Although it chills me to say this, I think that the vein of violence that is rooted in indigenous genocide and African slavery also circulates the blood supply that nourishes both empire energy and capitalist entrepreneurship. As such, the depth to which both domestic and international violence are ingrained and interwoven into the fabric of US society is terribly unlikely to suddenly unravel and modulate itself. This makes both gun violence and neocolonialist imperialism almost inevitable as symptoms of the late-stage neoliberal capitalist experiment. Am I a pessimist or a realist? I can't quite decide.
I think you're a realist. A nation born in violence, dispossession/theft, economy grounded in slavery and salve trade - what way would you expect it to grow? If it, or any idealistic souls in it, tried to change it, the thing would fall apart because there is no substructure of honest ideals and practices to support mere idealism. Before the whole show goes down it'd be best to take up boat building. Pity, as there's tons of stuff about the place and people to love.
What I would expect from reading history is that the violent, piratical slave drivers, as they acquired stuff and wanted to keep it, would make up a culture and a bunch of rules which looked a lot like the previous culture and bunch of rules. For an example, consider the Mongol empire -- or the Romans, or Alexander the Great, and so on. The horsemen grow tired, dragging our booted feet upstairs to come down in velvet slippers -- even that grows old, and pretty quickly. In the USA, we are still not very far from our violent, piratical slave-driver ancestors. The last survivor of the last American slave ship died in 1940, a year after I was born; the last person who had been enslaved died in 1971. Only fifty years later, we are most delicate about the names and games we assign to our fellow citizens. But as Mr. Faulker said, the past isn't dead -- it isn't even past.
I suppose it's true that _this_ scene is going to drive right off the apocalyptic edge of the cliff. The Mongols were somewhat smarter.
In my paltry small lifetime, I have first hand(!) witnessed in a close manner(!) Muricans near and around me (first hand mind you), express rabid hate for : Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Japan, China (recent, all the time Apple was raking in profits overseas for the bulk of this WTO trend, mind you, they were surreptitiously quiet), Russia (perennially), Soviet Union, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico, Latin America, Spain (contemptfully described as lazy), Philippines,......(i don't feel like stretching my memory more)...oh yeah..Panama,......then there was the hate of California (yes, the state), New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, LA (since high school, by my history teacher no less)............
you get the idea. Now ask yourself, are you a realist, or a pessimist?
I think you (or someone) should work out that theory with more specific, explicit evidence from what we see around us. It seems quite likely that there is a system of connections between American war and imperialism abroad and crime, violence and oppression at home, and the place to start dealing with those connections is at the top, politically speaking, not the bottom.
This: "It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it's just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history."
More reasons to shut down the empire once and for all!
I say that about mass shootings. If there must be mass shootings, and apparently there must be by virtue of the fact there are so many, then "let's start at the top." To ALL future mass shooters in the pipeline and beyond, please, please, please "start at the top."
I'm sure they would be okay with those weapons being used to kill Americans. As long as it's the State doing the killing and they stick to the hoi polloi, and only the ones who could be painted as "traitors," "terrorists," or "insurrectionists."
****I'm sure they would be okay with those weapons being used to kill Americans.****
Obviously they are okay with it because those weapons ARE being used to kill Americans and the Dems have done nothing about it except grand stand on the issue for reelection purposes year after year after year after year after year. No need to get the state involved when patriotic citizens like the most recent Highland Park shooter — the freak looks like a CGI carve out deposited in meat space — are willing to do the patriotic dirty work voluntarily.
It is amazing, really it's not, that for years, decades even before the rehabilitation of the history of the Vietnam War, Vietnam War vets walked around in shame after that conflict. It was perceived largely as a shameful conflict and those associated with it, namely the vets, were tarnished and stigmatized by it. Not so with the Iraq War and yet it was every bit as illegal and egregious. Both wars were a war crime and yet Iraq is and has always been viewed in a much more favorable light than Vietnam. Where have all the Walter Cronkites gone?
There will never be another Cronkite in the major media, not even another investigative reporter like Jack Anderson. That's what happens when you allow the industry to migrate from 'free press' to 'corporate media'.
If the democrats still had an anti-war left, AOC and her squad would have been ostracized for their votes backing Biden's insane $60 billion giveaway to Ukraine for high-tech weapons. Not ONE democrat voted against that travesty. They are a herd of lemmings, following senile Biden off a cliff toward nuclear war.
