to keep foreign states (or anarchist societies or whatever) from organizing and persisting against that predation. the left interpretation of this is that it is fundamentally a moral wrong to attack others, with whom we should find solidarity as common workers, against a capitalist world-system.

the right is also often opposed to imperialism, but for wholly different reasons. while the right may also point to the simple moral wrong of attacking a relatively innocent Other, they are instead mainly focused on themselves: they point to the loss of their own lives in the imperial military machine, and perhaps even more outrageously, the taxing of their meager wealth to fund that machine. this taxation is appalling because it is seated not only in a framework of misuse, but also as theft. the foundation to this is the just-world fallacy, where the earning or creation of wealth is supposed to be related to labor, and that the taking of this wealth (or labor-value) by elites, by the government, is a moral wrong (again, superficially similar to the left, whereas the left imagines this stealing is committed mainly by the boss instead of the elected official, but that there is also collusion between these). the left and right split here: the left believes the labor-value belongs only to the worker, where the right believes that the labor-value belongs to a hierarchical authority based on an argument of proportional risk (i.e., the CEO risks more of a loss with a poor decision or mistake than a worker on an assembly line does). the left and right further split when interpreting this proportional risk: where the capitalist may risk an absolute value of wealth greater than the worker, the worker risks not eating, whereas the capitalist risks losing one of their six mansions; meanwhile, the right only sees the price of the mansion compared to the price of the beans and rice, and concludes that the mansion is worth protecting more than the meal. this is related to the (perhaps USA-centric) notion of the temporarily-embarrassed millionaire: in a true and white capitalist system free of jewish corruption and interference, wealth is directly proportional to personal virtue, so the attainment of unlimited wealth must be protected, so that unlimited personal virtue is protected. therefore, a tax to fund imperialism is an outrageous tax, because it both destroys this relationship of personal virtue to personal wealth, and also takes wealth, rightfully generated by this white virtue, from whites, and diverts it to the schemes of the international jewish banking elite on their quest to rule the world.

these streams of thought also seem to come together in a curious way with regard to the state of israel: left anti-imperialists will hate israel for its colonialism, which is promoted and sustained by the western imperial core, while at the same time maintaining a strict opposition against anti-semitism (that is to say, jewish people are not identified with israeli colonialism). right anti-imperialists will also hate israel, because it is a jewish state, and the USA, by supporting israel, shows that it is subject to the schemes of international jewish bankers. in contrast, many moderate centrists are in favor of supporting israel, either because they naively believe a two-state solution is possible, that the USA is a neutral party to the conflict between israel and palestine, or really that the centrist position is unabashedly imperialist, though it provides a multitude of excuses.

the far left and far right both believe that the governing system of liberal democracy both allows and promotes the outrages highlighted here. it’s important to note here too that liberal-capitalism on its surface makes a host of promises which ultimately it does not keep, or twists those promises to mean things that are not superficially apparent: human rights, freedoms, prosperity, education, stability, mobility, peace, are all things promised to the common person, but either from the start or over time decay into ideas that reproduce the aristocracy (or oligarchy, kleptocracy, aristocratic monarchy, etc) that liberalism proposes to end. human rights are twisted to mean legal privileges that can be and should be revoked. freedom is at the center of american history, where it is constantly fought over and redefined in innumerable ways to suit whatever conflict is at hand, at the moment, and its moral value is reflected more by the person or organization in the conflict than the principle itself. prosperity is removed from the promise of the common cornucopia (and on the right, to the commonly virtuous) to that of the reserve of the uncommonly virtuous, and then further, in practice, the reserve of only a tiny minority that hold all real power, not through their virtue, but through their vice (this is where the false idea of “crony capitalism” emerges, whereas all capitalism is, in practice, crony capitalism, and the two can’t be separated). education is promoted for all, except those ideas which challenge a hierarchical social order of capitalist elites; education is remade into training for service and obedience. liberal democracy proposes a system of stable exchange of power over time, superior to dynastic intrigues that salic law failed to prevent. here it might be successful in a sense, but it is twisted (in the USA) into a type of stability that favors dynastic families based on ideology instead of blood (with some famous exceptions), and declines into a tussle between lesser evils, instead of ascending to greater goods, and in any case it too must serve the interests of a capitalist elite. the entire system of voting and choosing of candidates becomes (or was from the start) thoroughly corrupt and out of step with all other promises, and these are described again by innumerable problems: voting tests, poll taxes, voter ID laws, voting schedules, gerrymandering, falsified counting procedures, procedures and systems that make falsification easier, specific methods of voting that create errors (issues with ballots, hanging chads, unclear systems of indicating preferred candidate), campaigns of roboticized or otherwise mass communication systems of lying about the circumstances of voting (date, requirements, location, times, threats), a first-past-the-post system to determine winners (in the USA), etc, and often these problems are specifically created to disenfranchise people that are marginalized in other ways, most often either by class or race. campaigning for office is defined more by funding than any other aspect, and that funding necessarily arrives through money given by capitalists through organizations, and that money is often made unaccountable, and all of this results in a system where the capitalist class effectively both writes and buys legislation that favors the capitalist class, so the whole of liberalism eventually decays into aristocracy. economic and social mobility are promised in capitalism and never delivered, because wealth is equal to power, and power is kept tightly in the hands of the aristocrats as long as they are allowed to exist. this means the result of liberal-capitalism is necessarily that of poverty for the common person, and untold (and hidden) wealth for an elite, taken as close to a breaking point as possible. finally we are asked to accept all of this in exchange for peace, a sort of peace made by imperial rome, where the common person is kept sedated most of the time through bread and circuses, and otherwise through the exhaustion of labor and debt, while the government attempts to maintain control of the world through military might, and the people at the top are kept insulated from the suffering that is the consequence of their actions. this tendency toward ultimate decline is described both on the left by marx, and on the right by works like oswald spengler’s decline of the west. when we come closer and closer to that breaking point, where the illusion of liberalism becomes unsustainable, that describes an era that precedes the rise of communism and fascism, and it’s the reason why we see both movements crop up in the early 20th and early 21st centuries. instead of liberalism being a see-saw of left and right, a supposed kind of stability, what we are really seeing is a long-term see-saw between moderate and extreme, or center and periphery. the “moderate” system decays until the aristocracy is so entrenched and so abusive of the common people that peripheral politics become popular, and since all peaceful means to fulfill the promises of liberalism are exhausted and futile, this leaves us with no recourse other than violent revolution.

