The real problem is that the born-here American people - from truck driver to CEO to Soccer Mom to Cable TV dad to Senator are complacent with American Imperialism.
The real problem is that Liberals accept a lying, cheating, warmonger in stride, they don't even notice that it's at odds with the concept of liberalism. Americans turn a blind eye on foreign policy with a pervasive attitude that "what happens elsewhere in the world is of very little importance, really."
They accept the deportation of jobs and industry in the hopes that the dropping prices at walmart will compensate, that their standard of living will remain much higher than the world's average, that they will have a chance at becoming filthy rich in "the land of opportunity."
The real problem is that white americans who are really feeling the results of austerity measures (a term intended to facilitate the takeover of our government by the oligarchy) are the very ones who are angry and lashing out against immigrants and people of color, angry at their loss of status and income, but much, much, much too ignorant and culturally unprepared to cope with the reality that capitalism is their worst enemy.
The problem, my friend, is that Liberals have fallen into a complacent stupor - unwilling to criticise in any sort of a serious manner their own "leaders" - Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee, & etc., all get doughy eyed around Democrats and are so frightened of the current right-wing threat that they decided that they cannot criticize their prevaricating, greedy, in-cahoots democrats for fear that something even worse will get into office.
And so, my friend, you, me, everyone who claims to care about liberal issues has fueled the race to the bottom - to Hillary & Trump. Some of our friends were saying "this is an untenable pattern - it will lead to the bottom" for years, and yet you, and I, and most every liberal around ignored them as the "crazy fringe" .
But - and I cite reality here - they were resoundingly right.
So, although I respect everyone's right to make choices for themselves - that's a core to my progressive-humanist values - the fact is that it is this continued blind faith in the status quo and a real deliberate looking-away by liberals that allows this system to accelerate towards - if not outright to WW3, then at the very minimum degradation of the biosphere to catastrophic degrees of CO2 emission, sea level rise, the 6th extinction, and a return to slave or near slave labor for most of humanity in a senseless pursuit of profit for 1% of 1% of the population.
We're text-book insane as a nation. And since Liberals will not acknowledge this - or their place - their complacency - and the dire degree to which all of this is real, on the ground reality here and now - I see no hope of turning the tide here in America.
I honestly have no sense of what - if anything at all - will turn the tide short of self destruction on a grand scale.
And I cry for the children bombed in Somalia because America doesn't consider the people there to be people, and they were just in the way in some geopolitical move that the Clintons wanted to make.
Or for the children in Syria, who are dying under our 45,000 bombs dropped this year so-far by the Obama administration - 24hrs / day, 7 day / week - while liberals and americans and journalists pretend that this is a "just war" which is "borne of humanitarian reasons." (See here for another perspective)
It's sick - it's cardboard cutout cartoon villain level of bullshit - that you, and my previous self - and most everyone we know happily barely acknowledges and hides our war mongering away in their peripheral vision so that they don't have to think too hard about it and just trusts the idea that america as a reasonable sane place with flawed but overall sensible well-meaning leaders (well, R's think theirs are the sane ones, and D's think theirs are, while in truth they're both beating the same war drums and taking the same corporate pay-to-play cash).
Liberals willfully buy-in to the "Assad is a bad guy" pre-chewed narrative and go along with the idea that this somehow gives the USA carte blanche to bomb and starve and terrorize civilians in order to bring about a regime change that suits our geopolitical interests better even though this is a flash point for Russia and China and seriously endangers sparking a WW3.
But, you know, "bad guy" = them, and "good guy" = us, and all is right under the american pie.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
The DNC is a reeking corpse...
I agree with all Alicé Anil has to say in that video except the idea that we can do anything at all useful with the DNC. They're extremely well funded and corporate-money controls them to their core.
There is no we in the DNC - no populous anything - just a lot of neoliberals trying to blow up the world for fun or profit.
The DNC is pro-war, pro-repressive regimes, pro-puppet regime change, pro psy-ops, pro-globalization, pro-human rights abuses, anti-humanist, anti-working class, anti-democracy on every possible level.
So - YES! The DNC couldn't have been more stupid - more self-destructive - more destructive to our nation if they tried (wait - they did try - they did their absolute damndest to retain power at the expense of all moral and ethical value - all reason to legitimately want power in the first place!)
The DNC sold their soul when they chose to follow Bill Clinton and his advisors from the DLC into "3rd way democrats" - i.e. wooing big monied interests by agreeing to help them with their agenda while simultaneously trading on the good name they still had from FDR and Kennedy to woo us voters.
But they haven't helped minorities, or the poor, or really fought for women's health in 30+ years.
And time and again when they lose big (as they did in 2010 midterms, and before in 2000 when they lost to GW for christ's sake!) - they just say "oh, it was /anything-but-their-failures/ to blame.
They never acknowledge that their focus on pleasing big money has utterly hollowed out their party and left it a vampire that feeds on the lifeblood of those who still believe in the goodness of people, of FDR, of JFK, or MLK, and wrongly believe that the DNC is in there fighting the good fight with them.
No - the DNC is not our friend - nay - it is indelibly our sworn enemy - the enemy of all goodness and human interests for the mindless pursuit of power and money.