On a different note, Boris Johnson was just forced to resign as Britain's PM as he had lost the support of the people. Why don't we have a similar parliamentary system in the US? How can this country stand 2 &1/2 more years of Biden wrecking the nation?
He has support only because he's wrecking it slower than the previous guy. I don't know of anyone who voted *for* 'the Senator from Wall Street', only people who voted **against** Rump.
****Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor and press freedom advocate who has lived in Moscow in exile since 2013, hasn't uttered a word publicly on Russia's move to criminalize independent reporting about its invasion of Ukraine.
Snowden is the president of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a California-based charity that tracks "press freedom violations" in the United States as minor as journalists being denied access to press conferences. As recently as Jan. 26, Snowden urged Danish citizens to resist their government after it threatened to impose lengthy prison sentences to members of the media who reported on state secrets.
But Snowden hasn't said anything publicly, let alone issued a call for active resistance from the Russian people, about the legislation signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin last week that threatens imprisonment of up to 15 years for spreading what the Russian government deems to be "fake information."
Examples of "fake information" in the eyes of the Russian government include any reporting about its invasion of Ukraine that isn't sourced directly from the Russian Defense Ministry.****
Hypocrisy is the favorite product of liberals and Democrats: "You can't protect yourself, give your guns to foreign countries we (pretend to) care about".
Also, George Takei has yet to say anything close to sane.
You'll find they all sing the song of the pied piper and it goes like this
"My Mind goes like the wind... anyway it blows I vote... money is my master....the endgame is disaster... 30 shilling silver coins...for that I lay the world in Ruins..."
You will find the producer is George Soros published by the WEF and financed by the devils own brood... the Jewish Occult.
The AR-15 is not a weapon of war! It is a semiautomatic rifle. That means one shot per trigger pull— just like a semiautomatic pistol. The war version can be fired in full automatic mode. That means that if the trigger is pulled and held to the rear, the gun fires repeatedly.
Either way, there is no need for it except to make it easier for mass shooters to shoot as many people as they can in a short period of time. If you have to cock after every shot, maybe mass shooters wouldn't be so inclined and instead would resort to bombings. If Oswald had to lock and load between each shot, mass shooters should too.
I am pretty sure it was Obama's administration that re-purposed Military hardware and gave it to Police Departments nation wide (may have been Bush2). That act, along with fast-tracking former soldiers into the Police Services have terrible consequences. Soldiers are trained to be an occupying force in a hostile environment and protect themselves from "the Enemy" - Now they are coming home with that training & Hardware to be "Peace Officers" - the very notion is absurd at face value & we are now seeing the results of dead wrong policy against the best interests of the American People.
Actually it was Clinton who started it, I believe at prompting from Joe "Asset Forfeiture" Biden. It accelerated under Shrub, though.
Four or more years of constant training that resistance must be immediately met with overwhelming force will never be overcome by a few afternoon training sessions about deescalation, especially when we have Israeli mercenaries training SWAT teams across the country.
Really? - that early - I am not surprised - thanks for that. Agreed - the exportation of Israeli IDF tactics to Police forces in the west is an absolute abomination - why would we need training from the Thugs in an apartheid State on how to "handle our citizens" - a shameful act!
Hypocrisy is the favorite product of liberals and Democrats: "You can't protect yourself, give your guns to foreign countries we (pretend to) care about".
Also, George Takei has yet to say anything close to sane.
Although it chills me to say this, I think that the vein of violence that is rooted in indigenous genocide and African slavery also circulates the blood supply that nourishes both empire energy and capitalist entrepreneurship. As such, the depth to which both domestic and international violence are ingrained and interwoven into the fabric of US society is terribly unlikely to suddenly unravel and modulate itself. This makes both gun violence and neocolonialist imperialism almost inevitable as symptoms of the late-stage neoliberal capitalist experiment. Am I a pessimist or a realist? I can't quite decide.
I think you're a realist. A nation born in violence, dispossession/theft, economy grounded in slavery and salve trade - what way would you expect it to grow? If it, or any idealistic souls in it, tried to change it, the thing would fall apart because there is no substructure of honest ideals and practices to support mere idealism. Before the whole show goes down it'd be best to take up boat building. Pity, as there's tons of stuff about the place and people to love.