this leads to discussion of what the new society after the revolution (rapture) must look like, and what we must do to prevent a decay back into the liberal-capitalism that finally leads to the old aristocracy. here again, and perhaps most pointedly, the left and right diverge to such extremes in some cases that horsehoe theory is rendered totally absurd. the left utterly refuses a system of race, where the right embraces it to the point where it constitutes possibly the most important core value. the left refuses the interpretation of gender where people are valued based on a biological or social difference, where the right emphasizes (reifies) the difference and importance of “sex” and its importance in society. the left refuses the class warfare of capitalism, where the right reconstitutes and promotes it as a pure system of virtue, where tax can only be justified through spending it on promoting the white race or other nativist avenues, and even here, private charity (another form of virtue) is favored over tax. following from that, the left favors accommodating the disabled, whereas the right interprets the disabled as lacking virtue, and interprets caring for the disabled either as extraordinary virtue performed privately, or a grand mistake that can devalue ability (strength, a virtue). in contrast to these extreme differences, both the left and right have no single theory of government to unify them, the left varies from extreme authoritarian systems to extreme anti-authoritarian systems, both proposed to promote a common good of all peoples. superficially, the right also has this split between extreme authority (in the manner of 20th century fascism) and extreme anti-authority (the “muh freedums” “don’t tread on me” right), but the imagined societies of each of these are starkly opposed to their pairs on the left: tankie authoritarianism on the left is the enemy of fascist authoritarianism on the right, and anarcho-communists propose wholly different ways of living to anarcho-capitalists, to the point where grouping them together is laughable. at the same time, this leads horseshoe-theorists to mistakenly conclude that communists and nazis are the same, or that all anarchists are just the same rabble. likewise, it results in confusing splits across the spectrum of authority: we can find those that favor authoritarianism grouping all anti-authoritarians together without regard to their left/right split, and those that favor anti-authoritarianism grouping together all authoritarians, such that the left will fight the left, and the right will fight the right.

in any of these cases, both the left and right superficially observe a “good people,” but how this is defined is wholly divergent. on the left, the “good people” are all people, by nature, who are mainly corrupted or lost to (turned evil by) the forces of poverty, or lack of education (i must admit here i remain unconvinced of this innate goodness, and consequently i remain skeptical of any system reliant on it). on the right, the “good people” are defined through the system of race, where whites are best, and everyone else falls into an inferior system of hierarchical goodness. both the left and the right propose that their post-revolution societies rely on their ideals of natural goodness, but the content of that natural goodness is, yet again, wholly divergent. the natural goodness of the left is anti-racist, anti-misogynistic, anti-greed, anti-ableist. the natural goodness of the right is firmly racist, firmly misogynistic, firmly “virtuous,” where virtue is identified with material wealth and strength.

the far left and far right really don’t agree on anything: the identity of the oppressor is different, the meaning of race is different, the construction of gender is different, the notion of virtue is different, the accumulation and meaning of wealth is not agreed upon, the interpretation and content of human nature and human goodness is different, the analysis of capitalism and economy is different, the value and meaning of labor is different. the far left and far right are not the same. horsehoe theory is wrong. people are tricked into believing it because they’re ignorant and have not examined what’s going on under the surface.

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