Do not be a fool and fall for their lies.
Do not be naive and accept that there is ANY path to redeeming the DNC.
They are dead, dead, and dead.
All that's left is for us to bury their stinking reeking corpse, and to birth a new political system - not a goddamn two -party duopoly - but a real democracy with a real parliament or something similar that's open, inclusive, diverse, and multiethnic, multi-inclusive, as America really ought to be!!!
There is no we in the DNC - no populous anything - just a lot of neoliberals trying to blow up the world for fun or profit.
The DNC is pro-war, pro-repressive regimes, pro-puppet regime change, pro psy-ops, pro-globalization, pro-human rights abuses, anti-humanist, anti-working class, anti-democracy on every possible level.
So - YES! The DNC couldn't have been more stupid - more self-destructive - more destructive to our nation if they tried (wait - they did try - they did their absolute damndest to retain power at the expense of all moral and ethical value - all reason to legitimately want power in the first place!)
The DNC sold their soul when they chose to follow Bill Clinton and his advisors from the DLC into "3rd way democrats" - i.e. wooing big monied interests by agreeing to help them with their agenda while simultaneously trading on the good name they still had from FDR and Kennedy to woo us voters.
But they haven't helped minorities, or the poor, or really fought for women's health in 30+ years.
And time and again when they lose big (as they did in 2010 midterms, and before in 2000 when they lost to GW for christ's sake!) - they just say "oh, it was /anything-but-their-failures/ to blame.
They never acknowledge that their focus on pleasing big money has utterly hollowed out their party and left it a vampire that feeds on the lifeblood of those who still believe in the goodness of people, of FDR, of JFK, or MLK, and wrongly believe that the DNC is in there fighting the good fight with them.
No - the DNC is not our friend - nay - it is indelibly our sworn enemy - the enemy of all goodness and human interests for the mindless pursuit of power and money.
Do not be a fool and fall for their lies.
Do not be naive and accept that there is ANY path to redeeming the DNC.
They are dead, dead, and dead.
All that's left is for us to bury their stinking reeking corpse, and to birth a new political system - not a goddamn two -party duopoly - but a real democracy with a real parliament or something similar that's open, inclusive, diverse, and multiethnic, multi-inclusive, as America really ought to be!!!
It begins with a process of reconciliation
I watched a TED talk recently where a man - a black man - Bryan Stevenson - works with incarcerated youths who were tried as adults and imprisoned for life.
Of all of the so-called developed nations, this only happens in America - that we take 14yr old children, try them as adults - and give them life sentences.
One of his remarks that most struck me was this idea that America has not yet really committed to the process of reconciliation - and that process requires a full commitment to truth.
We are a nation that is literally founded upon a genocide as grave and enormous as the Nazi attempt to annihilate Jews of Europe. We literally sit in houses built on stolen land, having murdered almost all the people that rightfully owned it.
We are a nation whose wealth was initially created - but largely continues to be created - through the enslavement of millions of black Africans - hunted, captured, chained, and shipped here to die as cattle for our greed.
We are a nation whose infrastructure was built on the backs of mistreated and abused immigrants whose search from something better landed them in a place where their labor was cheap, their lives cheaper still.
We are a nation whose military dominates this globe. We use that military to bomb 7 other nations currently. We use that military to coerce other nations to give us access to their oil, their metals, their water, any commodity that we covet. We use that military and our CIA to undermine foreign governments - often democratic governments - who do not jump in line to offer us access cheaply enough or freely enough for our greedy exploitative corporations.
We are a nation that believes itself to be exceptional. Exceptional in the sense that we do not owe respect to any other nation, nor to international norms, or international treaties, or international laws. We do as we please, where we please, when we please, and we claim that it is because we are a special people and these lesser restrictions do no apply to so exceptional a people as we.
We are a nation that lies to its own citizens while singing songs of freedom.
We are a nation that condemns other governments for human rights abuses as we attack the water protectors in North Dakota who are trying to protect their water sources from yet further ecological damage from greedy oil corporations.
We are a nation that has unilaterally given itself the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere - including American civilians - if the president decides its in his best interests without judicial oversight and against international treaties, norms, and laws.
We are a nation that tortures.
We are a nation that steals.
We are a nation that lies about its past, its present, and its future.
We are in desperate need of some honesty.
We are in desperate need of acknowledging our unlawful, immoral, unethical, abusive, and intolerable behavior towards every culture on earth that isn't white upper class Americans.
I agree with that fellow in the TED talks:
We need a serious and honest commitment to reconciliation -
And until we do that, we cannot honestly nor reasonably have any hope at all of being able to move forward and stop repeating these same crimes and abuses over and over.
So, no, we cannot stop talking about the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Obama and Hillary and GW Bush and Rumsfeld, and the rest of our leaders have committed.
We must continue to act as our conscience until we as a whole - we as a community - we as a nation - stop lying to ourselves and face the truth to begin walking in the path of justice.
We must prosecute our criminals - starting at the highest levels and working our way down until we have renounced to our very cores exceptionalism once and for all.