What I would expect from reading history is that the violent, piratical slave drivers, as they acquired stuff and wanted to keep it, would make up a culture and a bunch of rules which looked a lot like the previous culture and bunch of rules. For an example, consider the Mongol empire -- or the Romans, or Alexander the Great, and so on. The horsemen grow tired, dragging our booted feet upstairs to come down in velvet slippers -- even that grows old, and pretty quickly. In the USA, we are still not very far from our violent, piratical slave-driver ancestors. The last survivor of the last American slave ship died in 1940, a year after I was born; the last person who had been enslaved died in 1971. Only fifty years later, we are most delicate about the names and games we assign to our fellow citizens. But as Mr. Faulker said, the past isn't dead -- it isn't even past.
I suppose it's true that _this_ scene is going to drive right off the apocalyptic edge of the cliff. The Mongols were somewhat smarter.
Pessimists are rarely disappointed.
which is, realistically speaking, a rather solid way of protecting your happiness and sanity!
In my paltry small lifetime, I have first hand(!) witnessed in a close manner(!) Muricans near and around me (first hand mind you), express rabid hate for : Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Japan, China (recent, all the time Apple was raking in profits overseas for the bulk of this WTO trend, mind you, they were surreptitiously quiet), Russia (perennially), Soviet Union, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico, Latin America, Spain (contemptfully described as lazy), Philippines,......(i don't feel like stretching my memory more)...oh yeah..Panama,......then there was the hate of California (yes, the state), New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, LA (since high school, by my history teacher no less)............
you get the idea. Now ask yourself, are you a realist, or a pessimist?
I think you (or someone) should work out that theory with more specific, explicit evidence from what we see around us. It seems quite likely that there is a system of connections between American war and imperialism abroad and crime, violence and oppression at home, and the place to start dealing with those connections is at the top, politically speaking, not the bottom.
This: "It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it's just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history."
More reasons to shut down the empire once and for all!
Thank you !!!
Also -- OUTSTANDING:
Scott Ritter: 'Two-Front War: Biden's Mouth is Writing Checks the US Military Can't Cash'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIIoyh2LdCo – July 4, 2022
So, when people talk to me about gun control, I say "Let's start at the top."
An excellent idea. Could be good advice for many group endeavors.
I say that about mass shootings. If there must be mass shootings, and apparently there must be by virtue of the fact there are so many, then "let's start at the top." To ALL future mass shooters in the pipeline and beyond, please, please, please "start at the top."
I'm sure they would be okay with those weapons being used to kill Americans. As long as it's the State doing the killing and they stick to the hoi polloi, and only the ones who could be painted as "traitors," "terrorists," or "insurrectionists."
****I'm sure they would be okay with those weapons being used to kill Americans.****
Obviously they are okay with it because those weapons ARE being used to kill Americans and the Dems have done nothing about it except grand stand on the issue for reelection purposes year after year after year after year after year. No need to get the state involved when patriotic citizens like the most recent Highland Park shooter — the freak looks like a CGI carve out deposited in meat space — are willing to do the patriotic dirty work voluntarily.
It is amazing, really it's not, that for years, decades even before the rehabilitation of the history of the Vietnam War, Vietnam War vets walked around in shame after that conflict. It was perceived largely as a shameful conflict and those associated with it, namely the vets, were tarnished and stigmatized by it. Not so with the Iraq War and yet it was every bit as illegal and egregious. Both wars were a war crime and yet Iraq is and has always been viewed in a much more favorable light than Vietnam. Where have all the Walter Cronkites gone?
This is precisely why the government controlled the media with "imbedded" journalists, not releasing casualty numbers, or showing dead soldiers on tv.
There will never be another Cronkite in the major media, not even another investigative reporter like Jack Anderson. That's what happens when you allow the industry to migrate from 'free press' to 'corporate media'.
If the democrats still had an anti-war left, AOC and her squad would have been ostracized for their votes backing Biden's insane $60 billion giveaway to Ukraine for high-tech weapons. Not ONE democrat voted against that travesty. They are a herd of lemmings, following senile Biden off a cliff toward nuclear war.