Germany reminds itself annually of its criminal past - and has memorials in many prominent places to remind itself of its dark past. It teaches of itself honestly and openly in its schools so that it never makes the same mistake again.
America needs to own up to its global crimes and begin that same process.
As Bryan Stevenson notes - the opposite of poverty is not wealth - it is Justice.
Of all of the so-called developed nations, this only happens in America - that we take 14yr old children, try them as adults - and give them life sentences.
One of his remarks that most struck me was this idea that America has not yet really committed to the process of reconciliation - and that process requires a full commitment to truth.
We are a nation that is literally founded upon a genocide as grave and enormous as the Nazi attempt to annihilate Jews of Europe. We literally sit in houses built on stolen land, having murdered almost all the people that rightfully owned it.
We are a nation whose wealth was initially created - but largely continues to be created - through the enslavement of millions of black Africans - hunted, captured, chained, and shipped here to die as cattle for our greed.
We are a nation whose infrastructure was built on the backs of mistreated and abused immigrants whose search from something better landed them in a place where their labor was cheap, their lives cheaper still.
We are a nation whose military dominates this globe. We use that military to bomb 7 other nations currently. We use that military to coerce other nations to give us access to their oil, their metals, their water, any commodity that we covet. We use that military and our CIA to undermine foreign governments - often democratic governments - who do not jump in line to offer us access cheaply enough or freely enough for our greedy exploitative corporations.
We are a nation that believes itself to be exceptional. Exceptional in the sense that we do not owe respect to any other nation, nor to international norms, or international treaties, or international laws. We do as we please, where we please, when we please, and we claim that it is because we are a special people and these lesser restrictions do no apply to so exceptional a people as we.
We are a nation that lies to its own citizens while singing songs of freedom.
We are a nation that condemns other governments for human rights abuses as we attack the water protectors in North Dakota who are trying to protect their water sources from yet further ecological damage from greedy oil corporations.
We are a nation that has unilaterally given itself the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere - including American civilians - if the president decides its in his best interests without judicial oversight and against international treaties, norms, and laws.
We are a nation that tortures.
We are a nation that steals.
We are a nation that lies about its past, its present, and its future.
We are in desperate need of some honesty.
We are in desperate need of acknowledging our unlawful, immoral, unethical, abusive, and intolerable behavior towards every culture on earth that isn't white upper class Americans.
I agree with that fellow in the TED talks:
We need a serious and honest commitment to reconciliation -
And until we do that, we cannot honestly nor reasonably have any hope at all of being able to move forward and stop repeating these same crimes and abuses over and over.
So, no, we cannot stop talking about the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Obama and Hillary and GW Bush and Rumsfeld, and the rest of our leaders have committed.
We must continue to act as our conscience until we as a whole - we as a community - we as a nation - stop lying to ourselves and face the truth to begin walking in the path of justice.
We must prosecute our criminals - starting at the highest levels and working our way down until we have renounced to our very cores exceptionalism once and for all.
Germany reminds itself annually of its criminal past - and has memorials in many prominent places to remind itself of its dark past. It teaches of itself honestly and openly in its schools so that it never makes the same mistake again.
America needs to own up to its global crimes and begin that same process.
As Bryan Stevenson notes - the opposite of poverty is not wealth - it is Justice.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
On Honesty & American Denialism
My sense of the world that you and I live in is that folks want to believe whatever they believe and are very quick to turn away if what someone else has to say disrupts that belief in any way.
I can count on my fingers the number of folks I know who consider content more important than tone, and I think when push comes to shove, tone is ultimately critical to them as well - myself included.
But I don't think that makes us all equal in this regard.
Even the intention of putting content first - at looking through the ephemeris of the message to its core is important. It's a philosophical point of view that I hold dear. I suppose it's a belief I have: That attempting to understand what is true is more important than making everyone feel good to maintain the peace.
I don't hold the belief that there is only one truth, however. Understanding what is true is more of a process of eliminating those beliefs that simply cannot be true. That are at odds with reality, insofar as we can actually say with some degree of confidence what some part of reality is.
That doesn't mean that I feel the need to require everyone to believe a certain way - but it does mean that I don't respect a person's beliefs that are in conflict with known facts, especially when those facts are readily available to them - that it is a matter of wilful ignorance, not a matter of innocence.
I can and often do empathise with people's desire to believe things that are demonstrably untrue, or radically unlikely. And I have a basic empathy and respect for everyone wherever they're coming from even if they're deeply wrong about any number of things - as far as I can tell or know.
Again, It's not that I believe I have some special line to "objective" reality - but I don't find that there are that many in my spheres of experience who give a flying tomato for what is true over what they wish or were brought up to believe is true.
The point being, I would just like to have more folks who are willing to look for what we can know to be true (or at least not demonstrably false) and have the conversations that flow from that starting point or minimum adherence to reality.