On a different note, Boris Johnson was just forced to resign as Britain's PM as he had lost the support of the people. Why don't we have a similar parliamentary system in the US? How can this country stand 2 &1/2 more years of Biden wrecking the nation?
He has support only because he's wrecking it slower than the previous guy. I don't know of anyone who voted *for* 'the Senator from Wall Street', only people who voted **against** Rump.
Yep. Nailed it again. Keep it up!
There are plenty of true journalists in Russia if you're looking for some. Just visit any graveyard.
Ed is alive and well.
Ed, yes, but not Zed. Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.
Snowden may be alive and well, but he's been awfully silent as of late considering his latest endeavor related to press freedom.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/why-so-silent-edward-snowden-has-gone-underground-since-russias-invasion
****Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor and press freedom advocate who has lived in Moscow in exile since 2013, hasn't uttered a word publicly on Russia's move to criminalize independent reporting about its invasion of Ukraine.
Snowden is the president of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a California-based charity that tracks "press freedom violations" in the United States as minor as journalists being denied access to press conferences. As recently as Jan. 26, Snowden urged Danish citizens to resist their government after it threatened to impose lengthy prison sentences to members of the media who reported on state secrets.
But Snowden hasn't said anything publicly, let alone issued a call for active resistance from the Russian people, about the legislation signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin last week that threatens imprisonment of up to 15 years for spreading what the Russian government deems to be "fake information."
Examples of "fake information" in the eyes of the Russian government include any reporting about its invasion of Ukraine that isn't sourced directly from the Russian Defense Ministry.****
Hypocrisy is the favorite product of liberals and Democrats: "You can't protect yourself, give your guns to foreign countries we (pretend to) care about".
Also, George Takei has yet to say anything close to sane.
There is nothing Democratic about politics...
They are all actors non excluded.
You'll find they all sing the song of the pied piper and it goes like this
"My Mind goes like the wind... anyway it blows I vote... money is my master....the endgame is disaster... 30 shilling silver coins...for that I lay the world in Ruins..."
You will find the producer is George Soros published by the WEF and financed by the devils own brood... the Jewish Occult.
What goes round comes round, is all I can think of at the moment. And that's all anyone needs to know: the rule of the universe.
Let’s not forget that police shoot and kill ~1000 people/yr.
The AR-15 is not a weapon of war! It is a semiautomatic rifle. That means one shot per trigger pull— just like a semiautomatic pistol. The war version can be fired in full automatic mode. That means that if the trigger is pulled and held to the rear, the gun fires repeatedly.
Either way, there is no need for it except to make it easier for mass shooters to shoot as many people as they can in a short period of time. If you have to cock after every shot, maybe mass shooters wouldn't be so inclined and instead would resort to bombings. If Oswald had to lock and load between each shot, mass shooters should too.
I am pretty sure it was Obama's administration that re-purposed Military hardware and gave it to Police Departments nation wide (may have been Bush2). That act, along with fast-tracking former soldiers into the Police Services have terrible consequences. Soldiers are trained to be an occupying force in a hostile environment and protect themselves from "the Enemy" - Now they are coming home with that training & Hardware to be "Peace Officers" - the very notion is absurd at face value & we are now seeing the results of dead wrong policy against the best interests of the American People.
Actually it was Clinton who started it, I believe at prompting from Joe "Asset Forfeiture" Biden. It accelerated under Shrub, though.
Four or more years of constant training that resistance must be immediately met with overwhelming force will never be overcome by a few afternoon training sessions about deescalation, especially when we have Israeli mercenaries training SWAT teams across the country.
Really? - that early - I am not surprised - thanks for that. Agreed - the exportation of Israeli IDF tactics to Police forces in the west is an absolute abomination - why would we need training from the Thugs in an apartheid State on how to "handle our citizens" - a shameful act!
Hypocrisy is the favorite product of liberals and Democrats: "You can't protect yourself, give your guns to foreign countries we (pretend to) care about".
Also, George Takei has yet to say anything close to sane.
He has written some really hilarious Amazon reviews, though.
Very profound writing, Caitlin
With apologies to Doris Day........
".....America, please take this advice
I hand you, like a brother
Or are you not seeing things too clear
Are you much too "exceptional" to hear
Is it all going in one ear and out the other."......
But keep trying, Caitlin. A respected voice of reason.