A friend recently put it thus - that all truth is human truth - subjective - because at best we approach what is potentially objectively true by continuous refinements - it's an asymptotic relationship. All of science is like this. As a hypothesis is well tested and shown to be predictive and useful it becomes a theory, but theories are still conditional - they can still be modified and over time usually are. Not discarded whole - rather updated or modified to better encompass additional understandings that were poorly or incorrectly handled by the previous incarnation of the theory. Newtonian physics being expanded and deepened and corrected by Einstein's theory of gravity and spacetime. Newtonian physics didn't cease to exist - it's explanatory power didn't end with Einstein's discoveries - rather it was given context and its limits better understood and we achieved through Einstein new insights on how to go beyond those limits (but the new limits are still limits, and I have no doubt that we will come to modify our understand of reality again and have new insights that allow us to understand more deeply than either Newton or Einstein did, continuing the refining process, or the expanding understanding process).
Again, my sense of talking with people about politics or social theory is one of constantly running into people's emotionally held beliefs and anger at having those beliefs thrown into question.
It's like the reaction of the Catholic Church to Galileo. His ideas upset their beliefs and that was intolerable to them. Not that they were interested in refining their understanding of the world - just that it was upsetting and they wanted the upset to go away. Not, mind you, that I am comparing myself to the genius of Galileo! Rather, that even my meager desire to be truthful and honest and refine my understanding of what is true - to apply science to my own understanding of life as I live it - leads to analogous encounters.
I am constantly bombarded by former friends and family who want me to stop questioning their beliefs. I am told that it's how I say it, not what I'm saying. But no matter how nicely I say a thing - I'm still asking them to question their beliefs which is a fundamentally painful experience - and as far as I can tell - that's the real issue.
As such, it is impossible to avoid the pain and the backlash (or would you like to point out the scientist who was a greatly beloved member of his or her society and brought about great insights into the world without upsetting folks around him or her?)
Learning ugly truths about Hillary when Hillary was our best chance for a female to rise to President of the United States thus far is not going to be welcome news to anyone for whom having a woman hold the highest office in this land is a strongly held desire.
Everyone has the ability to do the research - to look a few things up about her - to discover "is she often a good person and in alignment with my personal values or is she often what I consider to be a bad person - out of alignment with what I value and believe others should value?" (Or, perhaps being a moral person is not a virtue for you?)
The same is true for Obama. Or democrats as a whole. Or the United States domestic or foreign policy as a whole.
These things aren't hidden if you simply look beyond the immediate surrounding veil of surface information. Listening to CBS evening news certainly isn't going to challenge the predominant narrative that America is great. Listening to NPR isn't going to give you one shred of evidence against the righteous democratic and glorious nation of our motherland. Talking to your friends, coworkers, and family - who also only go by these same sources for their information - isn't going to challenge anything you've been taught to believe your entire life by a culture that is intent on having you be a supporting member of its cast.
America wants you to see America as a great, good, just, righteous nation. That - is - at - its - core - for its own survival: your allegiance, your faith, your cooperation and participation.
And other Americans in power wish to keep their power and so they also work hard at generating this sense of positive messaging about America. Because it makes them powerful. Your allegiance makes them powerful. Whatever America is doing has made them very powerful, so it is insanity to question it. The higher a person is on the economic ladder in America, the more they're going to be a true believer in America - regardless of any objective ethics - because it is working for them very well, or very, very, very well.
It is not a failing on my part to ask you to go beyond your inculcation - your programming - your illusions and your jingoism.
That push-back, that desire to denounce me, that feeling of anger and unhappiness is a desire to kill the messenger - perhaps it is a sign that I am actually on to something and at that point it is up to you to figure out what is true:
Is your understanding more correct or not?
Do you have supporting evidence from reasonably neutral, reliable sources, from disparate sources, which bolster your understanding and creates a holistic view of what's going on to give context to my concerns that render them no longer upsetting because in the larger deeper context you know their place and their place is small?
Or, are you simply not interested in what is real - what is true - not even interested in approaching reality as best we can - but perhaps your real desire is to be left in peace with the beliefs you were given as a member of society and leave it at that?
Stepping outside of the accepted norms of society is scary. It's potentially deadly, it's potentially very bad for your social and economic positions.
In fact, it directly means coming to terms with the fact that you and I and everyone we know owes their economic surety to the life's work, sweat and tears of enslaved peoples. A vast cruelty that is hard to imagine in depth and scope. The enslavement of 12.5 million black Africans captured as if they were but animals, all rights stripped, all decency, all empathy, all humanity unilaterally stripped for the immediate benefit of our great great parents - but which almost certainly benefits you and me to this day.
Many of my black brothers and sisters speak of reparations. Reparations that they are owed. I agree. America is one giant spoils of crime. Of a genocide of many native peoples who existed here before my European ancestors did, and murdered them en masse. Whether genocide was better or worse then racially based mass slavery is impossible to know, and probably pointless to debate. Both were crimes against humanity. Both were as monstrous as Auschwitz and the other ethnic pogroms of the world.
Yet we don't talk about it.
Yet I am attacked when I point out that these United States of America exist entirely upon the blood of millions in genocide and in human chattel.
When I attack Hillary's record - when I attack Obama's record - when I attack the DNC's record - when I question this nation's goodness and history and righteousness and lack of justice - I am directly asking you to step out of your comfortable lies and illusions that allow you to ignore the reality that all you have exists only because your forefathers stole it or beat humans into creating the conditions under which it was created for them and for you.
We Americans owe a debt to the world that in all reasonable conscience we can never repay.
How can we un-murder millions of native peoples?
How can we un-enslave millions of black people?
How can we restore the hundreds of millions of children never born to those people?
How can we restore the dignity we robbed? The lives we destroyed through poverty or incarceration? The suffering we administered on people... on humans - on our brothers, our sisters - for our greed?
America is one big circle-jerk - one big amalgamation of the children of crime lords arguing about how just and righteous and honorable a people we really are.
We have the audacity to claim exceptionalism - a right to stand above international law and ethical norms - to do as we please through might and extortion and war and assassination and global theft - and we claim it's because we are better than the rest of the world. We are just that exceptional a peoples.
And folks get angry at me. Americans feel upset by me. They have their feelings hurt by me pointing out that our leaders are all of those things - that if you bother to pay even a little attention to what is actually true - and not the Disney story of America - but the factual record of one Hillary Rodham Clinton - you see all of these crimes and more writ in plain English in our very own public records within OUR lifetimes - contemporary crimes against humanity occurring NOW! Not in some comfortably far off yesteryear, some blameless place remote in years from our existence. But in the here and now and - not even becoming less criminal! Instead, accelerating and becoming more criminal! More heinous, more cruel, more inexcusable while we American citizens argue over which of the insanely unworthy crime lords propped up for our perusal we should have elected as the face of the global war crimes machine.
I try - I really try to be gentle. To deliver this information to folks in small bites, in easy to understand pieces backed up by articles by good journalists who've done their homework to bring you and I some insight into the world.
But y'all don't listen. Y'all just want to shoot me, the messenger, and gaslight me, and tell me I'm the crazypants, the tinfoil wearing nutjob who will believe any old conspiracy theory.
I hereby formally reject that lie.
I am - to the very best of my ability - a discerning person who does his honest best at determining whether the information is true, fits the scenery, connects with other information, and genuinely fits the whole.
I am also - to the very best of my ability - willing to change my mind when sufficient evidence is found or presented that refutes a point I used to believe. I am willing to refine my hypothesis and theories and learn from my mistakes and work with you if you you're but willing to be brave enough to work with me, unflinchingly honest and in integrity with what is actually to the very best of our ability to understand or uncover to be true.
I am looking for allies, friends, brothers, sisters of the faith in honesty, integrity, and virtue of becoming a better people for the greater good of all humanity.
If there is any way to restore balance on this planet - I believe that it is to renounce our criminal ways of the past - and to work as TRUE EQUALS with all HUMANs everywhere on this blue marble.
It is our spiritual salvation. Our ecological salvation. Our material salvation. Our one true road forward to a time when we can be honest about who we are AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT IT.
Please stop participating in the theft by hiding from the ugly truth of human history - especially of American history - and work together to put an end to the violence, the thievery, the gaslighting, and the small-minded self-destructive greed that we are all complicit in by staying silent or by defending the very politicians and political systems - including our police - and military - which continues to execute those same crimes here, there, and almost everywhere around this earth.
I'm not claiming to be perfect or know all of the answers. But I am eager to discuss any and all of this with you if you're willing to be intellectually honest with me towards refining an understanding of truth instead of obfuscating it on behalf of fears.
We can take responsibility for who we are and where we are and who we owe for that. For me, that must be grounded in honesty. A commitment to the truth and a real process of reconciliation in which we admit that our very way of life as Americans is predicated upon global theft, and we stop it. We. Stop. The. Evil. Machine. Together. First, by simply being willing to realize that this is the situation, and no longer being willing to be a defender of it out of our own shame or fears.
We can create a future worth existing in. One that can sustain humanity.
But it cannot be one whose foundation is not firmly set in love, integrity, and peace.
Please, help.
Friday, January 13, 2017
An Open Letter to Liberals
An open letter to American Liberals:
You're right of course that liberal governments are lesser evil than conservative ones.
I wish that was enough of a common ground that we could genuinely work together in harmony (it's enough for us to work together on limited actions).
I honestly wish it were entirely enough.
But the problem is that I still haven't heard you call out Obama for his war crimes, or for his failures to address police brutality, or any of a very long list of humanitarian failures.
And before you jump in to defend him - he's only Human, he was hog-tied by the GOP congress and on and on - those things are true to some degree, but if he didn't have a (D) after his name those things would not be stopping you from railing against him on those issues.
And my aim isn't to have you criticize Obama for criticism's sake. Rather, it is the underlying ability to distance yourself from the liberal bubble that renders Trump satan, and Obama gabrielle.
And not because Trump needs my protection, or because I hate Obama (I actually like his personal demeanour, his grace, his appreciation for the arts, for how he's handled himself as the international face of America, ... there's a great many things that I admire about Obama)
...but because I need to have allies that are willing to stop trusting the liberal narrative.
...because the liberal narrative (just like the mirror conservative narrative) keeps people ignoring the underlying causes of everything and supporting false leaders and false goals.
Again - this may not be something you're available for? I don't know? People are where they are, and I spent the entire GW Bush years drinking the liberal kool-aid and lambasting the tinfoil hat wearing ninnys that kept telling me then that LEV (lesser evil voting) was wrong, and that both sides R/D were really on team Oligarchy, and etc.
I remember strongly how I reacted to such information - with astonishment, disgust, scorn, amusement, disbelief, and so on. "How can anyone [who isn't absolutely bonkers] believe that Ds and Rs are equivalent IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER?!!!"
And having watched what happened to Barack from '08 to today - what's happened to Bernie over the past two years - and learning much more than I ever wish I knew about Hillary over this past year - has utterly destroyed - obliterated - laid waste to my former liberal beliefs.
Now I laugh at my old self and wonder how I could ever have been so naive?
But see, that's the rub. I wish It didn't matter whether you believed in the liberal narrative or not. But - just as you believe that Trump is very likely to accelerate global warming, usher in the most corporatist government in human history, reinstate the most racist and reactionary conservative laws and policies; I believe that Hillary would do exactly the same in all of the ways that really matter under the surface.
In fact, I am quite certain that a majority of Ds in congress will do the same.
In fact, I am quite certain that all Ds and all Rs are effectively on the same page (due to being compromised by their need for corporate funding to various donors and groups), and that the smoke and mirrors of disagreements are circus for our entertainment and distraction (whether any given senator is savvy enough themselves to realize they're actors in a big farce, or if they're unwittingly so, is quite irrelevant at the end of the day).
The most recent case in point is Corey Booker and the other Ds who voted against Bernie's bill to allow us to import drugs at reduced costs through Canada.
Another is Democrats reappointing Nancy Pelosi as their leader. Another is Democrats failing to run Bernie in the general. Another is Democrats using false stories about Russia to resurrect red-scare McCarthyism (a very ugly page from our history) to distract voters from the unbelievably corrupt and disheartening contents of the emails penned by Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and others in Hillary's election campaign (which included, unethically, the entire DNC machine). Another is Obama's creating a 'Ministry of Truth' in his final days.
The list goes on and on and on.
But liberals - want to keep the current system and elect more Ds to office - on the basis that this is a good thing. The ills as y'all see it isn't that Democrats have failed the working class utterly over the past 30+ years. It isn't that their policies have effectively done zero for black rights in that timespan. It isn't that they're complicit in taking corporate money. It isn't that they've been caught red handed rigging an entire primary for POTUS. It's just that there aren't enough of them. :'(
I cannot abide that. I cannot support that.
It's a failed political philosophy - with a world near ready to catch fire and burn out of control possibly eradicating all Human life, irreparably damaging this planet's ecosystem and biosystems, it's gone from bad-policy to extinction-threatening-policy.
I'm tired of watching good friends and family support an evil system - one that bombs 7 nations simultaneously, is the largest arms dealer to the world, has a military 10x the next 10 biggest combined, poisons our inner cities with lead and bacteria, openly lynches black and native peoples publicly and makes excuses for it, etc., etc.
At the core of american liberalism is the acceptance of democrats as our only and best hope.
That's a sickness.
I may not have all of the answers - but I sure as hell know that aiding the cancer is not one of them.
You're right of course that liberal governments are lesser evil than conservative ones.
I wish that was enough of a common ground that we could genuinely work together in harmony (it's enough for us to work together on limited actions).
I honestly wish it were entirely enough.
But the problem is that I still haven't heard you call out Obama for his war crimes, or for his failures to address police brutality, or any of a very long list of humanitarian failures.
And before you jump in to defend him - he's only Human, he was hog-tied by the GOP congress and on and on - those things are true to some degree, but if he didn't have a (D) after his name those things would not be stopping you from railing against him on those issues.
And my aim isn't to have you criticize Obama for criticism's sake. Rather, it is the underlying ability to distance yourself from the liberal bubble that renders Trump satan, and Obama gabrielle.
And not because Trump needs my protection, or because I hate Obama (I actually like his personal demeanour, his grace, his appreciation for the arts, for how he's handled himself as the international face of America, ... there's a great many things that I admire about Obama)
...but because I need to have allies that are willing to stop trusting the liberal narrative.
...because the liberal narrative (just like the mirror conservative narrative) keeps people ignoring the underlying causes of everything and supporting false leaders and false goals.
Again - this may not be something you're available for? I don't know? People are where they are, and I spent the entire GW Bush years drinking the liberal kool-aid and lambasting the tinfoil hat wearing ninnys that kept telling me then that LEV (lesser evil voting) was wrong, and that both sides R/D were really on team Oligarchy, and etc.
I remember strongly how I reacted to such information - with astonishment, disgust, scorn, amusement, disbelief, and so on. "How can anyone [who isn't absolutely bonkers] believe that Ds and Rs are equivalent IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER?!!!"
And having watched what happened to Barack from '08 to today - what's happened to Bernie over the past two years - and learning much more than I ever wish I knew about Hillary over this past year - has utterly destroyed - obliterated - laid waste to my former liberal beliefs.
Now I laugh at my old self and wonder how I could ever have been so naive?
But see, that's the rub. I wish It didn't matter whether you believed in the liberal narrative or not. But - just as you believe that Trump is very likely to accelerate global warming, usher in the most corporatist government in human history, reinstate the most racist and reactionary conservative laws and policies; I believe that Hillary would do exactly the same in all of the ways that really matter under the surface.
In fact, I am quite certain that a majority of Ds in congress will do the same.
In fact, I am quite certain that all Ds and all Rs are effectively on the same page (due to being compromised by their need for corporate funding to various donors and groups), and that the smoke and mirrors of disagreements are circus for our entertainment and distraction (whether any given senator is savvy enough themselves to realize they're actors in a big farce, or if they're unwittingly so, is quite irrelevant at the end of the day).
The most recent case in point is Corey Booker and the other Ds who voted against Bernie's bill to allow us to import drugs at reduced costs through Canada.
Another is Democrats reappointing Nancy Pelosi as their leader. Another is Democrats failing to run Bernie in the general. Another is Democrats using false stories about Russia to resurrect red-scare McCarthyism (a very ugly page from our history) to distract voters from the unbelievably corrupt and disheartening contents of the emails penned by Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and others in Hillary's election campaign (which included, unethically, the entire DNC machine). Another is Obama's creating a 'Ministry of Truth' in his final days.
The list goes on and on and on.
But liberals - want to keep the current system and elect more Ds to office - on the basis that this is a good thing. The ills as y'all see it isn't that Democrats have failed the working class utterly over the past 30+ years. It isn't that their policies have effectively done zero for black rights in that timespan. It isn't that they're complicit in taking corporate money. It isn't that they've been caught red handed rigging an entire primary for POTUS. It's just that there aren't enough of them. :'(
I cannot abide that. I cannot support that.
It's a failed political philosophy - with a world near ready to catch fire and burn out of control possibly eradicating all Human life, irreparably damaging this planet's ecosystem and biosystems, it's gone from bad-policy to extinction-threatening-policy.
I'm tired of watching good friends and family support an evil system - one that bombs 7 nations simultaneously, is the largest arms dealer to the world, has a military 10x the next 10 biggest combined, poisons our inner cities with lead and bacteria, openly lynches black and native peoples publicly and makes excuses for it, etc., etc.
At the core of american liberalism is the acceptance of democrats as our only and best hope.
That's a sickness.
I may not have all of the answers - but I sure as hell know that aiding the cancer is not one of them.
Science vs. Nature
I was just listening to Naomi Klein "This Changes Everything" - and she's talking about "Geo Engineering".
And a lot of parallels strike me between that discussion (is GE a reasonable approach - is there some level at which it is reasonable - what will happen should the world's feedback systems become a serious mess for human survival without it, etc.) and GMOs and the many concerns that they bring up.
I have many friends on both sides of both debates.
I feel like neither side is wrong, so much as both have something important to contribute if the other would just listen.
Naomi Klein's description of seeding the outer atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, and similar to the ocean, and more to seed clouds that we can help control the rain distribution, and so on, and i'm thinking "Hey, this is also the discussion about western medicine and its failures."
I know that my science friends will roll their eyes and dismiss everything that is essentially about creating health without using scientific interventions such as we commonly name "medicine" in the west. Pills mostly, but surgeries as well.
And I'm not saying that western medicine doesn't have its uses - it's amazingly wonderful aspects. On the other hand, I'm seeing my own body and many other people's become a mess with folks trying to figure out how to manage them with pills and surgeries and the medicines tend to be more and more and more. They don't seem to do a good job of ending, but rather one starts a medication to address one imbalance, only to then need another to address a new imbalance, only then to need yet another for another imbalance (each additional imbalance at least contributed to by the previous medications taken).
We all know it's true - we watch those godforsaken ads on TV about some new pill and then for two minutes straight some poor bloke is talking as fast as humanly possibly to squeeze in the endless list of side effects that may be caused by the pill in question.
---
My point, and Naomi Klein's point is that western scientific approaches tend to be very intrusive and dependency-creating.
So once we start with some form of Geo Engineering, we're likely to cause other imbalances (less rainfall in our best food valleys, for example), that then need additional highly intrusive GE interventions to try to manage, that then beget other imbalances.... and the cycle doesn't end until the patient is dead.
Now, yes, for a Human, the patient is always going to die anyway. But for Earth... this is ... a whole different ball game.
Instead of losing one patient, we're talking wiping out the Human race (at a minimum).
---
I'm tempted to wax philosophical here and remind myself that oh-well, if we all die we all die.
But honestly, I'd really rather not be the cause of the death of Earth.
And ultimately - the only reason we have for trying to intervene in all of these already balanced feedback loops we call the biosphere or weather or climate or nature is because we're already interfering viz. carbon emissions.
The solution isn't to ignore the root cause, and find new pills to shove down the patient's throat to manage symptom after symptom, but to address the original cancer - our addiction to carbon fuels.
---
Anyway, all of this has parallels with GMOs Yes, we can engineer various things - but will we ever end up with crops that are more robust in the long term, less energy intensive, etc?
I know my science-y friends are screaming "YES!" - but I'm worried about the unintended - the unforeseen consequences.
It would help enormously if I saw humanity as being responsible when things go wrong - saw us as having good feedback systems in our own societies that dealt with illness - in this case pollution or bad science or what not, but the reality I see is that as humans - our social structures are incredibly bad - awful - miserable at taking responsibility for when things go wrong and even worse at fixing them or addressing the messes they create.
So I am not - NOT - reassured about GMOs, nor about GE, nor about western medicine & pharmaceuticals, despite also seeing that all of these has great potential for good - the good is swamped by our long, long track record for irresponsibility as a species.
And to me, that's the part I need my science friends to become literate about.
And a lot of parallels strike me between that discussion (is GE a reasonable approach - is there some level at which it is reasonable - what will happen should the world's feedback systems become a serious mess for human survival without it, etc.) and GMOs and the many concerns that they bring up.
I have many friends on both sides of both debates.
I feel like neither side is wrong, so much as both have something important to contribute if the other would just listen.
Naomi Klein's description of seeding the outer atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, and similar to the ocean, and more to seed clouds that we can help control the rain distribution, and so on, and i'm thinking "Hey, this is also the discussion about western medicine and its failures."
I know that my science friends will roll their eyes and dismiss everything that is essentially about creating health without using scientific interventions such as we commonly name "medicine" in the west. Pills mostly, but surgeries as well.
And I'm not saying that western medicine doesn't have its uses - it's amazingly wonderful aspects. On the other hand, I'm seeing my own body and many other people's become a mess with folks trying to figure out how to manage them with pills and surgeries and the medicines tend to be more and more and more. They don't seem to do a good job of ending, but rather one starts a medication to address one imbalance, only to then need another to address a new imbalance, only then to need yet another for another imbalance (each additional imbalance at least contributed to by the previous medications taken).
We all know it's true - we watch those godforsaken ads on TV about some new pill and then for two minutes straight some poor bloke is talking as fast as humanly possibly to squeeze in the endless list of side effects that may be caused by the pill in question.
---
My point, and Naomi Klein's point is that western scientific approaches tend to be very intrusive and dependency-creating.
So once we start with some form of Geo Engineering, we're likely to cause other imbalances (less rainfall in our best food valleys, for example), that then need additional highly intrusive GE interventions to try to manage, that then beget other imbalances.... and the cycle doesn't end until the patient is dead.
Now, yes, for a Human, the patient is always going to die anyway. But for Earth... this is ... a whole different ball game.
Instead of losing one patient, we're talking wiping out the Human race (at a minimum).
---
I'm tempted to wax philosophical here and remind myself that oh-well, if we all die we all die.
But honestly, I'd really rather not be the cause of the death of Earth.
And ultimately - the only reason we have for trying to intervene in all of these already balanced feedback loops we call the biosphere or weather or climate or nature is because we're already interfering viz. carbon emissions.
The solution isn't to ignore the root cause, and find new pills to shove down the patient's throat to manage symptom after symptom, but to address the original cancer - our addiction to carbon fuels.
---
Anyway, all of this has parallels with GMOs Yes, we can engineer various things - but will we ever end up with crops that are more robust in the long term, less energy intensive, etc?
I know my science-y friends are screaming "YES!" - but I'm worried about the unintended - the unforeseen consequences.
It would help enormously if I saw humanity as being responsible when things go wrong - saw us as having good feedback systems in our own societies that dealt with illness - in this case pollution or bad science or what not, but the reality I see is that as humans - our social structures are incredibly bad - awful - miserable at taking responsibility for when things go wrong and even worse at fixing them or addressing the messes they create.
So I am not - NOT - reassured about GMOs, nor about GE, nor about western medicine & pharmaceuticals, despite also seeing that all of these has great potential for good - the good is swamped by our long, long track record for irresponsibility as a species.
And to me, that's the part I need my science friends to become literate about.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
Worst News Sources
Sick of the constant gawd-awful McCarthyism, Red-Scare, pro-Clintonista effluent that issues from these sites:
CBS
MSN
NBC
NY Times
Washington Post - Funded by the CIA (literally, factually)
Media Matters for America - (see this for example)
Blue Nation in Review[1]
Daily News Bin[1]
Nation in Review[1]
Political News Review
Raw Story
The Daily Beast
The Independent
The Nation
VOX
[1] These sites are owned by David Brock as part of Hillary's Super Pac.
Neoconservative / McCarthyism / red-scare:
Fox
The Economist (might be more neoliberal than neoconservative, the distinction is harder to make these days)
The Economist (might be more neoliberal than neoconservative, the distinction is harder to make these days)
Neoliberal / 3rd-way DNC / DLC / McCarthyism / red-scare:
ABCCBS
MSN
NBC
NY Times
Washington Post - Funded by the CIA (literally, factually)
Media Matters for America - (see this for example)
Blue Nation in Review[1]
Daily News Bin[1]
Nation in Review[1]
Political News Review
Raw Story
The Daily Beast
The Independent
The Nation
VOX
Statist Propagandist Reporters:
Jeremy Diamond (CNN)[1] These sites are owned by David Brock as part of Hillary's Super Pac.
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